Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy Risk Assessment: The UK experience

Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) risk assessments undertaken in the United Kingdom have mainly had the objective of determining the risks posed to humans from exposure to the causal agents associated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (vCJD). In this article, I examine 19 of these risk assessments published to date and consider how their results might be influenced by underlying model assumptions and methodology. Three separate aspects common to all the assessments are infective load estimation, exposure pathway identification, and risk estimation. These are each discussed in detail.