According to a brief report in the journal Neurology, two hunters in the United States died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), which was likely caused by eating the meat from deer that had prion disease–also known as chronic wasting disease (CWD). The report is unconfirmed, but it does provide a chance to illustrate how badly prion disease, including CWD, is being managed. Answers begin with the truth.

What Is Prion Disease

Prion disease, including CJD and CWD, is a progressive, infectious disease, which means that it gets worse over time and that there is no cure. Prion disease is caused by a misfolded protein called a prion. Prions are infectious and vicious. They migrate, mutate and multiply. They kill with extreme efficiency.

In wildlife, prion disease affects members of the deer family (cervids) such as deer, elk, moose, and caribou.

In livestock, prion disease is often called mad cow disease. In humans, it is usually called Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ALS and other names to help cloak the fastest-growing cause of death in the world–neurodegenerative disease.

Prions infect the entire body of victims (man or beast). Prions are in the bodily fluids and cell tissue of each victim. Blood, mucus, saliva, skin, urine, feces and organs are all infected. Prions infect everything in their path, which means that there isn’t such a thing as safe handling of an infected (dead or alive) cow, deer, elk, moose or reindeer. Caregivers for those who have neurodegenerative disease face the same risk. Prions are unstoppable and prion disease is always fatal. Infected items cannot be sterilized.

The only difference between CWD, mad cow disease or the human forms of prion disease is the species impacted. In humans, the only difference between prion diseases is the region of the brain that is under attack. If the prions start their assault in the hippocampus region of the brain, for example, the person will experience memory problems, which should generate a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.

If the prions start attacking the brain in the cerebellum or the primary motor cortex, the person will have difficulty coordinating the complex muscle movements we need for smooth, controlled actions. This will likely generate a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. If prion disease is advanced and attacking several regions of the brain, it should generate a diagnosis of Creutzfeldt-jakob disease, like the hunters in the study. Yes, they are infectious.

The spread of prion disease is not fully understood, but it’s safe to say that there is no evidence of safe prion exposure. In other words: 

Prions + Pathways = Victims

Despite this basic logic, wildlife officials want misinformed hunters to be part of the problem. Hunters have been told that CWD is a serious disease for deer populations, but there is no strong evidence that it can infect humans or livestock. This is a lie. Prion disease is prion disease. There is no disagreement that mad cow disease is highly transmissible to humans from livestock. There is no species barrier to prion disease, including chronic wasting disease. Don’t trust any agency or anyone who claims otherwise.

Unfortunately, prion pathways are abundant. In the case of the hunters who died of CJD recently, they could have been infected by many pathways: 

1. Assuming they harvested and dressed the animals, they could have exposed themselves and others in several ways. The surviving family members still should take precautions. For example, when hunters harvest animals with prion disease, they contaminate their hunting knives and saws while cleaning and skinning the animals. The knives and saws can’t ever be sterilized. 
2. The hunters probably got blood on their hands and clothes and washed the last of it off at home. They probably got blood and hair from the carcass in the back of their truck, which cannot be sterilized and safely used again. 
3. If the animals were butchered at a local processing plant, the plant is permanently contaminated. The tables, knives and saws are spreading prions to every animal that comes down the line–not to mention the threat to the workers in the plant. They take prion contamination home every day. Meanwhile, the prions are migrating, mutating and multiplying.

The hunters and or their wives cooked up their meat on grills and in frying pans that are now contaminated and spreading prion disease with every meal. Forks, plates and more are now contaminated and spreading disease. The sink and dishwasher are contaminated because of washing these contaminated items. You get the picture.

Prion Disease Threatens Family, Caregivers

The patients themselves were likely mishandled. They infected their homes and communities before they died. Cups, plates, phones, door knobs, light switches, steering wheels, etc. are all infected with prions. Healthcare professionals probably protected themselves and the truth without warning the families and caregivers about prion infectivity.

Meanwhile, wastewater systems from meat processing plants, medical and dental facilities and other high-risk waste streams collect and incubate prions. Wastewater treatment can’t stop prions, which means that reclaimed wastewater and sewage sludge are still infectious waste. Despite the infectious and toxic nature of these waste streams, we are injecting prion disease into our food and water supplies. We are dumping tons of it on fields and in forests every day. We are reclaiming and reusing infectious wastewater like it’s gold. This prion loop recycles neurodegenerative disease from humans to humans, humans to wildlife and from wildlife back to humans. It’s no wonder that neurodegenerative disease is exploding around the world.

The symptoms of CJD can vary depending on the type of the disease, but they generally develop rapidly and worsen over time. Common symptoms include:

• Memory problems
• Difficulty thinking
• Changes in mood or behavior
• Problems with coordination
• Muscle weakness
• Vision problems
• Seizures
• Coma

There is no cure for CJD, and the disease is always fatal. People with CJD typically live for less than a year after symptoms begin. People with Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease can degenerate to a point that resembles CJD.

Prion disease is a spectrum disease, which means that no two cases are identical and diagnosing exactly where a case falls on that spectrum is a guessing game. Neurology is not an exact science, especially when it involves neurodegenerative disease.

Prion disease has been found in wildlife in 33 states in the United States. It also has been found in Canada, Norway, Sweden and Korea, so far.

Gary Chandler is the CEO of Crossbow Communications — an award-winning public affairs and government affairs firm. We specialize in public health and environmental issues. We serve the world.

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According to the Mayo Clinic and others, most cases of Alzheimer’s disease are preventable. Unfortunately, there is not a cure.

Neurodegenerative disease is now the fastest-growing cause of death in the world. It’s a cruel wasting disease that takes both the mind and body. Many cases of cancer and heart disease are proving to be treatable and beatable, while millions of people around the world are dying from neurodegenerative disease.

First of all, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) are forms of prion disease. The main difference between Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease is the region of the brain initially impacted by prion infection. The difference between CJD and Alzheimer’s disease is the severity of the prion infection and the stage of disease progression. As one neurologist explained, CJD is like Alzheimer’s disease on steroids.

Prion disease is technically known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE). Prion disease is transmissible.

Therefore, prion aversion in your lifestyle influences whether or not you will contract neurodegenerative disease. Prion disease in humans is so transmissible that wildlife around the world have now contracted prion disease from human waste. Cities are dumping millions of tons of infectious waste on crops, ranches, forests, parks, golf courses, school grounds, and beyond. These practices and others have created a public health disaster around the world.

In wildlife, prion disease is known as chronic wasting disease. In livestock, prion disease is known as mad cow disease. It’s all essentially the same, except for the fact that there are thousands of different mutations spreading rampantly and there are more mutations made every day. Humans are spreading the disease into the environment in numerous ways, while Mother Nature feeds them right back to us through the food chain and our water supplies.

