Eurosurveillance - Volume 5, Issue 9, 01 September 2000

The announcement on 17 July 2000 that the rate of increase in the incidence of variant Creutzfeldt Jakob disease (vCJD) in the United Kingdom (UK) had reached statistical significance makes the current issue of Eurosurveillance particularly timely. A clus

By the end of May 2000, 54 definite cases and 13 probable cases of vCJD had been notified in the United Kingdom by the National CJD Surveillance Unit set up in 1990. All definite cases for whom data are available are methionine homozygous at codon 129 of

Work on experimental pathology carried out for over 10 years indicates that the biological properties of the BSE agent, responsible for the new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), are particular. In contrast to the situation observed in the other

Despite measures taken in France since 1990 to control the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the incidence of BSE cases notified in France by the BSE Epidemiological Surveillance Network has been rising in recent years. By 1 July 2000, 103