"Jim Webster" wrote in message ...

Lotus wrote in message
...
[..]

You've still not explained the 11 CJD cases per 1,000.

no need to, if the overal total of dementia cases hasn't increased,
there isn't a problem, all that is happening is that according to me,
they might be dying from a different type of dementia, or from your
point of view, it is actually the same type of dementia.

It's CJD, which we are told occurs in one person per million.

How do UK dementia figures compare with US, or EU.

'.. The true prevalence of prion diseases in this or any other country remains
a mystery (Harrison,1991). Compounding the uncertainty, autopsies are rarely
performed on atypical dementias (Harrison,1991), because medical professionals
fear infection (Altman, 1996a). The officially reported rate in this country is less
than 1 case in a million people per year (World, 1996). An informal survey of
neuropathologists, however, registered a theoretical range of 2-12% of all
dementias as actually CJD (Harrison, 1991). And hundreds of thousands of
Americans suffer from severe dementias every year (Brayne, 1994; United, 1995).
Two other studies average about a 3% CJD rate among dementia patients
(Mahendra, 1987; Wade, 1987). A preliminary 1989 University of Pennsylvania
study showed that 5% of patients diagnosed with dementia were actually dying
from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (Boller, 1989). It would seem CJD is seriously
underdiagnosed at present (Harrison, 1991).

The most common misdiagnosis of CJD is Alzheimer's disease (Harrison, 1991).
CJD was even described by our government's top CJD researcher (Wlazelek, 1990a)
as "Alzheimer's in fast forward (Wlazelek, 1990b)." The symptoms and pathology of
both diseases overlap (Brown, 1989). There can be spongy changes in Alzheimer's,
for example, and senile plaques in CJD (Brown, 1989). The causes may overlap as
well; epidemiological evidence suggests that people eating meat more than four times
a week for a prolonged period have a three times higher chance of suffering a dementia
than long-time vegetarians (Giem, 1993), although this result may be confounded by
vascular factors (Van Duijn, 1996).

Paul Brown, medical director for the U.S. Public Health Service (Gruzen, 1996),
said that the brains of the young people who died from the new CJD variant in Britain
even look like Alzheimer's brains (Hager, 1996). Stanley Prusinger, the scientist who
coined the term prion, speculates Alzheimer's may in fact turn out to be a prion disease
(Prusiner, 1984). In younger victims the disease could look like multiple sclerosis or a
severe viral infection, according to Alzheimer's expert Gareth Roberts (Brain, 1996).

An estimated two to three million Americans are afflicted by Alzheimer's (Scully,
1993); it is the fourth leading cause of death among the elderly in the U.S (Perry, 1995).
Twenty percent or more of people clinically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease are
found at autopsy to not have had Alzheimer's at all (McKhann, 1984). At Yale, out of
46 patients clinically diagnosed with Alzheimer's, 6 were proven to be CJD at autopsy
(Manuelidis, 1989). In another post-mortem study 3 out of 12 "Alzheimer" patients
actually died from a spongiform encephalopathy (Teixeira, 1995).

Carleton Gajdusek, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work with prion diseases
(Manuelidis,1985), estimates that 1% of people showing up in Alzheimer clinics actually
have CJD (Folstein, 1983). That means that hundreds of people (Hoyert, 1996; United,
1995) may already be dying from mad cow disease each year in the United States. ..'

http://www.mad-cow.org/~tom/Alzheimer_cjd.html