The food and water that we consume are important factors. The right foods can help us avert Alzheimer’s disease. The wrong foods and beverages increase our risk.

A strong heart is a critical factor as we defend our brains. Strong blood flow helps keep the brain healthy. High cholesterol, hypertension, obesity, and diabetes, increase the risk for Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.

Many studies suggest that what we eat affects the aging brain’s ability to think and remember. These findings have led to research on general eating patterns and whether they might make a difference.

As author Gary Chandler explains, animal products are highly correlated with Alzheimer’s disease. Persons who consume the most saturated fat had more than twice the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Trans fats are equally harmful. Saturated fat is particularly abundant in dairy products and meat. These trans fats are found in many snack foods and dairy products. Other studies have also implicated saturated fats in cognitive decline. Head trauma also is a factor.

Preview and order the eBook now to defend yourself and your family.

Gary Chandler is the CEO of Crossbow Communications — an award-winning public affairs and government affairs firm. We specialize in public health and environmental issues. We serve the world.

The post Prevent Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s With Brain Food appeared first on Gary Chandler.

Neurodegenerative disease is the fastest-growing cause of death in the world. Author and prion expert Gary Chandler hopes to reverse that trend by showcasing and connecting existing science.

Alzheimer’s disease alone is taking the lives of 50-100 million people around the world now. Millions will die of the disease this year, while millions more will be diagnosed and misdiagnosed. Millions of additional people will go undiagnosed.

Death rates from heart disease, cancer and other leading causes of death are dropping in most countries due to advances in nutrition, medicine and disease management. Neurodegenerative disease is the one glaring exception. It’s spreading exponentially. In the U.S., for example, deaths attributed to Alzheimer’s disease increased 71 percent from 2000 to 2013, while those attributed to heart disease decreased 14 percent.

The pandemic is more severe in some countries than others. Finland and Iceland had the highest prevalence rates just a few years ago. Now, countries in the Middle East and Persian Gulf states have soared to the top of the list. Most cases go unrecorded, so the true scope of the problem is unknown.

A variety of factors can trigger neurodegenerative disease, including genetics, head trauma and exposure to deadly prions (pree-on). The Mayo Clinic claims that Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of neurodegenerative disease are largely preventable.

A prion is a deadly form of protein that ultimately infects the entire body, while consuming the brain. Prion disease is clinically known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE). As the name suggests, TSE is a transmissible disease.

Deadly prions spread through the bodily fluids and tissue those carrying prion disease (milk, blood, saliva, mucus, urine, feces, tissue and skin). Prions shed from infected humans are highly transmissible to others.

Dr. Stanley Prusiner, a neuroscientist from the University of California at San Francisco, earned a Nobel Prize in 1997 for discovering and characterizing prions and prion disease. President Obama awarded Prusiner the National Medal of Science in 2010 to recognize the importance of his research. Unfortunately, important reforms to protect public health have been elusive.

Prusiner’s most recent study confirms that Alzheimer’s disease is a prion disease, which means that millions of people with Alzheimer’s disease (and millions who died ahead of them) are highly infectious. Prion contamination is impossible to stop in most scenarios. Prion diseases affect humans and other animals. The spectrum of human prion diseases includes Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and Huntington diseases.

Thanks to misinformation and mismanagement, prion disease has killed millions of people around the world over the past 50 years. Prion contamination from those victims alone has spread far and wide. In addition to people, prion disease is killing livestock, wildlife and sea mammals.

The deadly prion spectrum now includes mad cow disease in livestock and chronic wasting disease in deer, elk and moose. Many species of mammals have contracted TSE, including camels, dolphins, mink, felines and elephants. Sick animals are canaries in a coalmine when it comes to prion contamination causing prion disease. Prions are a real-world version of Pandora’s box. Governments and industries that ignore these pathogens are reckless, irresponsible and criminal.

Prion contamination from humans is infecting wildlife and livestock. Prion contamination from livestock and wildlife is infecting humans. It’s a vicious circle with no end in sight. Misinformation and mismanagement are making the contamination worse, while keeping the prion pandemic alive. Governments and industry are working diligently to keep prion disease off the public radar. The CDC quietly took prions off the highly regulated list of select agents because the regulation criminalized entire industries and several reckless practices. It also opened the floodgates to prion mismanagement.

Regardless of the species impacted, prion disease causes memory loss, impaired coordination, abnormal movements and overall wasting of the mind and body. Victims become prion incubators and distributors. So do wastewater treatment plants.

“Contrary to popular belief, neurodegenerative disease is not a normal part of aging,” said Gary Chandler, a prion expert and author of Alzheimer’s Disease: A Survival Guide. “Prion contamination is fueling the majority of the prion pandemic. Neurodegenerative disease is now killing teenagers. The truth is your best defense.”

Experts suggest that the prevalence of brain disease will quadruple, if not more, by 2050. If we had accurate mortality statistics, we would likely find that brain disease is already the leading cause of death around the world today. Ignorance, negligence, fraud and corruption are fanning the flames.

To beat brain disease, we need to understand its dynamics. The brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease collect particles of protein that are not expelled from their bodies. These protein particles stick together and form plaques in the brain, which smother and kill healthy brain cells. The brain damage cascades once the proteins begin to accumulate.

Much like the plaque on our teeth, these proteins create cavities inside the brain as more cells are killed. Dead brain cells then contribute to the avalanche of plaque building up, which causes the damage to escalate and spread to other regions of the brain. The brain damage spreads until it stops vital bodily functions.

These protein deposits are called tau and beta-amyloid. With Alzheimer’s disease, this damage starts in the hippocampus—the region of the brain responsible for memory. Parkinson’s disease is almost identical, except that it starts in the region of the brain that is responsible for movement.

Chandler’s new book helps readers navigate the complex landscape of prion aversion and targeted nutrition. For example, experts claim that the risk for cognitive impairment is 42 percent lower in elderly individuals who consume healthy fats and fewer carbohydrates. Up to half of those who have Alzheimer’s disease could have prevented it with a smarter diet and exercise. Targeted nutrition is our best hope for both prevention and treatment.

“Our health is linked to our ability to get optimal nutrition for the fewest calories,” Chandler said. “The more that we decrease our calories, while staying optimally nourished, the better our chances of healthy aging and longevity.”

Some foods increase your risk of contracting brain disease. Some foods help prevent brain disease, while others can treat the symptoms. Targeted nutrition is extremely effective, but we need to know which foods to avoid and we need to know how to avoid prion pathways. It’s vital to avoid prions and other neurotoxins.

To avoid neurodegenerative disease, we need to keep our brains free of oxidation, toxins and plaque. To help us purge these neurotoxins from our brain and bodies, we need to promote healthy blood flow to and through the brain. Ideally, we need to:

• Exercise;
• Reduce overall calorie consumption;
• Reduce carbohydrate consumption;
• Maintain a healthy alkaline level;
• Reduce prion exposure; and
• Increase healthy fat consumption.

