Email: mwgross@juno.com |
Intro
Glenn Greenwald throughly dismantles Joe Klein's reckless misstatements of the truth concerning the FISA bill published in Time this week.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Sunday, January 16, 2005; Washington Post Page A01
{President Bush said the public's decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath.
"We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. "The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me."]
November 7, 2006 is another acountability moment. Make it count.
For details see:
http://www.pasadosafehaven.org/NEWS/NEWS.htm
HOW WE'RE HELPING CLEAR OUT THE FULL STATE SHELTERS:
First: We are taking foster applications now. We are being very careful screening applicants. We believe this disaster is a prime opportunity for puppy mills and animal labs to acquire many, free animals.
Second: We are taking offers of people who can drive air-conditioned vehicles, or cattle/horse hauling trailers to LA. Once the state vet O.K.'s release of animals, the exact number of animals that we have foster homes for will be released to the transport teams. They will return to their states.
Third: Once back in their states, they will rendezvous with the approved foster families.
Who can be a part of the transport convoy? E-mail here.
Who can foster? E-mail
findernkeepers@comcast.net
9/11 6:43am PST Our animals were kept at our staging area overnight in Raceland since the Gonzales shelter turned all animals away last night. CBS NEWS may cover the story tonight.
Humane LA, the state's humane society, reports that a new shelter is quickly being developed to take animals. We hope this is true.
Full story
http://www.pasadosafehaven.org/NEWS/NEWS.htm
https://www.pasadosafehaven.org/NEWS/NEWS.htm
http://www.pasadosafehaven.org/NEWS/NEWS.htm
9/10 6:47pm PST ASCENSION PARISH SHERIFF STOPS RESCUERS FROM SHELTER - ARMED GUARDS OUTSIDE WON'T LET US IN! Because the Louisiana State Veterinarian refuses to lift the 15 day quarantine hold period, the Gonzales state-designated shelter, is now considered full by the local sheriff. The Parish Sheriff is holding Pasado Rescuers back with loaded guns, despite the fact we have full vans, loaded with animals - the result of a 19-hour-day of rescue. We need to raise hell - call local media, whoever you can, the state vet needs to cut the bureaucracy and allow foster families, from around the country, to take these animals!
See below for a rescue story.
http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/5417025.html
One of 55 most-wanted Iraqis set free
Associated Press
May 22, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Iraqi authorities have released a top official in Saddam Hussein's former regime -- one of the 55 most-wanted Iraqis on the U.S. military's "deck of cards'' -- because he is terminally ill, the justice minister and the suspect's lawyer said today.
Ghazi Hammud al-Obeidi, former regional chairman in the southern Iraqi city of Kut for the former ruling Baath Party, was the first to be released among detained former regime members who were on the most-wanted list.
"Ghazi al-Obeidi is suffering from cancer and according to my information he has been released for health reasons,'' Justice Minister Abdel Hussein Shandal told The Associated Press. "Only for health reasons.''
A bipartisan coalition of Senators believe it is close to a deal that would avert the looming showdown between Republicans and Democrats over judicial filibusters.
The potential deal, spearheaded by Sens. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), would involve at least a half-dozen Senators from each party signing a letter or memorandum of understanding that signals how they would proceed to vote on all matters related to judicial nominations.
The six Senate Republicans would commit to opposing the so-called nuclear option to end judicial filibusters, which would leave GOP leaders short of the 50 votes they need to execute the parliamentary move to abolish the procedure.
In exchange, the six Senate Democrats would pledge to allow votes on four of the seven circuit court nominees who were already filibustered in the 108th Congress and have been renominated.
Seismic Shift in statehouse http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~34018~2509847,00.html
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E34018%257E2509509,00.html
The Senate went from 18-17 republican to 17-18 or 16-19.
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E34018%257E2509844,00.html
The House made a spectacular change from 37-28 to a dem majority for the first time since 1976.
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E34018%257E2509843,00.html
One small point of hope while I cry for our country.
