WORLD: BSE on the retreat globally

By Keith Nuthall | 30 March 2006

BSE is on the decline around the world, with the good news being mirrored by a fall in cases of the human-version variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has claimed.

The number of BSE cases have dropped at 50% annually over the past three years, claims the FAO, with just 474 animals dying of the disease worldwide in 2005, compared with 878 in 2004 and 1,646 in 2003. Meanwhile, only five humans died from vCJD in 2005, all in the disease's heartland Britain, where nine vCJD deaths were registered in 2004 and 18 in 2003.