The UK is being warned that a second wave of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease deaths could be on the way, after the nasty condition was found in a man with genes thought to make people less susceptible.

Until now all cases of variant CJD in the UK have been in people with an ‘MM’ genetic makeup. But the new case is in an ‘MV’ person. MVs make up 47% of the population (Daily Telegraph).

“Given that 160-170 MM individuals were infected we would estimate that the number of MV victims would be a maximum of 300 to 350, probably between 50 and 350,” says Chris Higgins, chair of the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (BBC).

This follows a paper published in Lancet Neurology on genetic risk factors in CJD, generally contracted from eating infected beef. An op-ed piece published with that paper noted that “To put it prudently, a second wave of CJD with a longer incubation time might hit these shores, but we do not know whether this will be a tidal wave or just an imperceptible ripple.”

Hugh Pennington, of Aberdeen University, told the BBC that the MV-gene cases “have a longer incubation period, because they’re more resistant… a longer period goes by between [the patient] being infected… and falling ill.”

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