For those already battling neurodegenerative disease, nutrition offers the only real hope in treating the symptoms. Eat nutritious food. Eat organic food. Avoid processed foods, which contain ingredients harmful to your brain, including refined sugar, processed fructose, gluten, genetically engineered ingredients, and pesticides like glyphosate.

Chandler offers dozens of strategies and tips to help you beat and treat neurodegenerative disease and other diseases. This information will empower you with the knowledge to make smarter food choices, while empowering you to seek out more answers and find even more hope on your own. Most of the information will also help you avoid heart disease, diabetes, cancer and more. What’s good for the mind is good for the body.

As Chandler explains, this is a very serious book about corruption, collusion and calls for industry reform to protect public health. Misinformation and mismanagement are putting innocent people in harm’s way. However, it also is the most empowering information available for those who want to prevent neurodegenerative disease and for those who want to treat it effectively.

Unfortunately, drugs don’t work against Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease, yet. At best, they ease the symptoms slightly, if at all. However, new treatments aimed at purging the deadly proteins from the brain are showing promise.

Gary Chandler is the CEO of Crossbow Communications — an award-winning public affairs and government affairs firm. We specialize in public health and environmental issues. We serve the world.

Chandler is connecting the dots to the global surge in neurodegenerative disease, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, chronic wasting disease and other forms of prion disease. The scientific name for prion disease is transmissible spongiform encephalopathy.

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Doctors in New Brunswick are on high alert for patients exhibiting symptoms of an alarming neurological disease that appears to be linked to environmental causes. The neurotoxin behind the human outbreak is likely impacting livestock and wildlife, too. Caregivers are getting sick.

Health Canada’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease surveillance system determined that the rising number of cases should be considered a cluster in the Moncton and Acadian Peninsula areas of New Brunswick. There have been at least 48 cases of this emerging disease reported in the province so far. Eight people have died so far. Rumors and leaks from whistleblowers suggest that the number is more like 150 or more.

Symptoms of the disease include muscle spasms, memory loss, atrophy, vision problems and the rapid development of dementia. Symptoms are similar to prion disease which also is known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, which includes Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans, chronic wasting disease in wildlife and mad cow disease in livestock. If it’s prion disease, sick people and animals are merely symptoms of a bigger problem–a global problem.

Suffice it to say, Canadian health officials are falling all over themselves in an attempt to rule out prion disease. The potential liabilities and lawsuits associated with a CJD cluster would send shockwaves throughout the country and around the world. The truth hurts. (Update: A report from a government committee that investigated the disease is expected blame several cases on misdiagnoses by neurologists.)

Dr. Michael Coulthart, who is the head of the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Surveillance System, wrote last October that he had been “essentially cut off” from working on the file at the public health level for reasons he could “only discern to be political.” He said he was worried there are more than 200 people experiencing unexplained neurological decline.

“All I will say is that my scientific opinion is that there is something real going on in [New Brunswick] that absolutely cannot be explained by the bias or personal agenda of an individual neurologist,” microbiologist Coulthart wrote last October. “A few cases might be best explained by the latter, but there are just too many [now over 200].

My strong hypothesis is that there is some environmental exposure — or perhaps a combination of exposures — that is triggering and/or accelerating a variety of neurodegenerative syndromes in people who are already predisposed to different protein-misfolding conditions, which could include Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s or Huntington’s disease. This kind of phenomenon does not easily fit within the shallow classification paradigms of diagnostic pathology,” which has created “a ‘loophole’ through which the politicians have eagerly leaped to conclude nothing coherent is going on.”

Scientists are supposedly looking into the possibility that this is a new variant of a prion disease — or a new disease entirely. Since prions mutate as they move up the food chain, there are now thousands of mutations threatening humans and other mammals. It’s impossible to rule out prion disease given the numerous prion pathways that are being ignored in every nation.

Excluding the recent coronavirus pandemic, neurodegenerative disease is the fastest-growing cause of death on the planet. Alzheimer’s disease alone is taking the lives of 50-100 million people around the world now. Millions will die of the disease this year, while millions more will be diagnosed and misdiagnosed. Millions of additional people will go undiagnosed. The prion (pree-on) pandemic has been accelerating for years. Prion disease is an infectious disease. No two cases are identical in terms of symptoms or pathology. It’s always fatal. There is no vaccine or cure.

A variety of factors can trigger neurodegenerative disease, including genetics, head trauma and prions. Prions are infectious, deadly proteins that consume the brain. Prion disease is clinically known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE). As the name suggests, TSEs are extremely transmissible.

Prion disease is a spectrum disease. No two cases are identical. This spectrum of rapidly progressive, fatal, and infectious neurodegenerative disorders is affecting both humans and many other mammals. Parkinson’s disease is another prion disease. The difference between Parkinson’s disease and the spectrum above is that Parkinson’s attacks the region of the brain responsible for movement. Alzheimer’s disease attacks the region of the brain responsible for memory.

CJD is like Alzheimer’s disease on steroids and it is highly infectious. All people with prion disease are theoretically contaminating the world around them, while exposing family, friends and community members. It demands much stricter protocols to contain the prion pathogen, including infectious waste and wastewater management.

Like many nations around the world, Canada has a history of prion disease and prion mismanagement.

Chronic wasting disease among wildlife and mad cow disease among livestock are just two examples. The nation has all but given up on the war against CWD.

Prion-tainted growth hormones obtained from cadavers were injected into people around the world, including Canada, several years ago. In 2013, three people showed up in emergency rooms in British Columbia on the same day–all with symptoms similar to what has been found recently in New Brunswick. One of those victims definitely had CJD, while the others have been swept under the rug.

Today, the nation is dumping prion-laced infectious waste on open lands across rural Canada. Because of the infectious nature of prion disease, infectious waste (past and present) is part of the story in New Brunswick, British Columbia or anywhere else affected by prion disease.

The cases in New brunswick are not genetic, said neurologist Alier Marrero of Moncton’s Dr. Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital Centre. A neurotoxin appears to be responsible for the surge, which means that it is still a threat to humans, livestock and wildlife. Canadian authorities have provided little information about the victims although they have indicated that the disease affects people of all ages.

Yvonne Godin, mayor of a small town in the Acadian Peninsula, said the lack of public information is causing concern. She wants to know the cause of this disease as soon as possible.

“We don’t know where this is coming from,” but the leading hypothesis so far is that it’s environmental, Marrero said. “We believe it is acquired from exposure to something in the environment—food, water, neurotoxins.”

