There is something about the time lag in the development of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease which makes it so worrying.
If the incubation period of the disease is anything from five to 50 years, as some experts suggest, there could be an illness time bomb ticking away in any number of people who might have been affected by the newly established link with mad cow disease in British beef.
It has been compared by one British government scientific adviser as the equivalent to a potential AIDS epidemic.
The British Government, which for years adamantly denied any link between beef and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), has accepted a new form of the disease has been found in 10 people under the age of 42, seven of whom have died.
Government experts admit the 'most likely' cause of these cases was exposure to mad cow disease before certain types of offal were banned from being used in foodstuffs in 1989.
The disease was first confirmed in Britain in 1986 and is thought to have come from feeding the remains of sheep, suffering from the disease 'scrapie', to cattle in processed feeds.