학술논문
Source of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease outside United Kingdom.
Document Type
Journal Article
Source
Subject
*CREUTZFELDT-Jakob disease
*BOVINE spongiform encephalopathy
*PRION diseases in animals
*CENTRAL nervous system diseases
*BEEF exports & imports
*ANIMAL experimentation
*CATTLE
*COMPARATIVE studies
*RESEARCH methodology
*MEAT
*MEDICAL cooperation
*RESEARCH
*RESEARCH funding
*EVALUATION research
*INFECTIOUS disease transmission
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Language
ISSN
1080-6040
Abstract
We studied the occurrence of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) outside the United Kingdom in relation to the incidence of indigenous bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and to the level of live bovines and bovine products imported from the UK during the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. Our study provides evidence that a country's number of vCJD cases correlates with the number of live bovines it imported from the UK from 1980 to 1990 (Spearman rank correlation coefficient [r(s)] 0.73, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.42-0.89, p < 0.001). Similar correlations were observed with the number of indigenous BSE cases (r(s) 0.70, 95% CI 0.37-0.87, p = 0.001) and carcass meat imported from the UK from 1980 to 1996 (r(s) 0.75, 95% CI 0.45-0.89; p < 0.001) Bovine imports from the UK may have been an important source of human exposure to BSE and may have contributed to the global risk for disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]