Britain is unlikely to suffer an epidemic of human mad cow disease, according to the consultant neurologist who treated CJD victim Andrew Carter.

But Dr Jim Howe, based at Airedale General Hospital, Steeton, warned that other European countries were only just waking up to the dangers of the disease.

Variant CJD emerged in 1995 as a previously unrecognised form of the human brain disease.

An inquest in Bradford yesterday confirmed that Andrew, of Cross Roads, near Keighley, was the country's 53rd confirmed victim.

Dr Howe said he met fellow neurologists covering an area from York to Huddersfield and from Wakefield to Airedale every month to discuss problem cases.

The area had a population of about five million, and in the past three years they had seen a total of six cases of new variant CJD.

Britain led Europe in having a national surveillance unit for CJD which had been working for about 20 years but other European countries were only now waking up to the extent of the problem, said Dr Howe.

"They have been complacent over there and haven't been looking for it," he said. "Now as neurologists we will be looking at those trends."

Yesterday, the Government's chief medical officer Professor Liam Donaldson announced preliminary results from a study looking for evidence of the disease in appendix or tonsil specimens from operations since the 1980s.

No specimens showed evidence of variant CJD, he said, but he warned the results from 3,000 samples should not be viewed as an all-clear. They were the first findings from a larger study of 18,000.

Dr Howe said the sample was far too small to draw any conclusions from.

But he had to concur with the opinion of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Professor Stanley Prusiner, who identified the prion protein linked with CJD, that Britain would not see an epidemic.

At an international neurology conference, said Dr Howe, Prof Prusiner told delegates that a large number of the country's population must have been exposed to the risk before strict food regulations were introduced, but there were still few cases of variant CJD.

"I would go along with that," said Dr Howe. "You have to agree with an expert like that."

There was no screening test for the disease, and wider testing of all people who died was likely to make little difference because it was still so rare, he said. But Dr Howe admitted there were still unanswered questions about the illness's incubation period and transmission.

Dr Vivien Hollyoak, regional epidemiologist at the Leeds-based communicable diseases surveillance centre for the Northern and Yorkshire region, said: "I'm not aware that this region has any more or fewer cases than we would expect compared to the rest of the country. Nor am I aware of any clusters of cases."

When the news about links between CJD and British beef had broken in the mid-1990s, Dr Howe said he stopped his children eating the meat but he believed it was now safe.

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