Rising incidence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in Switzerland

Last week, the Lancet reported on a recent rise in the incidence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in Switzerland over a 15 month period. From 1996, the annual number of diagnoses of CJD has been between 8 and 11, corresponding to an annual incidence of about one per million. In 2001 the number of confirmed cases rose to 19, corresponding to an incidence of 2.7 per million, and in the first quarter of 2002, seven cases were identified, which extrapolates to an annual incidence of 3.9 per million this year (1 and figure).