"pearl" > wrote in message
...
> > it is quite simple. We are monitoring a population, which is rather
bigger
> > and probably more important than a person. If the disease is not present
in
> > a population, then the person cannot get it. If the disease is present
in a
> > population, then it is a risk to the individuals.
> > Also remember that there have been claims that millions of UK citizens
will
> > die. When we callously refused to die and thus put a lot of lobby groups
> > noses out of joint. So they said actually we were just incubating it and
> > would all die later (which is in a way true, everyone dies later) so
they
> > run these tests on tonsils and discover that in our brutally
uncooperative
> > way, we aren't even incubating it.
> >
> > Jim Webster
>
> '..the director of the UK CJD Surveillance Unit warned that current
> tests might vastly under-represent the risk of infection.
>
> Professor James Ironside told the BBC last night that the tests were
> not sensitive enough to identify all those infected with the human form
> of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).
>

So what. We have found NONE! Sorry and all that, but there will be no huge
corpse fest.

3000 tissue samples.
So if we were going to get 4 million dead (a figure much mooted by those
shroud waving to get their grant allocation increased in the early days)
then we would expect out of a population of 60 million (round figures) we
would expect one in 15 samples to be infected

Out of 3000 samples that would be 200.


So the test isn't that sensitive, we might miss 50%. Fine, we would expect
100 positive samples. Yet there are NONE
The Guardian has papers to sell and James Ironside obviously needs more
funding for surveillance, after all he doesn't want the UK CJD
Surveillance Unit to be wound down because there is nothing out there to
look for.

Jim Webster