Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease

[LindaRS]

A Maine woman has died of CJD.

Sandra Kennedy, a 38-year-old mother of four who worked as a nurse at Maine Medical Center and dedicated her life to family, friends and the Kennebunk community, died Monday of a rare brain disorder.

Mrs. Kennedy was diagnosed in February with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare and progressive disease that attacks the brain and has no cure. An estimated one person per million is diagnosed each year.

source

[Richard Myers]

Only one per million die each year from s CJD.  Is this rare? No, it is not rare.  Your chance of dying from s CJD is closer to one in 30,000.  That is quite different.  Some are beginning to realize we have a problem with s CJD.  "s" is sporadic, it just pops up with no cause. In other words, you don't have to worry about what you eat when it comes to s CJD.  Now, some understand that it very well may be caused by what we eat, more specifically, meat infected by prion disease.

England has suffered greatly from Mad Cow Disease, so they are actively studying the disease and CJD. The UK HoC Science and Technology Committee testified before the UK Parliment on March 5, 2014. The subject was CJD. In this testimony we find that the risk of contracting s CJD is one in 30,000.

Q86   David Tredinnick: I have one last question for Professor Collinge, and that is about the scale of the problem. In our last evidence session, Christine Lord suggested that the prevalence of sporadic CJD had increased in recent years from approximately 1 in a million to 1 in 33,000. Does this fit with your understanding, and, if so, what might this increase be attributed to?

Professor Collinge: I think there is some misunderstanding there. The apparent incidence of sporadic CJD is increasing. There are about a hundred new cases a year at the moment, and that has gone up substantially from the start of surveillance. That is thought, principally, to reflect better diagnosis of the disease, although that may not be all the explanation. It is possible, and we can talk about that, that some of that may be BSE-related. However, I think that the specific confusion there is that people talk about sporadic CJD occurring at 1 per million. That is not your individual risk. Your risk is 1 per million every year. Actually, it is nearer 2 per million per year of the population will develop sporadic CJD, but your lifetime risk of developing sporadic CJD is about 1 in 30,000. So that has not really changed. When people talk about 1 per million, often they interpret that as thinking it is incredibly rare. They think they have a 1-in-a-million chance of developing this disease. You haven’t. You’ve got about a 1-in-30,000 chance of developing it. transcript from meeting

Video of meeting:

[Richard Myers]

Transferring CJD from patient to patient via medical instruments.  Stereotactic multicontact electrodes used to probe the cerebral cortex of a middle aged woman with progressive dementia were previously implicated in the accidental transmission of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) to two younger patients. The diagnoses of CJD have been confirmed for all three cases. More than two years after their last use in humans, after three cleanings and repeated sterilisation in ethanol and formaldehyde vapour, the electrodes were implanted in the cortex of a chimpanzee. Eighteen months later the animal became ill with CJD. This finding serves to re-emphasise the potential danger posed by reuse of instruments contaminated with the agents of spongiform encephalopathies, even after scrupulous attempts to clean them.  source

[Mimi]

That is truly horrifying.

[JimB]

A Texas man has died of the fatal brain illness variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the fourth person to die of the disease in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Source

[Richard Myers]

Thanks  for sharing, Jim. It would be nice if CJD were rare, but it may not be. And, the article was misleading.  "CJD is a rare, degenerative, fatal brain disorder in humans, believed to be caused by consumption of products from cows with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or "mad cow" disease." There are different strains of CJD.  The one the Texan died from is the strain from England. There are other cases of CJD in the US, many more than four. They are  not the same as England's.

[Richard Myers]

Here is a listing of CJD cases in Texas for the last nine years by county. It is noteworthy that there are some clusters. Hard to explain if you don't believe it is an infectious disease.

[Ed Sutton]

Plug in prion carrying food supplies - reverse engineer by looking at stores/supermarkets/restaurants / outlets > suppliers to those supermarkets et all.  Then look for trends.

[Mimi]

Amarillo, Del Rio, Corpus Christi, Dallas and the corridor down to San Antonio, Houston. All huge beef-eating cities. This map is not surprising. Well, what may be surprising is that it isn't higher.

[Ed Sutton]

A researching reporter warned of it years ago.  But who listened ?

The reporter - Richard Rhodes - his Book - "Deadly Feasts"  reviews in these links 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1381977/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1381977/pdf/pubhealthrep00039-0089.pdf ; D   

  http://pubmedcentralcanada.ca/picrender.cgi?artid=1360679&blobtype=pdf 

[colporteur]

 
That's an interesting way to put it ,Ed. The feast days may lead to death.


 On another note, be very careful when purchasing from the health food store. Often you may ask if a product contained in a capsule is animal free and you will be told "yes."  However, more times than not they are paying no attention to the capsule. Most of the time the capsule is made of bovine cellulose. Most of the time the attendant does not know, does not care, and has not even thought about it. I have found this to be true time and again. The only safe bet is to call the company and ask them specifically about the gelatin capsule. You may think and have been told at the store you have an animal free product while it may contain the dreaded protein prion.