Published 28 May 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b2156
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;338:b2156

Editor's Choice

Editor’s Choice

Ignorance and certainty

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Most weeks the BMJ, like most other journals, adds small bits of knowledge to what we already know. But we also accumulate more things that we don’t know—and this week’s issue has some important bits of ignorance.

We still don’t, for example, know how many cases of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (caused by exposure to bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle) there might be. The study by Jonathan Clewley and colleagues tested 63 007 tonsils and detected no disease related prion protein, but the confidence interval was 0 to 289 cases per million, lower than but still consistent with an earlier prevalence study done in appendixes (doi:10.1136/bmj.b1442). As Maurizio Pocchiari says in his editorial, predicting numbers of vCJD carriers remains difficult, and repeating surveys in tissue specimens may not be helpful. He thinks, however, that these negative findings mean that other countries don’t need to carry out such studies—because . . . [Full text of this article]

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