Baseline risks, those of the slaughtered populations across Europe, and country-specific covariates, available from the European Commission Report, were inputted in the model to explain the heterogeneity.
We have assessed the relationship of the logOR (FS/AS) with the baseline risk (AS) to account for the potential variability in the risks of the slaughtered populations between countries on the overall heterogeneity.
Furthermore, even if the sheep tested within the healthy slaughter population are thought to be representative of the slaughtered population, this does not equate to the standing population.
Most countries (14/20) considered that animals tested within the healthy slaughter programme were representative of the slaughtered population, the other six considered that some biases could have occurred.
Differences in the genotype distribution and/or the survivorship of the slaughtered population between countries might result in different risks in the abattoir survey.
If animals from scrapie affected holdings, which had been slaughtered out, were included in the slaughtered population, as culls, this might have increased the risk of scrapie within this group.
Alternatively, the increased risk of scrapie among the slaughtered population, relative to that of the fallen stock group, could also explain the negative logOR of some countries (Table I).
Maximum scanning windows were limited to 50% of the population of hogs slaughtered, or population at risk (PAR) for the spatial scans, 50% of the study period for temporal scan tests, and both 50% of the condemnations and study period for the space-time scan tests.
That what had begun, and we'll see this in a minute, as a war between protestants and Catholics, a war that began in Prague when somebody gets defenestrated, which is a fancy word for throwing somebody out of a window, that this ended up being a war fought by just vicious mercenaries who slaughtered the populations of central Europe.
This supports the field situation, in which the great majority of atypical BSE cases have been identified through the statutory active screening of fallen stock and emergency slaughter populations [ 31].
However, that study did not target the slaughtered animal population.
