Reply to “Predicting the size of the epidemic of the new variant of Creutzfeldt‐Jakob disease” by Neil Ferguson, Christl A. Donnelly, Azra C. Ghani and Roy M. Anderson

The authors welcome the debate hosted by the British Food Journal on the likely size of the outbreak of New Variant CJD, if it is caused by eating BSE‐contaminated beef. We are pleased that there is a substantial measure of agreement between our estimates and those of Ferguson et al., for the most likely number of deaths, even if there is disagreement on the upper bound. We note that our low predictions for vCJD deaths based on vCJD data to the end of 1997 continue to be borne out by figures available at the time of writing, one year later.