The disease cluster was not disclosed to the public until March 17, 2021. A report from health authorities in New Brunswick was leaked to the media. According to the memo, the first case of the disease in this region was diagnosed in 2015. In 2019, 11 additional cases were discovered. In 2020, 24 more cases discovered and another six so far in 2021. Not one has recovered. All should be quarantined and their infectious waste should be segregated and buried in a lined landfill. Unfortunately, that is not required protocol for suspected prion disease.

Dr. Cristin Muecke, deputy chief medical officer of health, sent the memo on March 5^th to the New Brunswick Medical Society and related professional associations for doctors and nurses. Her office describes the cluster as “a progressive neurological syndrome of unknown origin.” The cases have many similarities to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, but the government is clearly reluctant to make such a declaration, which will make it more difficult to dismiss.

The median age for the unknown disease is 59 years old, with a few patients being in their early 50s. A whistleblower claims that the disease is impacting younger people.

“As the disease progresses, usually over a course of 18 to 36 months, loss of balance and coordination have been observed, and sometimes patients have abnormal and rapidly progressing brain atrophy,” said Marrero. “We cannot say this is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (yet).”

Chief medical officer of health Dr. Jennifer Russell told reporters that the outbreak is under investigation. Russell confirmed that cases so far are concentrated in the Moncton region and the northeastern part of the province. Marrero and Russell didn’t call the situation a threat to public health. Since they haven’t ruled out prion disease, such a statement is reckless.

“Fear is usually bad advice because it will paralyze us,” Marrero said. “We are working very hard to figure this out.”

It should be assumed that anyone with neurological symptoms has prion disease until proven otherwise. Unfortunately, governments around the world have a problem telling the truth about prion disease and prion contamination. Canada is no exception. The official government response will be scripted. It will frame this cluster as an isolated event and it will kill any science or evidence that suggests the contrary. Prion disease is never an isolated event.

Public Health officials won’t reveal specifically where in New Brunswick more than 40 cases of a mystery neurological disease have been identified, citing the “sensitive” and “confidential” nature of the information. Even more importantly, are these victims under quarantine to prevent further prion contamination and to protect family and caregivers?

Green Party Leader David Coon blasted Public Health’s handling of the cases on several levels, saying it’s “unacceptable that information involving the health of so many people is being concealed.”

“We are very, very worried about it,” said Yvon Godin, the mayor of Bertrand, a village further north on the peninsula, who also chairs the Forum of Acadian Peninsula Mayors. “Residents are asking ‘Is it moose meat? Is it deer? Is it contagious?’ We need to know, as fast as possible, what is causing this disease.”

Dr. Neil Cashman, a neurologist at the University of British Columbia and a specialist in prion disease, says that Canadian doctors “have a problem on our hands.”

Prion Science

Unfortunately, Alzheimer’s disease is a prion disease. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is a prion disease. Both diseases are on the prion spectrum and doctors can’t explain where on the spectrum an Alzheimer’s diagnosis becomes a CJD diagnosis. It’s simpler and much more accurate to stop playing these games and call it prion disease. It’s even more accurate to call prion disease by the clinical term, which is transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. The operative word is transmissible. Prions mutate as they migrate. Prions kill with unparallelled efficiency.

This distinction is important, because prions are found in the bodily fluid and cell tissue of its victims—millions of victims. Blood, mucus, milk, saliva, urine, feces and all tissue are infected and contagious. Once prions are released from the body, they proceed to migrate, mutate and multiply. Prions are impossible to stop because they aren’t a virus or bacteria. They are killer proteins that convert normal proteins into killers. These proteins infect the entire body, but they do most of their damage in the brain.

The cause of the cluster could be environmental, said University of Alberta scientist Debbie McKenzie. Since the cases reported so far are concentrated in two specific areas, the theory makes sense to epidemiologists. On one hand, we need to understand where the neurotoxin came from. However, if we are dealing with prion disease, we must not allow these victims to create additional prion pathways. Unfortunately, prion victims create a new threat to public health.

Because of these dynamics, there isn’t such a thing as an isolated event regarding prion disease. Avoiding prion contamination caused by prion victims is impossible. Homes, restaurants, dental offices, nursing homes and any other destination visited by people with Alzheimer’s disease or CJD is a threat to your health. That’s just the tip of the iceberg when you consider that we are dumping millions of tons of sewage sludge (biosolids) from our cities on our farmland, ranches, golf courses, parks, playgrounds and schoolyards. The cocktail of toxic waste and radioactive waste combined with infectious waste proceeds to infect food, water and air. The recent victims in Canada could have been hit by any of the deadly components found in sewage sludge dumped on land–biosolids.

When Canada began dumping massive quantities of sewage sludge on land, it based this unsavory practice on a risk assessment prepared by the U.S. EPA (EPA 503 Rule, also known as the sludge rule). The sludge rule is based on the premise that no evidence of harm can be taken as evidence of safety. It’s the scientific equivalent of don’t ask and don’t tell. The U.S. government developed EPA Rule 503 before the world knew about prions. Once Stanley Prusiner brought them to light with his Nobel-Prize winning work in 1997, nothing changed at the EPA or in the other nations that rely on EPA Rule 503 to dump millions of tons of toxic, infectious waste on their homelands and their citizens.

In 2018, after standing behind this fraudulent risk assessment for more than 30 years, the U.S. EPA admitted that the risk assessment regarding the dumping of sewage sludge on land is incomplete. It no longer endorses the foolish practice that has created a public health disaster in many nations. Unfortunately, these dumping practices have not been stopped. Millions of tons of sewage sludge, loaded with infectious waste, carcinogens, endocrine disruptors and plenty of prions, are still being dumped in just the U.S. and Canada every year.

My guess is that the impacted region of New Brunswick has been a dumping ground for tons of sewage sludge, which is a wicked combination of toxic waste, infectious waste and low-level radioactive waste. The Greater Moncton Sewerage Commission dumps more than 10,000 tons of biosolids across the region annually. Where are cities such as Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City and others dumping their sewage sludge? This toxic, infectious waste is not fertilizer. It’s bioterrorism. As more people contract neurodegenerative disease, the deadlier this waste stream becomes.

Prion contamination is almost impossible to completely sterilize or neutralize. Prevention, containment and aversion are clearly the best strategies. People who have prion disease, even those who have not been diagnosed, are prion incubators and distributors. Everything that they touch becomes hopelessly contaminated. Yes, sewage is the largest prion pathway in the world, but when you think about the things that a prion victim contaminates daily, it’s overwhelming. So, yes, the cluster in New Brunswick could have been sparked by one of several potential prion pathways, if not all of them. The key now is to contain these victims and keep them from creating new vectors and victims. It’s critical to shut down all prion pathways.

The Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged that pathogen risks from land application of sewage sludge have not been adequately evaluated. As the incidence of neurodegenerative disease increases, infectious waste becomes more prevalent and more deadly. Please join us in our quest for truth and reform. Answers begin with the truth.

