Can scrapie titres be calculated accurately from incubation periods?

Since endpoint titrations of scrapie material are costly and time-consuming, several workers have estimated titre from the correlation between the incubation period of the disease and the infectivity titre. However, we show here that the relationship between incubation period and titre cannot be assumed to be constant for all scrapie preparations. Our results indicate that sodium deoxycholate treatment of scrapie preparations does not reduce the titre, but can lengthen the incubation period by about 10 days. This is equivalent to a discrepancy of 1 log LD50 unit if the estimation of titre was based on the incubation period.