What happened to the epidemic in new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease?

Summary 

The first recognised case of new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease was in 1995 and it was only a short time thereafter that this extremely rare fatal condition was attributed to the contamination of beef products by the putative aetiological agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. While the United Kingdom government appeared to bend over backwards in both accepting this attribution and in funding myriad research to support such an heretical conclusion many scientists while being extremely sceptical of such a possibility remained cautious in the light of an impending epidemic of human disease. Ten years further on there is no sign of any such epidemic and it is time to put politics aside and grasp the nettle of scientific consensus which must be that new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease was not caused by affected individuals eating beef products which were contaminated with bovine prion protein.