There has been positive reaction in Irish agricultural circles to the results of a study which found that only one further person from the Republic is likely to die from variant Cruetzfeldt-Jacob Disease (vCJD), as a consequence of eating BSE-infected meat.
To date, there have been 137 confirmed cases of vCJD in Britain, and only one in the Republic, despite the fact that the State has had the second-highest incidence of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) worldwide after Britain.
As it was not possible to construct estimates of future epidemics from this case alone, the researchers from Beaumont Hospital in Dublin and Imperial College in London calculated the exposure of the Irish population to BSE-infected beef, relative to the exposure of people in the UK.
The prediction, published in the British Medial Council Infectious Disease publication, will reassure Irish consumers who may have been exposed to beef infected with BSE.
The researchers found that 2.5 per cent of the Republic's population, who were living in Britain during the "at-risk" period (1980-1996), were exposed to the same risk of eating BSE-infected beef as other UK residents.
Those who stayed at home were exposed to BSE via BSE-infected domestic beef products or products imported to Ireland from the UK.
They used information from UK Customs & Excise and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) to calculate that only 0.26 per cent of the beef products produced in the UK (some 2,148 BSE-infected cattle) were consumed in the Republic.
They also discovered that only 10 per cent of the annual Irish beef industry output was consumed in Ireland, approximately 2,200 infected cattle.
By plugging these figures into a statistical model based on the annual number of cases of vCJD seen in the UK, and the relative population sizes of the UK and the Republic, the scientists calculated that there was likely to be only one further case of vCJD in Ireland, with an upper limit of 15 cases.
The estimate only considered those people who would catch vCJD from infected beef or beef products. It did not include any cases arising through secondary transmission, for example via surgical equipment that had previously been used on an infected patient.
The researchers also believe that "the development of a suitable blood test that would allow screening of large numbers of the population would prove extremely valuable in further quantifying the risk to the Irish population of vCJD".
This would help to identify the number of people who were suffering from vCJD but had not yet shown symptoms.
Performing surgery on these people could potentially lead to contamination of surgical instruments and cause further spread of the disease.
The estimate does not take into consideration the possibility that meat other than beef could have been infected with BSE.
"To ensure that we are identifying all vCJD cases, and also to ensure that the disease is not entering the human population by a more surreptitious route (e.g. via different animals), it is of considerable importance that the Irish CJD Surveillance Unit continues to be notified of all possible cases of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies," said the report.
The farm organisations and the Department of Agriculture and Food said that, while even one death would be regrettable, the controls to prevent the spread of the disease to humans had clearly worked and this was a very positive report.