We must not give up in Ohio.
Newsflash : Hunter Thompson endorses Richard Nixon. Here is the link:
Last two paragraphs:
We were angry and righteous in those days, and there were millions of us. We kicked two chief executives out of the White House because they were stupid warmongers. We conquered Lyndon Johnson and we stomped on Richard Nixon -- which wise people said was impossible, but so what? It was fun. We were warriors then, and our tribe was strong like a river.
That river is still running. All we have to do is get out and vote, while it's still legal, and we will wash these crooked warmongers out of the White House.
We are still warriors. This is the time. This is the place. We will win. Defeat is not an option. The fate of our great nation is in our hands.
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000085&sid=avZ7zIEACp1A&refer=europe
The Netherlands will pull its troops from Iraq in March after Dutch Defense Minister Henk Kamp turned down a request from the Iraqi government to extend their mandate there, Algemeen Dagblad said, citing Kamp.
Iraqi interim President Ayad Allawi asked Kamp to keep Dutch troops in the Southern province of Al Muthanna, where about 1,200 soldiers have been on a peace-keeping mission, after the end of the current mandate in mid-March, the paper said. Coalition troops also want Dutch soldiers to stay, it said.
The paper quoted Kamp as saying that the Dutch had already made a ``large effort'' in keeping its troops in Iraq for 20 months in March and wouldn't stay longer. It also cited Kamp as saying the security situation in Iraq had worsened since his previous visit to Baghdad last year and that he expected the U.S. to remain for ``years'' in Iraq.
http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/index.php?page=national&story_id=102004b1_iraq_guard
At least 300 Iraqi soldiers abandoned their 750-man unit after they were deployed to Samarra earlier this month as part of a U.S.-Iraqi operation to retake the militant-controlled city.
**
He said the deserters were spooked by an attack on Sept. 19, about a week after they had been deployed from Baghdad. A car bombing at a checkpoint killed one of the battalion's officers and injured eight soldiers, Aylwin-Foster said. About 100 deserted afterward.
By Sept. 24, even before the offensive kicked off in Samarra, 300 had left. Senior Iraqi officers were sent there in an effort to rally the battalion's remaining soldiers. Iraq's new security forces have been regularly targeted by insurgents in an effort to affect troop strength and morale. Yesterday, a mortar attack killed at least four Iraqi national guardsmen and injured 80 at a base north of Baghdad.
Iraqi national security adviser Kassim Daoud said yesterday he was not aware of the incident involving the 7th Battalion.
Riverbend writes of the the valium and illicit drug problem in Iraq.
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
During my more thoughtful moments, I do think about the growing drug problem. I know that it is going to get bigger and there's nothing immediate that we can do to stop it. There seem to be such bigger problems out there, that drugs seem to be the least of our worries. Schools have started again and parents worry that their kids will be abducted or blown to pieces. I think our growing drug problem hasn't gotten that much attention with the media because, while it's going to wreak havoc in the long run, drugs don't suddenly blow off an arm or a leg, and they don't explode inside of your car and they don't come falling out of a plane to burn homes and families... in other words, people don't perceive them as a very immediate threat.
It's like discovering you have cancer while you're fighting off a hungry alligator- you'll worry about the disease later.
http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/10172004/south_of/43429.htm
BELCHERTOWN, Mass. - Jeffrey Lucey was just an ordinary kid from small-town America. He grew up loving his parents, his high school sweetheart and backyard Wiffle ball games in this quiet, picturesque community bordering the Quabbin Reservoir.
Even his decision to enlist in the Marine Corps Reserve in 1999 was run-of-the-mill, uncluttered by the anxious sense of patriotism that inspired many others to join the military following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"He just wanted to prove he could cut it," his mother, Joyce Lucey, said.
But when Jeff returned to his parents' home in July 2003 after serving six months in Iraq as a truck driver, there was nothing ordinary left about him.
He started drinking too much. He became withdrawn, depressed and distant.
