On 5 Jun 2004 16:36:07 GMT, (Nick Maclaren) wrote:

In article ,
martin wrote:

I find most of the CJD thing hard to take seriously.
According to expert forecasts, by now UK should be looking like it did
during the Black Death.

You have misunderstood. When the balloon went up, and the fact that
MAFF had created a new disease became public, the epidemiologists
did the best they could with the available data. And the estimates
really were from tens of deaths up to millions. Nobody knew how
infectious it was.

In that case they would have done better to keep their expert mouths
well shut, until they did.

Extrapolating from 10 cases or whatever it was then, may have produced
research funding and fame, but it also killed the British beef
industry.


We still don't, but the bounds are more like hundreds to tens of
thousands. The latter is very unlikely, but not impossible.

Exactly!