- Hello, Jeff - This was fowarded to me from a Jeff Rense
listener. It quite accurately describes why we are not seeing more CJD
cases affirmed. --Patricia
-
- Why we are not seeing more CJD cases: -- pathologists/medical
examiners don't want to do autopsies because of high risk of infection
and the fact they must either use disposable instruments -- or throw the
instruments they do use away.
-
- "We'd have to destroy all of our instruments,"
if the body of a CJD victim were autopsied locally, said Charles Levi,
chief investigator for the Brevard County medical examiner's office. His
office has never seen a CJD case but, he said, "if we did, we wouldn't
even open the brain if we didn't have to."
-
- When a CJD victim showed up two years ago at a Pensacola
funeral home, director George "Bubba" Cook said he was told by
county health officials not to embalm it. "We'd have to throw away
all of our equipment," Cook said. The refrigerated body was buried
as-is.
-
- The Florida Brain Bank in Miami refuses to accept tissue
samples from suspected CJD patients for research "because of the extra-special
precautions needed in handling samples," said Martha Purdy, who as
the brain bank specialist for the Alzheimer's Resource Center in Orlando
screens for donors.
-
-
- Fatal Brain Disease Bumps Threat Of Mad Cow
- Little Is Known About Mysterious Illness
-
- By Alisa LaPolt
- Florida Today
- 1-20-4
-
- TALLAHASSEE -- A rare and
fatal brain disease with no known cause or cure takes on new prominence
with the threat of mad cow disease in the United States.
-
- Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, which causes memory loss,
hallucinations and loss of coordination, kills about 300 people a year
in the United States. Researchers can't agree if bacteria or an errant
protein causes the degenerative disease. But its known variations include
bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, which is considered
contagious.
-
- A controversial study suggested CJD could be the true
cause of one in 10 deaths attributed to Alzheimer's disease. The baffling
disease is spreading fear among medical examiners, blood banks, researchers,
funeral directors and others who frequently come in close contact with
brain tissue.
-
- "We'd have to destroy all of our instruments,"
if the body of a CJD victim were autopsied locally, said Charles Levi,
chief investigator for the Brevard County medical examiner's office. His
office has never seen a CJD case but, he said, "if we did, we wouldn't
even open the brain if we didn't have to."
-
- When a CJD victim showed up two years ago at a Pensacola
funeral home, director George "Bubba" Cook said he was told by
county health officials not to embalm it. "We'd have to throw away
all of our equipment," Cook said. The refrigerated body was buried
as-is.
-
- The Florida Brain Bank in Miami refuses to accept tissue
samples from suspected CJD patients for research "because of the extra-special
precautions needed in handling samples," said Martha Purdy, who as
the brain bank specialist for the Alzheimer's Resource Center in Orlando
screens for donors.
-
- The majority of screening for CJD in the United States
is done by the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center in
Cleveland, Ohio. Growing awareness of the disease more than doubled the
number of samples sent for testing since the federally funded center opened
in 1997.
-
- Threat so great
-
- The funeral home industry thinks the threat of CJD is
so great that in August, it issued new guidelines for handling body waste.
-
- And federal health officials now ban blood donations
from individuals from Europe, particularly the United Kingdom, where a
rare form of CJD was identified as the human manifestation of mad cow disease
in 1996.
-
- But one of the top researchers in CJD is leaving Britain
to conduct his work in the United States. Two weeks ago, the Scripps Research
Institute announced Dr. Charles Weissmann would head the Scripps biomedical
center to be built in Palm Beach County. He said he will continue his breakthrough
work using mice to show how the disease is contracted.
-
- "It's been around for hundreds of years, but we've
only been tracking it for the last hundred," said Weissmann, currently
the senior research scientist in the Department of Neurodegenerative Diseases
at University College, London.
-
- Weissmann earned acclaim for showing how errant proteins
can cause mad cow disease and other dementia-like diseases in humans. He
said he is struggling to find out whether the rogue proteins he believes
cause CJD -- called prions -- occur spontaneously or are acquired from
an outside source.
-
- The only sure way to diagnose CJD is to autopsy a human
brain. Tests on human victims, which require samples of spinal fluid, are
not reliable. Weissmann is working with mice instead.
-
- Researchers know humans contract one form of the little
understood disease, dubbed variant CJD, by eating beef products from animals
infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
-
- To date, 153 cases of so-called vCJD were identified
in the world. The only confirmed case in the United States is a 23-year-old
University of Miami student who grew up in England, where an outbreak of
mad cow disease peaked a decade ago.
-
- Classic CJD -- not yet linked to tainted meat products
-- kills about 300 people a year in the United States, or about one in
1 million people. In Florida, death certificates reveal an average of 16
people -- predominantly in their 60s, 70s and 80s -- die of it, according
to the state Department of Health.
-
- While Florida has tracked the disease since the late
1970s, health department officials only last year made it mandatory for
physicians to report cases to the state. Weekly health statistics show
four confirmed CJD deaths in Florida from June through December.
-
- Rare, infectious
-
- While state and federal health officials maintain classic
CJD is rare, "If you don't look, you don't find it," said Yale
University School of Medicine researcher Dr. Laura Manuelidis.
-
- Her 1989 study of brain tissue from 43 suspected Alzheimer's
victims revealed six of them instead died of CJD. A University of Pittsburgh
study produced similar results.
-
- "The most important thing is that this is an infectious
disease," she said. "This should be more than a blip on the screen
-- this should be a warning sign."
-
- Other health officials say there is not enough evidence
to support either that conclusion or the assumption that CJD is infectious.
-
- "At this point, there isn't any great evidence that
there's a larger public health issue," said Dr. Bill Theis, vice president
for medical and scientific affairs for the national Alzheimer's Association
in Chicago.
-
- Even so, he acknowledged, "Obviously, there are
holes in our knowledge of the disease."
-
- http://www.floridatoday.com/!NEWSROOM/localstoryN120CJD.htm
-
- Patricia A. Doyle, PhD
- Please visit my "Emerging Diseases" message
board at: http://www.clickitnews.com/ubbthreads/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=emergingdiseases
- Zhan le Devlesa tai sastimasa
- Go with God and in Good Health
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