Gary Chandler is the CEO of Crossbow Communications — an award-winning public affairs and government affairs firm. We specialize in public health and environmental issues. We serve the world.

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Neurodegenerative disease is the fastest-growing cause of death in the world. Because of the Alzheimer’s disease epidemic alone, it will soon be the leading cause of death. 

The epidemiology has indicated that Alzheimer’s is a transmissible disease. A new study confirms that millions of those with the disease are infectious. Talk about inconvenient truth. Unfortunately, misinformation and mismanagement are fueling a public health disaster.

Alzheimer’s disease is defined by toxic protein aggregations in the brain known as amyloid plaques and tau tangles. Attempts to treat the disease by clearing out these proteins have been unsuccessful. The new evidence that active Aß and tau prions could be driving the disease could lead researchers to new therapies.

“I believe this shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that amyloid beta and tau are both prions, and that Alzheimer’s disease is a double-prion disorder in which these two rogue proteins together destroy the brain,” said Stanley Prusiner, MD, the study’s senior author and director of the UCSF Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, part of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences. “The fact that prion levels also appear linked to patient longevity should change how we think about the way forward for developing treatments for the disease. We need a sea change in Alzheimer’s disease research, and that is what this paper does. This paper might catalyze a major change in AD research.”

Prions are rogue versions of a protein that can spread like an infection by converting normal proteins into pathological ones. Prions cause fatal neurodegenerative disease in humans and other mammals by converting the cellular version of prion protein into a toxic form that erodes the brain and body. Prion disease often is described as a wasting disease that causes a loss of body mass and brain mass.

Research shows that amyloid plaques and tau tangles from diseased brains can infect healthy brain tissue.

Prions invade the entire body, but they do their damage in the brain. Prions are in the bodily fluids and cell tissue of victims, including blood, saliva, mucus, urine and feces. Common household items become biohazards, including utensils and dishes. A cough or sneeze sends prions into the air. Prions are a real-world version of Pandora’s Box. Prions are unstoppable. Prion disease is always fatal. This is an extremely important issue that demands the truth from government and industry–especially the medical world.

Prions migrate, mutate, multiply and kill with unparalleled efficiency. Containing prions and preventing their spread is the key to avoiding a public health disaster. Unfortunately, the floodgates have been wide open for years.

Prion disease also is known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE). 

The operative word is “transmissible.” Prusiner claims that all forms of TSE are caused by infectious prions. TSE is a spectrum disease that varies in severity and symptoms. The diagnosis depends on which region of the brain is impacted first and by what prion mutation. Few cases are identical in terms of symptoms and diagnoses.

In humans, the prion spectrum includes Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD)–the most aggressive version. The difference between these diseases is very slight and often indistinguishable to neurologists. In reality, millions of people have CJD, which is the most aggressive form of prion disease among humans. CJD has not been declared a reportable disease across most nations. It’s time to manage the entire prion spectrum much more responsibly.

Prions are such a formidable threat that the U.S. government enacted the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002, which included a provision to halt research on prions in all but two laboratories.

The U.S. government initially classified prions as select agents that pose an extreme risk to food, water and health systems. Thanks to some midnight maneuvers, prions are no longer regulated at all in the U.S. and most other nations. It is bioterrorism of the highest order.

The original prion protein was identified by Prusiner in the 1980s as the cause of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease, which spread through negligent production practices. This was the first time a disease had been shown to infect people not by an infestation of an organism such as a bacterium or a virus, but through an infectious protein, and Prusiner received a Nobel Prize for that discovery in 1997. President Obama awarded Prusiner the National Medal of Science in 2010 to recognize the importance of his research. Important reforms to policies to protect public health, however, have been elusive.

Prusiner and colleagues have long suspected that one prion mutation was not the only protein capable of acting as a self-propagating pathogen, and that distinct types of prion could be responsible for other neurodegenerative diseases caused by the progressive toxic buildup of deadly proteins. For example, Alzheimer’s disease is at least partially defined by Aß plaques and tau tangles that spread destruction through the brain.

However, there are now likely thousands, if not millions, of prion mutations unleashed in the environment. These prions are contributing to both Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease through many pathways. These prions also are infecting wildlife and livestock, not to mention our water supplies. Mammals are recycling prion disease back and forth through air, food and water supplies.

Alzheimer’s disease alone is taking the lives of 50-100 million people around the world now. Millions will die of the disease this year, while many millions more will be diagnosed, misdiagnosed and undiagnosed. The epidemic is more severe in some countries than others. Supposedly, no one knows the scope of the problem. The evidence being swept under the rug and the global misinformation campaign suggest otherwise.

Despite millions of deaths, experts suggest that the prevalence of the disease will quadruple by 2050, if not sooner. Unfortunately, there is a growing stack of evidence that Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and other brain diseases are transmissible. Deadly, self-replicating proteins appear to be one of the common threads. Similar proteins are associated with the childhood cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Ironically, abnormal proteins also are associated with autism, which has been spiking on a similar trajectory to the global prion epidemic.

Read The Full Story About Alzheimer’s and Prion Disease.

Gary Chandler is connecting the dots to the global surge in neurodegenerative disease, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, chronic wasting disease and other forms of prion disease. The scientific name for prion disease is transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. The operative word is “transmissible.”

The post Alzheimer’s Disease Part Of Prion Spectrum appeared first on Gary Chandler.

Neurodegenerative disease is the fastest-growing cause of death in the world. It will soon be the leading cause of death because of misinformation and disinformation.

Deadly proteins are at the heart of the epidemic, which is technically known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE). The operative word is “transmissible.” Infectious proteins known as prions (PREE-on) are driving the epidemic. Prions are unstoppable, especially those shed from humans. Prions migrate, mutate and multiply and they become more aggressive and more deadly long the way. TSE is striking down people of all ages. Rogue proteins also appear to play a role in the surging autism epidemic.

Dr. Stanley Prusiner, an American neuroscientist from the University of California at San Francisco, earned a Nobel Prize in 1997 for discovering and characterizing prions and prion disease. President Obama awarded Prusiner the National Medal of Science in 2010 to recognize the importance of his research. Important reforms to policies to protect public health, however, have been elusive.

Prusiner claims that all forms of TSE are caused by infectious prions.

“Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disease in humans and will pose a considerable challenge to healthcare systems in the coming years,” Prusiner said. Aggregation of the β-amyloid (Aβ) peptide within the brain is thought to be an initiating event in AD pathogenesis. Many recent studies in transgenic mice have provided evidence that Aβ aggregates become self-propagating (infectious) during disease, leading to a cascade of protein aggregation in the brain, which may underlie the progressive nature of AD.

The ability to self-propagate and the existence of distinct strains reveals that Aβ aggregates exhibit many properties indistinguishable from those of prions composed of PrP^Sc proteins. The evidence that Aβ can become a prion during disease, Aβ prions may be important for understanding the pathobiology of AD.”

