COULD a whole new section of the population be at risk of developing the human form of mad cow disease? That is the big question following the discovery of the agent responsible for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in the appendixes of two people who have a different genetic make-up from all other known victims of the disease.
So far, the UK has recorded 161 cases of vCJD, and all the patients have had the same gene variant for the prion protein that is implicated in the disease: the MM genotype, which is found in 40 per cent of the population.…
