On the Question of Sporadic or Atypical Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease

Strategies to investigate the possible existence of sporadic bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) require systematic testing programs to identify cases in countries considered to have little or no risk of orally acquired disease or to detect a stable occurrence of atypical cases in countries in which orally acquired disease is disappearing. To achieve 95% statistical confidence that the prevalence for sporadic BSE is no greater than 1 per million (i.e., the annual incidence of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease [CJD] in humans) would require negative tests in 3 million randomly selected older cattle. A link between BSE and sporadic CJD has been suggested on the basis of laboratory studies but is unsupported by epidemiologic observation. Such a link might yet be established by the discovery of a specific molecular marker or of particular combinations of trends over time of typical and atypical BSE and various subtypes of sporadic CJD, as their numbers are influenced by a continuation of current public health measures that exclude high-risk bovine tissues from the animal and human food chains.