Like prion diseases, misfolded alpha-synuclein and tau protein associated with Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, respectively, have been reported in skin tissues of patients with these conditions. Skin could serve as a screen for early diagnosis, but also for monitoring the accumulation of the misfolded proteins in the brain of these neurodegenerative diseases. It also could be another pathway of transmission.

“I learned that scrapie, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and kuru had all been shown to be transmissible by injecting extracts of diseased brains into the brains of healthy animals,” Prusiner said. “The infections were thought to be caused by a slow-acting virus, yet no one had managed to isolate the culprit. Whether changes in protein shape are responsible for common neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, remains unknown, but it is a possibility that should not be ignored.”

“There has been a resurgence of this sort of thinking, because there is now real evidence of the potential transmissibility of Alzheimer’s disease,” says Thomas Wiesniewski M.D. a prion and Alzheimer’s disease researcher at New York University School of Medicine. “In fact, this ability to transmit an abnormal conformation is probably a universal property of amyloid-forming proteins (prions).”

Meanwhile, government and industry are playing dumb in light of growing evidence about reckless policies and practices that are contributing to the epidemic. As such, misinformation and mismanagement are fanning the flames of a global public health disaster that’s spreading like wildfire. The human epidemic is so bad, it’s even killing wildlife. Sick animals are serving as the proverbial canary in a coal mine, while millions of people are being exposed and killed each year. Each victim spreads the disease.

Meanwhile, the medical world is protecting some people from infectious prion disease, but they aren’t protecting everyone from these neurotoxins. For example, neurologists rarely have physical contact with their patients. They are making diagnoses from across the room based on the presenting symptoms. If they observe a movement disorder, the diagnosis is Parkinson’s disease. If they see a memory disorder, it’s Alzheimer’s disease. If the person is totally incapacitated, the diagnosis is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It’s about as scientific as pinning the tail on the donkey with a blindfold on.

Regardless of the diagnosis, these patients are all being sent home to die. Family and caregivers are not warned about the risks of caring for someone with neurodegenerative disease. It’s criminal negligence at best. Even patient advocacy organizations, including the CJD Foundation, aren’t sounding the alarm. They are merely trying to calm fears about the disease as opposed to prevent it. Read what the science says and then compare it to the deliberate lies issued by gatekeepers.

Read the full story about CJD and transmissibility.

Gary Chandler is connecting the dots to the global surge in neurodegenerative disease, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, chronic wasting disease and other forms of prion disease. The medical term for prion disease is transmissible spongiform encephalopathy.

The post Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Is Infectious appeared first on Gary Chandler.

Outdoor apparel icon Patagonia is becoming more vocal and more politically active to help promote environmental conservation. Hopefully, more companies will follow its example.

“We’re in business to save our home planet,” said CEO Rose Marcario. “That’s Patagonia’s new mission statement. We don’t just seek now to do less harm, we need to do more good.”

Patagonia has several ways in which it works to have a positive impact on the environment, but within the past few years, it has embraced politics. Most recently, it endorsed senators that align with its values and openly criticized the presidential administration on tax cuts and public land policies. Many retailers shy away from public political stands.

“For us, it hasn’t been a big risk,” she said. “We know our customers. We’ve never been a mass advertiser; we don’t do commercials. Customers come to us with some connection to the outdoors.”

In December 2017, President Trump signed a proclamation to dramatically reduce the boundaries and management of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Patagonia.com responded on its homepage displaying an all-black screen with white lettering declaring, “The President Stole Your Land.” Shoppers had to X out of the page to access the site, which still had that message as one of its hero images. Patagonia is one of the companies that is currently challenging the proclamation in court, Marcario said. 

Then, last October, Patagonia endorsed candidates running for the U.S. Senate in Nevada and Montana.

Patagonia has a distribution center in Nevada and a store in Montana and endorsed Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada) and Jon Tester (D-Montana), who both support protecting public lands and water. Patagonia featured its endorsements on its website, social media accounts and in customer emails. 

“The company is endorsing candidates for the first time this year because of the urgent and unprecedented threats to our public lands and waters,” Patagonia wrote in a statement on the endorsement. “Nevada and Montana are two states where Patagonia has significant company history and a long record of conservation accomplishments, and where the stakes are too high to stay silent.”

The races were close, but those candidates won. “We felt like we had influence there, and I feel good about that,” Marcario said at NRF. It also closed its stores to give its employees time off to vote.

In November, Patagonia announced that because of changes to the tax law, the retailer owed $10 million less in taxes. Patagonia said that the tax cut was “irresponsible” and donated its $10 million refund in the form of 20,000 grants to philanthropic environmental organizations that are committed to protecting air, land and water and looking for solutions to climate change. This was on top of the 1% of total sales it already donates.

Protecting the environment has always been central to Patagonia’s mission. While it may feel like Patagonia has taken a more political stand, Marcario said Patagonia’s actions are proportional and appropriate relative to the amount of changes that need responding to, Marcario said. Plus, changes to the environment personally affect Patagonia employees, as 75 percent of its employees had to be evacuated last year due to the wildfires.

“Our planet is facing its greatest crisis because of human-caused climate disruption,” Marcario said. “All the extra heat that we’ve trapped in the earth’s atmosphere is not only melting the poles and raising sea levels, it’s intensifying drought and accelerating the extinction of species. The most recent Climate Assessment report puts it in stark terms: the U.S. economy could lose hundreds of billions of dollars, and the climate crisis is already affecting all of us. Mega-fires. Toxic algae blooms. Deadly heat waves and deadly hurricanes. Far too many have suffered the consequences of global warming in recent months, and the political response has so far been woefully inadequate—and the denial is just evil.”

For almost 40 years, Patagonia has supported grassroots activists working to find solutions to the environmental crisis. But in this time of unprecedented threats, it’s often hard to know the best way to get involved. That’s why we’re connecting individuals with our grantees, in order to take action on the most pressing issues facing the world today.

Since 1985, Patagonia has pledged 1 percent of sales to the preservation and restoration of the natural environment. We’ve awarded over $89 million in cash and in-kind donations to domestic and international grassroots environmental groups making a difference in their local communities. In 2002, founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, and Craig Mathews, owner of Blue Ribbon Flies, created a non-profit corporation to encourage other businesses to do the same.

1% for the Planet is an alliance of businesses that understand the necessity of protecting the natural environment. They understand that profit and loss are directly linked to its health, and are concerned with the social and environmental impacts of industry.

If you’re a business owner (or have any influence over your boss), please consider becoming a member of this socially and environmentally progressive group. By contributing one percent of total annual sales to grassroots environmental groups, members of 1% for the Planet affect real change. And members receive other benefits: The satisfaction of paving the way for more corporate responsibility in the business community and the recognition, support and patronage of conscientious consumers who value serious commitment to the environment.

