The head of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, Dr Patrick Wall, has welcomed the report that the number of people who will die in Britain from eating beef infected with BSE could be as low as 40 over the next 40 years, writes Sean MacConnell.
"It is very good news because we know so little about the disease but we must keep all the controls to prevent the food chain being contaminated in place here," he said.
The estimate, by researchers at Imperial College London, was based on the latest data from the epidemic of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), which is overwhelmingly centred in Britain, the source of the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy disease (BSE).
In 2000, epidemiologists triggered alarm when they admitted they had so little knowledge about vCJD that its final death toll, over the next 40 years, ranged from dozens to up to 136,000.
The Imperial College team looked at people who carry a specific genetic variation that appears to make them more susceptible to vCJD than others; around 40 per cent of Britain's Caucasian population have this genotype.
They also calculated the number of Britons who had eaten infected meat before tough new laws in the mid-1990s stopped that happening.
They did not, however, include other ways of catching the disease, such as through contaminated surgical instruments or blood transfusions, or explore the possibility that other genetic types could be at risk.
"Our results show a substantial decrease in the uncertainty in the future course of the primary epidemic in the susceptible genotype; it appears to be in decline," they wrote.
The new estimates ranged from a worst-case scenario of 540 deaths by 2080, to only 40.
In 1996, the first evidence emerging to link vCJD with eating beef infected with BSE unleashed worldwide panic and a massive drop in beef consumption.
The study also made the first "meaningful" attempt to answer the question of how long it takes the disease to incubate, suggesting the disease takes 12.6 years to develop before the first symptoms appear.
A total of 132 cases of vCJD have been recorded in Britain. France, which used to be a big importer of British cows and beef, has recorded six cases of vCJD and Ireland one, in a woman who lived in Britain.
Canada has confirmed its first case of BSE in an eight-year-old cow in Alberta last night, according to a Reuters report. This in the first confirmed transatlantic case of the disease.