Prevalence of asymptomatic vCJD in UK is low

Latest estimates of the number of people asymptomatic for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in the population remain very low, according to results from a large scale study of tonsil tissue by the Health Protection Agency, published in the British Medical Journal. No evidence of the abnormal prion protein associated with vCJD was found in any of the 63,000 samples analysed.