In June, after what his parents describe as months of mental and emotional torment, the lance corporal went down to the basement and hanged himself.
He was 23.
Just a few feet from where his father found him with a garden hose wrapped around his neck, Jeff had arranged a semicircle of family photos on the floor. The note he left said he could no longer deal with his emotional pain.
Upstairs, a pair of dog tags rested on his bed. His Marine-issue boots stood next to them.
Now, nearly four months after his suicide, the Luceys are trying to make sense of how Jeff became unraveled after serving in Iraq.
Shaun Lamory, one of Jeff's friends since high school, figures it this way: "He was always the happiest kid in the world - he was too nice. And he was put into hell. And nice people don't go to hell."
But the Luceys don't spend too much time wondering what may have happened to their son in the desert, where he told his family he was ordered to shoot two unarmed Iraqi prisoners at close range.
**
As of early September, 29 troops serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom had killed themselves while in Iraq. Air Force officials say they're sure of only one airman - Sgt. David Guindon, 48, of Merrimack, N.H. - who took his life soon after coming home. Spokesmen for the Navy and Army as well as the Pentagon say they don't track such numbers.
But the Marines say there have been 12 known suicides among soldiers who had recently returned from Iraq or Afghanistan.
"Military people are heavily vetted for any psychological problems before they enter the service," said Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center. "They're screened very well when they come in, and they're supposed to be screened very well when they leave. So when a Marine takes the ultimate step of checking out by taking his own life, it should make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. These are the guys who aren't supposed to do that."
***
"He was really relieved to be back when he first got home," Debbie, his younger sister, said. "He looked tired and was thinner, but he seemed fine at first."
Then he quickly began to break down. Depression set in, and Jeff dealt with it by going on heavy drinking binges. On Christmas Eve, he sat down with Debbie and gave his first account of being told to shoot two unarmed Iraqi soldiers.
The way he told the story, Jeff was about five feet away from two Iraqis - each about his own age - when he was ordered to shoot them. He said he looked them in their eyes before closing his own, then pulled the trigger.
"He took off two dog tags around his neck, threw them at me and said, `Don't you understand? Your brother is a murderer,'" Debbie said.
The dog tags, which she said had Arabic letters scratched in them, were the ones her brother claimed he took from the soldiers he said he shot.
Debbie said she was too stunned - and her brother seemed too despondent - to ask any questions. She just listened.
*
By the end of March, he was having panic attacks. His relationship with his girlfriend, whom he had been dating since he was 15, became strained.
Signs that things were wrong
It was a complete departure from the outgoing, friendly kid at Belchertown High School.
"He was the type of guy who was friends with everybody. He got along with the jocks, the chess club kids and the intellectuals," said Shaun Lamory, who graduated a year behind Jeff.
Jeff was never much of a drinker in high school, Lamory said. But when he returned from Iraq, his drinking became "disgusting."
The two friends were taking classes at HCC. One day, they found a place on campus to smoke a cigarette and talk. Jeff pulled out a whiskey bottle filled with wine and started drinking.
Lamory was stunned.
"What's going on, man?" he demanded of his friend. "What are you doing to yourself?"
As he drank, Jeff told him about a small Iraqi boy he saw, riddled with bullets and lying dead in the street with an American flag clutched in his hand. Jeff said his truck was being shot at while he was driving by the boy, but he jumped out and brought the boy's body into an alley - sparing it from more bullet holes.
When Jeff came home, he brought the bloodstained American flag with him.
"He said whenever he goes home at night he just goes into his room and cries and stares at the flag," Lamory said. "I figured it was something Jeff had to work out. I didn't understand it when he killed himself."
Of course our commander in chief is not capable of making a mistake, but someone should be held accountable.
http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041015/NEWS01/410150366/1002
A 17-member Army Reserve platoon with troops from Jackson and around the Southeast deployed to Iraq is under arrest for refusing a "suicide mission" to deliver fuel, the troops' relatives said Thursday.
