Question:
IS CJD ALREADY A U.S. EPIDEMIC?Government officials deny that there is any Mad Cow disease in theU.S., or any kind of TSE health risk, at that. As put by a FDAspokesperson requesting anonymity, "There is absolutely no healthproblem with Mad Cow disease in the U.S. today." Perhaps this is whywe are not hearing more about cases of CJD in the U.S. New Alzheimer'sresearch may shed a different light on this question.

What's your opinion??? Can anyone of you share with me some more information???

Answer: Currently four million Americans are diagnosed with Alzheimer'sdisease. The percentage of cases is on the rise with solid researchshowing that there are about 360,000 individuals newly diagnosed eachyear.

At Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania at Pittsburgh,researchers recently studied the brains of people who died ofAlzheimer's disease (46 in the Yale case and 54 in the Pittsburghstudy). Surprisingly, the autopsies respectively showed that 13percent and five percent of the dead were actually CJD casesmisdiagnosed as Alzheimer's disease.

In a third (smaller) study published in the Journal of Psychiatry andNeuroscience (1995), investigators reported that three out of 12patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease were found to have had CJDwhen autopsied. It should be noted CJD symptoms may be remarkablysimilar to those of Alzheimer's disease.

There are no accurate figures for the total number of U.S. Alzheimer'sdeaths each year, simply because it doesn't usually get reported asthe cause of death. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported only22,725 Alzheimer's deaths in 1998. However, a spokesperson for theNational Alzheimer's Association, in a recent interview, agreed thatthe actual number could easily be 100,000, or even has high as 400,000per year. Because Alzheimer's patients usually die within 8 to 10years, she agreed that the CDC numbers must be grossly understated. Ifnew research supports that approximately 10 percent of all Alzheimer'sdisease related deaths are in fact misdiagnosed CJD cases, then 10,000to 40,000 CJD deaths will suddenly appear in America each year. Thatwould be an epidemic.