Reforms Can Save Lives

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.