The soldiers refused an order on Wednesday to go to Taji, Iraq -- north of Baghdad -- because their vehicles were considered "deadlined" or extremely unsafe, said Patricia McCook of Jackson, wife of Sgt. Larry O. McCook.
Sgt. McCook, a deputy at the Hinds County Detention Center, and the 16 other members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company from Rock Hill, S.C., were read their rights and moved from the military barracks into tents, Patricia McCook said her husband told her during a panicked phone call about 5 a.m. Thursday.
*
"I got a call from an officer in another unit early (Thursday) morning who told me that my husband and his platoon had been arrested on a bogus charge because they refused to go on a suicide mission," said Jackie Butler of Jackson, wife of Sgt. Michael Butler, a 24-year reservist. "When my husband refuses to follow an order, it has to be something major."
The platoon being held has troops from Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina, Mississippi and South Carolina, said Teresa Hill of Dothan, Ala., whose daughter Amber McClenny is among those being detained.
McClenny, 21, pleaded for help in a message left on her mother's answering machine early Thursday morning.
"They are holding us against our will," McClenny said. "We are now prisoners."
The platoon is normally escorted by armed Humvees and helicopters, but did not have that support Wednesday, McClenny told her mother.
The convoy trucks the platoon was driving had experienced problems in the past and were not being properly maintained, Hill said her daughter told her.
The situation mirrors other tales of troops being sent on missions without proper equipment.
Aviation regiments have complained of being forced to fly dangerous missions over Iraq with outdated night-vision goggles and old missile-avoidance systems. Stories of troops' families purchasing body armor because the military didn't provide them with adequate equipment have been included in recent presidential debates.
Patricia McCook said her husband, a staff sergeant, understands well the severity of disobeying orders. But he did not feel comfortable taking his soldiers on another trip.
"He told me that three of the vehicles they were to use were deadlines ... not safe to go in a hotbed like that," Patricia McCook said.
Hill said the trucks her daughter's unit was driving could not top 40 mph.
"They knew there was a 99 percent chance they were going to get ambushed or fired at," Hill said her daughter told her. "They would have had no way to fight back."
Support our troops. Deselect One term George II.
I. Iraq last straw for GOP rebels
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%7E115%7E2409837,00.html
My loyalty is to America," Meiklejohn said. "The Republican Party I joined, well, that's just gone.
**
"The war is just a misbegotten thing that's spiraling down," said the World War II combat veteran. "It's a matter of conscience for me.
"After 9/11, the whole world was behind us," he said. "That's all gone now. That's been squandered.
"Now we've made the entire Muslim world hate us," he said. "And for what?
"For what?"
Halliburton and Meiklejohn also criticized Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress for policies they consider an outrageous affront to conservatism.
"I can't imagine the deficits and the debt that this bunch is running up," said Meiklejohn, comparing them with Lyndon Johnson during Vietnam. "They're spending more money than Clinton.
"And they're borrowing it," he said.
"The way I see it, if the war's worth fighting, it's worth paying for."
II. Nebraska GOP Red has shade of anger
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E28203%257E2409731,00.html
But if Bush can't convince Nebraska Republicans that he's fighting the right war against terror, how will he fare in battleground states?
It may be a sign his Iraq policy, and his re-election hopes, are indeed in deep trouble.
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
Three years ago, Iraq wasn't a threat to America. Today it is. Since March 2003, over 1000 Americans have died inside of Iraq... and the number is rising. In twenty years time, upon looking back, how do Americans think Iraqis are going to remember this occupation?
I constantly wonder, three years after 9/11, do Americans feel safer? When it first happened, there was a sort of collective shock in Iraq. In 2002, there was a sort of pity and understanding- we've been through the same. Americans could hardly believe what had happened, but the American government brings this sort of grief upon nations annually... suddenly the war wasn't thousands of kilometers away, it was home.
How do we feel about it this year? A little bit tired.