Patagonia also helped gather the top leaders in the apparel industry, non-governmental organizations, academia and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for an inaugural meeting in 2010 to determine the feasibility of working together to create an index of social and environmental performance. We are happy to report that today there are 49 members of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, which represent nearly a third of all clothing and footwear sold on the planet. The entire apparel supply chain is coming together to create one measuring stick of where we are, and one road map to show us where we need to go.

Gary Chandler is the CEO of Crossbow Communications. He is the author of several books about health and environmental issues from around the world. He also is the author of the Language and Travel Guide To Indonesia.

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Fracking isn’t new to the Rocky Mountains. The oil industry drilled its first fracking well in Colorado near Boulder in 1901. The practice gained notoriety in the state with the infamous oil shale project near Parachute several decades ago, but it collapsed and remained dormant for years. Since then, fracking has become a modern day gold rush for many people in Colorado. It’s been a nightmare for others.

Unfortunately, health and safety concerns continue to take a back seat in public policy and private practice. The debate is gaining momentum again as oil prices and drilling activity rebound at a rapid pace.

Oil and gas companies continue concentrating the majority of their drilling in Weld County near Greeley and Garfield County near Rifle.

Weld County taps into the Niobrara Shale Foundation, which also covers portions of Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming. The second largest area in Colorado for fracking is in Garfield County, which gets its resources from the Piceance Basin. The Piceance Basin is thought to have one of the richest and thickest oil shale deposits in the world. Because Colorado is isolated from the major refining centers, producers must absorb a $12-$14 per barrel discount to cover transportation costs.

Dinosaurs vs. Technology

• Colorado accounts for almost 4 percent of U.S. total crude oil production and also holds about 4 percent of the nation’s proved crude oil reserves;
• Colorado has the sixth largest natural gas reserves, and 11 of the nation’s 100 biggest natural gas fields are located in the state;
• Electricity from renewable sources has more than doubled since 2010 to around 20 percent of Colorado’s net electricity generation in 2016, led by increased wind power from the state’s roughly 1,900 turbines;
• Colorado leads the nation in gross withdrawals of coal-bed methane from producing wells; and
• In 2016, Colorado was ranked 10th for installed solar power capacity and 11th in the nation for actual solar electricity generation.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Center (EIA), Colorado’s production of crude oil surged in 2010. Since then, production has more than tripled in the last five years–peaking in August 2015 at 357 thousand barrels per day (kbd). Subsequently, there was a decrease in production when oil prices crashed from $100 per barrel to $26 per barrel, but the market is rising fast. EIA’s latest Colorado production data from April 2017 puts production at 352 kbd (up from 317 kbd in 2016).

A recent economic report prepared by the Business Research Division of the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder for the Colorado Oil and Gas Association found that oil and gas development added $31.7 billion to Colorado’s economy in 2014.

Colorado already is dotted with hydraulic fracking wells and more are on the way. This growth is reviving the turmoil that accompanied the last boom, pitting neighbors against neighbors and communities against corporations. It’s also reviving talk about collusion, corruption and public policy that ignores public opinion, public health and public safety.

Concerned residents who live near these areas are worried about groundwater contamination, chemical exposure, air pollution impacts, and fracking-induced earthquakes. They also have concerns about industrial accidents.

Fracking is a major issue at the ballot box in Colorado. Both opponents and supporters try to influence the outcomes.

• In 2012, the city of Longmont passed an initiative that put an indefinite ban on fracking;
• In 2013, the city of Lafayette approved a similar measure;
• In 2013, Broomfield, Boulder and Fort Collins passed initiatives that imposed five-year fracking suspensions;
• In 2014, the city of Loveland defeated an initiative to suspend fracking for two years;
• In 2016, the Colorado Supreme Court denied local governments the right to make home rules on fracking. So much for decentralized government and citizen-based democracy.

In few places is the tension more evident than along Colorado’s Front Range, where a fracking boom is colliding with a population explosion. Drilling applications in the state have risen 70 percent in just a year, while the area north of Denver is expected to double in population by 2050.

Gary Chandler is the CEO of Crossbow Communications. He is the author of several books about health and environmental issues from around the world. He also is the author of the Language and Travel Guide To Indonesia.

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Neurodegenerative disease and autism have been surging around the world for the past 30 years. A man-made disaster is creating a public health disaster that’s still unfolding.

Neurotoxins are driving the epidemic more than age–in some countries more than others. Teenagers are now dying of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease–the most severe form of brain wasting disease.

Alzheimer’s disease alone is taking the lives of 50-100 million people around the world now. As millions die, even more will be diagnosed. Millions more are suffering in silence with a misdiagnosis or no diagnosis. Misinformation and mismanagement are fanning the flames.

Despite millions of deaths, experts suggest that the prevalence of the disease will quadruple by 2050, if not sooner. Unfortunately, there is a growing stack of evidence that Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and other brain diseases are transmissible. There is zero evidence to the contrary. Victims also are being misdiagnosed and undiagnosed at an alarming rate.

The Prion Pandemic

A variety of factors can trigger neurodegenerative disease, including genetics, head trauma and neurotoxins. Deadly, self-replicating proteins appear to be one of those neurotoxins.

Prions (PREE-ons) are a deadly and unstoppable form of protein that migrates, mutates, multiplies and kills with unparalleled efficiency. Dr. Stanley Prusiner coined the term as a contraction for proteinaceous infectious particle. Prions cause fatal neurodegenerative disease in humans and animals by converting the cellular version of prion protein into a toxic form that erodes the brain and body.

Prions migrate, mutate and multiply. They get stronger as they move up the food chain. At the top of the food chain, humans are highly vulnerable to prion disease. The prions shed from humans are the deadliest and most aggressive. Mismanaging human prions is a big mistake.

Dr. Prusiner, an American neuroscientist from the University of California at San Francisco, earned a Nobel Prize in 1997 for discovering and characterizing prions and prion disease. President Obama awarded Prusiner the National Medal of Science in 2010 to recognize the importance of his research. Unfortunately, Prusiner’s science is being ignored and we all are facing a public health disaster because of the negligence and reckless disregard for public health.

“Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disease in. Aggregation of the β-amyloid (Aβ) peptide within the brain is thought to spark the AD pathogenesis. Many recent studies in transgenic mice have proven that Aβ aggregates become self-propagating (infectious) during disease, leading to a cascade of protein aggregation in the brain, which may underlie the progressive nature of AD. The ability to self-propagate and the existence of distinct “strains” reveals that Aβ aggregates exhibit many properties indistinguishable from deadly prions. We have evidence that Aβ can become a prion during disease,” said Prusiner. “I learned that scrapie, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and kuru had all been shown to be transmissible by injecting extracts of diseased brains into the brains of healthy animals. Whether prions are responsible for common neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease is a possibility that should not be ignored.”

