|
||||||||||||||||||
 |
From: TSS ()
In Reply to: MAD COW USA JUNK SCIENCE PR COMING OUT BEFORE RECENT SUSPECT BSE CASE EVEN CONFIRMED i.e. preparing for the storm posted by TSS on March 11, 2006 at 7:31 pm:
TWIN FALLS, Idaho -- In late May, Marjorie Skinner played golf well enough to place fourth in a Memorial Day weekend tournament. Yet within weeks, the previously vibrant retiree started losing her ability to speak. As word of the latest death spread yesterday, local and federal health specialists sifted through clues about an illness different from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of mad cow disease. ''Five [cases] in one valley is pretty serious," said Sue Skinner, Marjorie's daughter-in-law. ''It's a grave concern in our family." The mystery has deepened in recent weeks. At the end of May, another elderly woman died of the incurable disease involving a malformed protein, or prion, that kills brain cells. After that, health officials learned of three other suspected cases, including one CJD death in February that was reported only last month. ''Is what is happening in Idaho an anomaly, a statistical fluke? That is possible," said Ermias Belay, a top CJD expert with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta who is helping advise officials in Idaho. ''But once it exceeds 1.5 or 2 per million, you start asking questions." ''If they are all confirmed, it could be odd," he said. In a year, the United States typically has fewer than 300 CJD cases, which mete out rapid death to the elderly, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In Twin Falls, Cheryle Becker, epidemiology manager for Idaho's South Central District Health, is going to families with detailed questionnaires aimed at finding the roots of a disease that could date back 30 years. She asks about past travels, unusual hobbies, and dietary habits, including eating organ meats, brain, and venison. ''We're asking them if they've consumed elk," Becker said, adding that many people hunt venison in Idaho. ''We're not having many people say that they have." Specialists said they do not expect to find a link to eating meat, although locals are asking whether there is any connection to the human variant of mad cow disease. ''It's very frightening to the community," said Cheryl Juntunen, director of the South Central District Health. Two confirmed US cases of mad cow disease, one in a Washington state dairy animal in 2003 and the other in a Texas beef cow this year, have further heightened concern. Health specialists have found few parallels among the women, all of European heritage. Four were Idaho natives, all had children, and none had experienced neurological disease. One had spent time in Britain before the outbreak of mad cow disease there, officials said. Several husbands were involved in farming, as is commonplace in a rural farmland region. ''There are things that lead you to believe this is not variant CJD," Becker said. © Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company. Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2001 23:27:10 +0000 (GMT) And, if there is a case.......there is gonna be every ========================================= CJD WATCH MESSAGE BOARD No one is known to have contracted variant CJD in the US. But last year a US-born cow was found to have BSE, and a related disease called CWD afflicts elk and deer in states close to Idaho. So not surprisingly, campaigners and conspiracy theorists who specialise in CJD latched onto Idaho's cluster of CJD cases as evidence that the authorities are covering things up: that there are way more mad cows, or mad deer, in the US diet than they admit. Scientists hate this kind of thing, not least because they are often included among those accused of the cover-up. It is also true that many scare stories of this kind rely on people's ignorance of statistics. Take Idaho. The cluster of CJD cases there may be the result of nothing more sinister than the workings of chance, says Tim Sly, a public health expert at Ryerson University in Toronto. If a disease is expected to occur at 1 in a million overall, and we imagine the US's population split into subgroups of 1 million each, then the chances of exactly one case occurring in every subgroup in any one year is around 10 ^ -19 That's 1 in 10 billion billion. It is virtually certain that some of the hypothetical subgroups will have several cases and some none. Still, as Sly points out, you don't get news stories saying, "Our state didn't have any CJD this year, and we should have had at least one case." In fact, over the last 20 years, Idaho has had on average about 1.3 cases per million per year. That's close to the predicted incidence. What's more, the 1-in-a-million average is probably lower than the true incidence. Surveillance for CJD is notoriously patchy, and the number of cases typically rises when it improves. The recent flurry of diagnoses in Idaho happened after the state decided that, with all the worries over BSE, doctors should report every case of CJD. But even if there is nothing amiss in Idaho, does that mean we should be telling the conspiracy theorists to shut up and leave public discourse and policy to the select few who understand statistics? Internet commentator Henry Niman clearly doesn't think so. He has tracked the unfolding saga of bird flu, and has posted on his website his own worst-case interpretations for every twist. These have occasionally been uncritically quoted by the press, to the annoyance of some scientists, leading one prominent public health expert to ask if there wasn't some legal way to shut Niman down. But annoying as these conspiracy theorists can sometimes be, suppressing them would be a bad idea. Part of the reason the authorities are paying close attention to CJD in Idaho is because of the spotlight that internet campaigners have brought to bear. Without that pressure, they would not have gone back and looked at the incidence over the last 20 years, and they would not have improved surveillance. The Idaho CJD cluster