We have 9/11's on a monthly basis. Each and every Iraqi person who dies with a bullet, a missile, a grenade, under torture, accidentally- they all have families and friends and people who care. The number of Iraqis dead since March 2003 is by now at least eight times the number of people who died in the World Trade Center. They had their last words, and their last thoughts as their worlds came down around them, too. I've attended more wakes and funerals this last year, than I've attended my whole life. The process of mourning and the hollow words of comfort have become much too familiar and automatic.
September 11... he sat there, reading the paper. As he reached out for the cup in front of him for a sip of tea, he could vaguely hear the sound of an airplane overhead. It was a bright, fresh day and there was much he had to do... but the world suddenly went black- a colossal explosion and then crushed bones under the weight of concrete and iron... screams rose up around him... men, women and children... shards of glass sought out tender, unprotected skin ... he thought of his family and tried to rise, but something inside of him was broken... there was a rising heat and the pungent smell of burning flesh mingled sickeningly with the smoke and the dust... and suddenly it was blackness.
9/11/01? New York? World Trade Center?
No.
9/11/04. Falloojeh. An Iraqi home.
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/front_page/107253027911210.xml
Public likely ate suspect cow meat
12/27/03
ANDY DWORKIN
Northwest residents probably have eaten meat from a Holstein with mad cow disease, agriculture officials said Friday, as several grocery chains recalled specific kinds of beef that could contain the cow's meat.
Albertsons, Fred Meyer, Safeway and WinCo Foods all received batches of beef, which could have contained bits of the sick cow, from Interstate Meat Distributors in Portland. It was sold mostly as ground beef to Northwest customers from about Dec. 15 through Dec. 23 -- although Safeway's recall includes 69 pounds of "fresh beef hearts."
"From a practical standpoint, some of this has already been consumed and can't be recalled," given the beef's distribution dates, said Dalton Hobbes, a spokesman for Oregon's Department of Agriculture.
Also Friday, a U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesman said the sick cow's discovery was partly luck: Another of the 20 cows being slaughtered at Vern's Moses Lake Meats on Dec. 9 was acting strangely, so inspectors sent tissue from all 20 cows for testing, Daniel Puzo said. Those tests showed the disease instead affected the Holstein, whose only notable injury came while giving birth.
"It's very ironic, actually," Puzo said.
Here is the Canadian response from BBC:
But his Canadian counterpart, Dr Evans, said the details on the cow's records in the US do not match those kept in Canada.
"As yet, there is no definitive evidence that confirms that the BSE-infected cow originated in Canada," Dr Evans said.
CJD screening may miss thousands of cases
By Steve Mitchell
UPI Medical Correspondent
Published 7/22/2003 10:35 AM
WASHINGTON, July 21 (UPI) -- The federal government's monitoring system for cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal human brain illness, could be missing tens of thousands of victims, scientists and consumer advocates have told United Press International.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or CJD can be caused by eating beef contaminated with mad cow disease, but the critics assert without a better tracking system it might be impossible to determine whether any CJD cases are due to mad cow or obtain an accurate picture of the prevalence of the disorder in the United States.
Beginning in the late 1990s, more than 100 people contracted CJD in the United Kingdom and several European countries after eating beef infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy -- the clinical name for mad cow disease.
No case of mad cow has ever been detected in U.S. cattle and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's monitoring system has never detected a case of CJD due to eating contaminated American beef. Nevertheless, critics say, the CDC's system misses many cases of the disease, which currently is untreatable and is always fatal.
The first symptoms of CJD typically include memory loss and difficulty keeping balance and walking. As the disease destroys the brain, patients rapidly progress in a matter of months to difficulty with movement, an inability to talk and swallow and, finally, death.
Spontaneously-occurring or sporadic CJD is a rare disorder. Only about 300 cases appear nationwide each year, but several studies have suggested the disorder might be more common than thought and as many as tens of thousands of cases might be going unrecognized.
Clusters of CJD have been reported in various areas of the United States -- Pennsylvania in 1993, Florida in 1994, Oregon in 1996, New York in 1999-2000 and Texas in 1996. In addition, several people in New Jersey developed CJD in recent years, including a 56 year old woman who died on May 31, 2003. Although in some instances, a mad cow link was suspected, all of the cases ultimately were classified as sporadic.
