No cure for HIV, no better cures for cancer, Alzheimers, CJD etc. etc. etc.
Apparently, CJD is brought on by the same virus that causes "mad cow disease, " also known as BSE.
The researchers used brain tissues infected with the spontaneously occurring version of CJD, which is also caused by prions.
There were also those who felt that the incidence of new variant CJD in humans was not enough to warrant a ban.
Annie McVey, whose 15-year-old daughter Claire died from CJD in January, has already put herself forward to act as a guinea pig.
The scientist has only managed to run the check, which works at a much higher resolution than normal ecg equipment, on four CJD sufferers.
Professor James Ironside, of the CJD Surveillance Unit at Edinburgh University, told the BBC News website the study seemed like "an interesting piece of work".
The beef-on-the-bone ban was imposed on the industry in 1997 after fears over new variant CJD, suspected of being the human form of mad cow disease.
It was not until March 1996 that Mr Dorrell told the Commons a new strain of CJD had emerged, probably linked to consumption of infected beef.
Since Thursday, when new research revealed the connection between "mad cow disease" and CJD, several nations across the world, especially in Europe, have turned their backs on British meat.
The latest figures from the Department of Health show that up to 31 December last year a total of 52 people in the UK had died from new variant CJD.
The worldwide export ban was imposed in March 1996, in response to the announcement of a suspected link between BSE in cattle and the human equivalent of the disease, CJD.
The arrests are part of a wider French inquiry into the deaths of at least four people in France from variant CJD that is passed onto humans by eating beef.
There were 113 cases of definite or probable vCJD in the UK between 1996, when doctors distinguished it as a new form of the rare brain-wasting disease CJD, and 3 December.
Eventually, enough brain cells die for the tell-tale gaps to appear in the tissues, although the only way of definitively confirming a CJD case in humans is following death during post mortem.
He has appealed to staff at the country's top specialist centres at the CJD Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh and the National Prion Clinic at St Mary's Hospital, London, to give him access to patients.
Professor Peter Smith, chairman of Seac, the scientific body that advises the government on CJD, said the only way to prove the link between BSE and CJD would be to inject BSE-infected material directly into a human.
After the meeting, Hueston was headed for England, where he serves on the British committee of scientists that found there may be a link between that country's bovine disease and a rare but fatal human equivalent called Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, or CJD.
It is alleged that the Buffalo Grill chain continued serving beef from Britain after it was banned in the European Union and that this may have been the cause of cases of the human form of mad cow disease (BSE), known as variant CJD.
While no definitive link between prion diseases in animals and CJD in humans has been established, the mechanism and progression of the diseases are so similar that most scientists are convinced that infection with BSE prion may under certain circumstances lead to the development of vCJD in humans.
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