may just be bad luck. But if ever something does go wrong it will show up as just such a cluster of cases. Can we trust the authorities to tell us when that happens? Their track record is not reassuring. The campaigners' attention to the smallest of rumours has at times helped defeat efforts to suppress important news. The heroic reporters who told a Chinese-language website about the large numbers of wild birds that had died from flu at Qinghai Lake in central China, and suspicions of human cases nearby, would probably have been overlooked by world media had it not been for Niman, who translated and posted their reports. Would it be better if we just let experts gather together in exclusive chat rooms, decide what was happening, and then tell us all? Possibly. Except that scientists, like any other group, have their own agendas, and these may not necessarily serve the greater good. The recreation of the deadly 1918 flu virus this month was an exciting piece of science, but was it worth the risk it would pose to public health if it escaped? There are questions: the review process was far from transparent. How do we know this? From internet campaigners and conspiracy theorists. Scientists have usually had to work hard to achieve their expertise, and with this can come a nasty streak of elitism. Some would prefer not to let those less expert than themselves have their say. True, uninformed commentators - especially those who fail to grasp the basics of statistics - can be a distraction from what experts believe to be the job in hand. But the same could be said for any opposition to the powers that be in a democracy. The conspiracy theorists may be monomaniacs, but they keep a sterner, more unyielding eye on officialdom and its scientists than we poor journalists ever can. We need them. http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg18825212.900 AS of July 31, 2005, there were 120 scrapie infected soure flocks (figure 3). There were 16 new infected and source flocks reorted in July (Figure 4) with a total of 143 flocks reported for FY 2005 (Figure 5). The total infected and source flocks that have been released in FY 2005 are 89 (Figure 6), with 8 flocks released in July. The ratio of infected and source flocks released to newly infected and source flocks for FY = 0.62 : 1. IN addition, as of July 31, 2005, 524 scrapie cases have been confirmed and reported by the National Veterinary Services Laboratories (NVSL), of which 116 were RSSS cases (Figure 7). This includes 76 newly confirmed cases in July 2005 (Figure 8). Fifteen cases of scrapie in goats have been reported since 1990 (Figure 9). The last goat case was reported in May 2005. ........... snip... http://www.aphis.usda.gov/vs/nahps/scrapie/monthly_report/monthly-report.html SCRAPIE USA MONTHLY REPORT 2005 AS of March 31, 2005, there were 70 scrapie infected source flocks (Figure FULL TEXT ; http://www.aphis.usda.gov/vs/nahps/scrapie/monthly_report/monthly-report.html =================== ANOTHER CJD CONFIRMED IN IDAHO CLUSTER (Scjd) ##################### Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy ##################### TSS TWIN FALLS -- Final test results on brain tissue have confirmed another Idaho woman died from the classic form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. "Test results showed it was not the variant form of CJD," said Tom Shanahan, spokesman for the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, on Tuesday. The variant form of CJD is caused by eating meat from a cow with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as mad cow disease. Since January 2005, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare has received nine reports of people -- seven women and two men -- diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease -- or CJD -- a fatal brain-wasting disease carried by prions, an abnormal form of protein in the bloodstream. Prions cause folding of normal protein in the brain, leading to brain damage. Symptoms include dementia and other neurological signs. Its victims usually die within four or five months after onset of the disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The cases included four women from Twin Falls County, a woman from Minidoka County, a woman from Benewah County in northern Idaho, a woman from Bear Lake County in the southern corner of Idaho on the Utah border, a man from Elmore County and a man from Caribou County in southeastern Idaho. Of the nine people in Idaho who have died, five had autopsies and their brain tissue was sent to the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center at Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University. Of those five, three women -- two women from Twin Falls County and the woman from Benewah County -- tested positive for a prion disease, and final results on all three of them have now shown they died of classic CJD and not the variant form. Two people, including the Elmore County man and a Twin Falls woman, tested negative for a prion disease. Autopsies were not performed on the other four suspected CJD victims. However, a CDC neurologist has reviewed their medical records, Shanahan said. The number of cases is highly unusual. Normally, there is one case of CJD per million people a year. Between 1984 and 2004, Idaho averaged 1.2 cases a year, Shanahan said. He said there was one year during that period when Idaho had three cases. Because of their ages -- all of the victims except one were over the age of 60 -- health officials suspected they died of classic CJD and not the variant. However, the only way to confirm CJD is by testing brain tissue, according to the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center. Times-News writer Sandy Miller can be reached at 735-3264 or by e-mail at smiller@magicvalley.com. Story published at magicvalley.com on Wednesday, February 01, 2006 http://www.magicvalley.com/articles/2006/02/01/news_localstate/news_local_state.3.txt TSS #################### https://lists.aegee.org/bse-l.html ####################
|