People who develop CJD from eating mad-cow-contaminated beef have been thought to develop a specific form of the disorder called variant CJD. But new research, released last December, indicates the mad cow pathogen can cause both sporadic CJD and the variant form.
"Now people are beginning to realize that because something looks like sporadic CJD they can't necessarily conclude that it's not linked to (mad cow disease)," said Laura Manuelidis, section chief of surgery in the neuropathology department at Yale University, who conducted a 1989 study that found 13 percent of Alzheimer's patients actually had CJD.
Several studies, including Manuelidis', have found that autopsies reveal 3 percent to 13 percent of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's or dementia actually suffered from CJD. Those numbers might sound low, but there are 4 million Alzheimer's cases and hundreds of thousands of dementia cases in the United States. A small percentage of those cases could add up to 120,000 or more CJD victims going undetected and not included in official statistics.
Experiences in England and Switzerland -- two countries that discovered mad cow disease in their cattle -- have heightened concerns about the possibility some cases of sporadic CJD are due to consuming mad-cow-tainted beef. Both countries have reported increases in sporadic CJD since mad cow was first detected in British herds in 1986.
Switzerland discovered last year its CJD rate was twice that of any other country in the world. Switzerland had been seeing about eight to 11 cases per year from 1997 to 2000. Then the incidence more than doubled, to 19 cases in 2001 and 18 cases in 2002.
The CDC says the annual rate of CJD in the United States is one case per million people, but the above studies suggest the true prevalence of CJD is not known, Manuelidis told UPI.
Diagnosing CJD or Alzheimer's is difficult because no test exists that can identify either disease in a living patient with certainty. So physicians must rely on the patient's symptoms to determine which illness might be present. Sometimes, however, the symptoms of one disease can appear similar to the other disorder. The only way to determine the disease conclusively is to perform an autopsy on the brain after death.
Unfortunately, although autopsies once were performed on approximately half of all corpses, the frequency has dropped to 15 percent or less in the United States. The National Center for Health Statistics -- a branch of the CDC -- stopped collecting autopsy data in 1995.
"If we don't do autopsies and we don't look at people's brains ... we have no idea about what is the general prevalence of these kinds of infections and (whether) it is changing," Manuelidis said.
At the same time autopsies have been declining, the number of deaths attributed to Alzheimer's has increased more than 50-fold since 1979, going from 857 deaths then to nearly 50,000 in 2000. Though it is unlikely the dramatic increase in Alzheimer's is due entirely to misdiagnosed CJD cases, it "could explain some of the increase we've seen," Manuelidis said.
"Neurodegenerative disease and Alzheimer's disease have become a wastebasket" for mental illness in the elderly that is difficult to diagnose conclusively, she said. "In other words, what people call Alzheimer's now is more broad than what people used to call it, and that has the possibility of encompassing more diseases -- including CJD."
The autopsy studies that found undiagnosed CJD cases raise the question of whether the United States "already has an undetected epidemic here," Jeff Nelson, director of vegsource.com, a vegetarian advocacy Web site, told UPI.
"What's the source of that?" Nelson asked. "Could it be the same source of encephalopathy we saw in minks?"
Nelson referred to an outbreak of a mad-cow-type disorder in minks in Wisconsin in the 1980s. The origin was traced back to the animals' diet, which included parts of so-called downer cattle -- sick cows that are unable to stand, which often indicates a neurological disease, including mad cow. The mink disease raised concerns about whether U.S. cattle were carrying a mad-cow-like pathogen even prior to the U.K. epidemic that began in 1986.
Andrew Monjan, chief of the neuropsychology of aging program at the National Institute of Aging -- part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. -- acknowledged there has been an increase in U.S. Alzheimer's cases. However, he told UPI, this probably is due to the aging of the population -- as people grow older, they develop a higher risk of developing Alzheimer's.
