Oops, we undershot the vCJD risk

According to CIDRAP, the current estimate of how many will die of vCJD may just be too low. Honestly, I know a legion of people who could have told you that. A study in the Lancet by Collinge et al reports that the incubation period of Kuru could be several decades long and that this could very well be the case for vCJD too. In other words, we may have seen only the beginning of the death toll vCJD will cause.

A stat such as this isn't very encouraging:

"The authors state that because of the genetic basis for vCJD susceptibility, the cases identified so far may represent people who are genetically predisposed to have the shortest incubation period."

We can't prevent these deaths at this point because whoever is going to die of vCJD has already eaten tainted meat and been exposed to the infectious agent and therefore the disease is already incubating. The only solution that I see is to work as hard as we can towards treatment of prion diseases and a possible cure. I can't believe anything other than we will get there.

Possibly, we've only seen the first wave of vCJD victims.