[Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in France: an epidemiological update (author's transl)].

We report here the results of a prospective epidemiological study of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in continental France during the years 1978-80, extending a retrospective study of the decade 1968-1977 previously reported. The new annual mortality figures are 0.53 cases per million people for France as a whole, and 1,01 cases per million people for the paris metropolitan area. The correlation between mortality rate and population density persists in the Parisian area, and is not related to differences in age composition of the density categories. Although the geographic distribution of CJD and Scrapie and completely unrelated, there is a correlation between lamb consumption and CJD mortality rates in different nationwide population categories.