Studies cited by Kirchheimer indicate it is likely that "tens or even hundreds of thousands of people are dying right now of undiagnosed or misdiagnosed CJD." Government figures estimate approximately 200 to 300 cases of CJD have been diagnosed in the U.S. Before you take comfort in that modest figure, bear in mind the findings of John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. The authors of Mad Cow USA learned that while some four million Americans (at the time) had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, autopsies revealed roughly 25% of alleged Alzheimer's deaths were caused instead by other forms of dementia. One percent of these misdiagnosed deaths have been ultimately attributed to CJD. If this trend is extrapolated and one percent of the now five million Americans with Alzheimer's actually have CJD (or nvCJD), the nationwide estimate rises dramatically from 200 to 50,000 cases.
"It would be rather straightforward to design and execute significant studies to answer the urgent questions of which dementia diseases people have, and in what numbers, but to my knowledge no one in the scientific, medical or public health communities are even proposing this," says Stauber. "Especially now that we have found mad cow disease in the U.S., along with mad deer, mad elk, and mad sheep disease, we should be launching ongoing studies nation-wide to aggressively search for cases of CJD in the human population. We should be testing our human population for CJD; CJD should be made a carefully reported disease nationwide."
How safe are Americans from being exposed to the human variant of mad cow disease? In France, a nation with only 5.7 million cows, 20,000 are tested each week with 153 found infected in the year 2000. Out of the nearly 40 million U.S. cattle slaughtered annually, only about 1000 are tested. You do the math.
Kirchheimer concludes: "The growing number of British victims of 'new variant' CJD, mostly young people in their prime who contracted the brain sickness from tainted meat, is a grim precursor to an uncertain future."
Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.
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