There have been 139 deaths since vCJD emerged in the UK nine years ago.
The fear was that the infective prion agent of vCJD was not completely destroyed by normal sterilisation of reusable instruments.
The Imperial College team suggest this could mean that some people could be infected with vCJD, but not develop symptoms.
Over the last decade, scientists have been working to evaluate what the full extent of the vCJD epidemic will be.
He was the minister whoin 1996 informed the British public of a "possible link" between the cattle disease and vCJD.
VCJD, as well as the epidemiology of real-life outbreaks, has made considerable strides since 1996, where the inquiry leaves off.
The researchers studied the genetic makeup of 50 patients with vCJD, approximately half of the population known to have the disease.
In all, 87 cases of vCJD have been reported in Britain, three in France and one in Ireland, according to the agency.
Dr Pomfrett said he needs to test the system on 20 people with vCJD to find out whether or not it works in humans.
But researchers who tested 12, 674 appendix and tonsil samples found three showed signs of apparent vCJD, indicating around 3, 800 people could ultimately be affected.
The WHO expressed concern about what it called "exposure worldwide" to mad cow disease and its fatal human form, new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD).
The first sign of the disease was simple clumsiness and lack of balance - classic early signs of the prions that cause vCJD damaging the brain.
Christine Lord, whose son died nearly two years ago of vCJD, urged coroners to carry out the tests as it had the potential to "save lives".
However, they warn that although they studied about half of all the people known to have contracted vCJD, their sample is still too small to be conclusive.
Australia barred British beef and by-products in 1996 as concerns mounted that mad cow disease could be linked to the fatal human condition, new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD).
June Richer from the Isle of Wight, who lost her daughter, Kate, to vCJD last year, said all research into the virus is a step in the right direction.
Hugh Pennington, the emeritus professor of bacteriology at Aberdeen University, told Newsnight that any new cases may well have originated at the same time as the original vCJD outbreak.
The report has sterner criticism for Douglas Hogg, Agriculture Minister 1995-97, accusing him of not acting quickly enough when confronted with evidence of a link between vCJD and contaminated meat.
Campaigner Christine Lord, who lost her son to vCJD a year ago, when he was 24, is going to Downing Street on Thursday to ask Gordon Brown to do more.
Although Jonathan - a year ago a talented youth footballer - still has some awareness of what is going on around him, remarkably, he was never told that he had vCJD.
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.
If this was the case, looking at the population who would have eaten infected meat, they used computer programmes to estimate there could be a total of around 70 deaths from vCJD.
The researchers say that in this worst case scenario - if people with other gene variants are equally as susceptible as those in the original subgroup, but have a longer incubation period for vCJD - there could be a total of around 600 deaths from vCJD.
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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