Update on CJD

In March 1996 the discovery of a new form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) was announced to a shocked world. In order to understand why this news took the headlines by storm, it is necessary to trace the history of this rare disease and in particular its links with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or “mad cow disease”. By 1996, Britain had been in the throes of the BSE epidemic for ten years and it was believed that cows had contracted the disease by consumption of scrapie contaminated food-stuff, scrapie being a similar but much older disease in sheep. Because this represented a species jump from sheep to cows, it was predicted in many quarters that BSE posed a new threat to human health. Therefore the Government took steps to remove BSE contaminated products from the human food chain and the Department of Health set up a surveillance programme to monitor the incidence of CJD in UK