Prions are a formidable threat. When the U.S. government enacted the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002, it included a provision to halt research on infectious prions in all but two laboratories. It classified prions as select agents that pose an extreme risk to food, water and health systems. Unfortunately, the Center For Disease Control quietly took prions off the list about two years ago because the classification criminalized multi-billion dollar industries and many industry practices.

Prion Disease Killing Mammals

Prion disease also is known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE). The operative word is “transmissible.” Prusiner claims that all forms of TSE are caused by infectious prions. Prion disease often is described as a wasting disease that causes a loss of body mass and brain mass.

TSE is a spectrum disease that varies in severity and symptoms. It depends on which region of the brain is impacted first and by what prion mutation. Few cases are identical in terms of symptoms and diagnoses. When the presenting symptom is memory loss, the diagnoses flow along the following chart.

In humans, the prion spectrum includes Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and an extremely aggressive version known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The difference between these diseases is very slight and often indistinguishable to neurologists. For example, millions of people have been told that they have Alzheimer’s disease, when, in reality, it’s CJD–where it’s clearly infectious.

“It is well known that CJD is transmissible via surgical or medical procedures involving prion-infected brain tissue. Our finding of infectious prions in skin is important since it not only raises concerns about the potential for disease transmission via common surgeries not involving the brain, but also suggests that skin biopsies and autopsies may enhance pre-mortem and post-mortem CJD diagnosis,” said Wenquan Zou, Associate Professor of Pathology and Neurology and Associate Director of the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine. “The level of prion infectivity detected in CJD skin was surprisingly significant, but still much lower than that in CJD brains. Further investigation is necessary to determine whether extra precautions should be taken during non-neurosurgeries of CJD patients, especially when surgical instruments will be reused.”

Prion infectivity is highly concentrated in brain tissue, but it’s also in all bodily fluids and tissue. CJD transmission has occurred after patients were exposed to surgical tools previously contaminated by CJD victims. It’s also happening due to many other pathways.

According to neuroscientists Dr. Laura Manuelidis, at least 25 percent of Alzheimer’s disease diagnoses are actually CJD.

CJD, without dispute, is extremely infectious to caregivers and loved ones, but it has not been declared a reportable disease across the U.S. and many other nations.

Millions of cases of deadly CJD are being misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease. Millions of patients and caregivers are being misinformed, misguided and exposed to an aggressive prion disease.

In wildlife, prion disease is known as chronic wasting disease. In cattle, insiders call it mad cow disease. It’s all prion disease. There is no species barrier among mammals. All victims are infectious.

Gary Chandler is connecting the dots to the global surge in neurodegenerative disease, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, chronic wasting disease and other forms of prion disease. The scientific name for prion disease is transmissible spongiform encephalopathy.

The post Prion Contamination A Public Health Disaster appeared first on Gary Chandler.

Italian and Algerian researchers released new evidence of prion disease in three dromedary camels found in an Algerian slaughterhouse, according to a new study in Emerging Infectious Diseases.

The discovery, now being called camel prion disease (CPD), has raised more questions than answers about this deadly illness characterized by misfolded brain proteins.

“These camels are quite intriguing,” prion expert Valerie Sim, MD, associate professor at the University of Alberta, told CIDRAP News. “If we know anything about prions it’s that they can cross species; it’s not easy to do, but they can. So it’s very concerning if you have any infected animals in the food supply chain.”

In prion disease, the normal shape of a protein is contorted pr folded, which triggers a domino-like effect in neighboring proteins, leading to fatal and severe neurodegenerative disease. Prion diseases can affect both humans and animals, and though interspecies transmission is rare, it can happen, as it did most famously during the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow epidemic, which started in the late 1980s in the United Kingdom.

In both humans and animals, the diseases can happen spontaneously, or they can be inherited from a genetic mutation or, rarely, transmitted when a person eats the meat of an infected animal. The last category, infectious prion disease, is the most concerning for researchers working on the human-animal interface (human sewage is the largest prion pathway in the world–which exposes land and sea mammals to prion disease).

Prions threaten all mammals

“Is there a clear exposure risk in camels? That’s what’s needed to be understood,” said Sim. She said that the presence of prions in the camels’ lymph tissues suggests the disease was acquired and not spontaneous, likely from something the animal was digesting.

In the Emerging Infectious Diseases study, researchers describe CPD in three symptomatic camels from a Saharan population in southeastern Algeria, where the animals were brought for slaughter to the Ouargla abattoir in 2015 and 2016. Dromedary camels are commonly slaughtered and consumed in many parts of North Africa and the Middle East.

Breeders bringing the camels to slaughter noted several neurologic symptoms from 2010 to 2015 in about 3 percent of their animals, including “weight loss; behavioral abnormalities; and neurologic signs, such as tremors, aggressiveness, hyperreactivity, typical down and upward movements of the head, hesitant and uncertain gait, ataxia of the hind limbs, occasional falls, and difficulty getting up.”

Anecdotal evidence collected from employees at the slaughterhouse suggests that these symptoms have been present since the 1980s.

The researchers, from Algeria and Rome, took brain samples as well as samples from the cervical, prescapular, and lumbar aortic lymph nodes from three symptomatic and one healthy camel. They confirmed the diagnosis by the presence of disease-specific prion protein in brain tissues from the symptomatic animals. The authors said the presence of prions in the lymph nodes suggests infection, but the disease remains a mystery.

Disease origin unknown?

“The origin of CPD is unknown. It might be a disease unique to dromedaries or a malady deriving from transmission of a prion disease from another species,” the authors concluded. They noted, however, that BSE from imported meat in the late 1980s cannot be ruled out. The likely source is human sewage, which can infect food, water and air (posing a massive public health threat around the globe).

Michael Osterholm, PhD, MPH, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, publisher of CIDRAP News, said the study was noteworthy especially as it comes on the heels of new information from Canadian researchers that showed that chronic wasting disease—another prion disease—in deer and their relatives can be transmitted to non-human primates fed meat from infected animals.

“The whole issue of prions and meat consumption is a new and much more serious topic we need to look at,” Osterholm said. “Even though there’s no evidence that there is transmission [from camels], the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Unfortunately, meat consumption is only one of many pathways for prions to infect humans and other mammals. Neurological disease is now the fastest-growing cause of death around the world. As the human population gets sicker with neurodegenerative disease, prion pathways multiply and intensify. Prions discharged from humans are the most deadly and aggressive form of prions, which migrate, multiply and mutate as they move up the food chain.

Gary Chandler is connecting the dots to the global surge in neurodegenerative disease, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, chronic wasting disease and other forms of prion disease. The scientific name for prion disease is transmissible spongiform encephalopathy.

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