A sudden jump in the number of cases of the new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease has fuelled fears that Britain could be facing a large-scale epidemic of
“human BSE”.
The CJD Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh reports in The Lancet (vol
353, p 979) that in the last three months of 1998 there were nine confirmed new
cases. In the previous three years there had been no more than five new cases in
a quarter.