"There's been no change in the number of CJD cases in the country and there has been clearly a tracking of the unusual cases of CJD" that could be due to mad cow disease, Monjan said. However, Terry Singletary, coordinator of CJD Watch -- an organization founded to track CJD cases -- says efforts to track the disease have been close to nonexistent. For example, only 12 states require such reports. Therefore, many cases might be going undetected, unreported or misdiagnosed.
If more states made CJD a reportable illness, there would be more clusters detected across the United States, said Singletary, who became involved with CJD advocacy after his mother died from a form of CJD known as Heidenhain variant. In the 18-year period between 1979 and 1996, he noted, the country saw a jump from one case of sporadic CJD in people under the age of 30 -- a warning sign for a link to mad cow because nearly all of the U.K. victims were 30 years of age or younger -- to five cases in five years between 1997 and 2001. "That represents a substantial blip," he told UPI.
Singletary also said there have been increases in sporadic CJD in France, Germany and Italy, all of which have detected mad cow disease in their cattle.
So far, the CDC has refused to impose a national requirement that physicians and hospitals report cases of the disease. The agency has not chosen to make CJD a reportable disease because "making it reportable is not necessarily directly helpful in surveillance because in some states where it's reportable you may not get the physician to report it," said Dr. Ermias Belay, CDC's medical epidemiologist working on CJD.
Instead, the agency relies on other methods, including death certificates and urging physicians to send suspicious cases to the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, which is funded by the CDC. However, because autopsies generally are not done, if a CJD case is misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's or dementia, a correct diagnosis might never be determined and therefore the cause of death listed on a death certificate might be inaccurate.
Belay told UPI he discounted this possibility. It is unlikely to happen, he said, because it is easy to distinguish CJD from Alzheimer's -- the two conditions display different symptoms.
Manuelidis disagreed. It can be quite difficult to determine accurately if a patient has CJD, as evidenced by her study, in which respected and competent neurologists and psychiatrists at Yale originally diagnosed patients with Alzheimer's, yet were wrong at least 13 percent of the time. Another study conducted at the University of Pennsylvania, which found 6 percent of dementia patients actually were suffering from CJD, supports the difficulty in distinguishing the illnesses correctly.
The U. Penn. researchers concluded: "These results show that in patients with a clinical diagnosis of dementia, the etiology (cause) cannot be accurately predicted during life."
In addition, the NPDPSC sees less than half of all the CJD cases each year, so the CDC's investigational system not only is missing many of the misdiagnosed CJD cases, it also is not conducting autopsies on most of the detected cases.
**
The case of Carrie Mahan -- a Philadelphia woman who developed a brain disorder that appeared to be CJD and died from it in 2000 at the age of 29 -- illustrates just how difficult it can be to diagnose the disease.
Mahan's physician, Dr. Peter Crinos of the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, ruled out other disorders and felt certain the young woman had died of CJD, a concern that raised the possibility of a link to mad cow disease because of her young age. When neuropathologist Nicholas Gonatas, who had seen CJD before, examined Mahan's brain after her death, he, likewise, was confident he detected the microscopic, sponge-like holes caused by the disease. But when he sent brain samples to the NPDPSC, the results came back negative. Gonatas, convinced the surveillance center's finding was erroneous, sent off two more samples, only to have them both come back negative.
Subsequent research, however, has shown the test used by the surveillance center cannot rule out CJD, said Crinos, an assistant professor of neurology.
"There's no question that Carrie had a spongiform encephalopathy," Crinos said, but added although it appeared to be CJD, it is difficult if not impossible to say if it was due to mad cow disease.
Crinos told UPI until the CDC implements a better tracking system, a lot of questions will remain about CJD and cases like Carrie Mahan's. One central question: Why are cases of what is presumed to be a rare disease popping up in clusters in certain areas of the country? Crinos said the clustering suggests an environmental or food-borne cause, but so far, "No one knows the answer to that."
Today, the NYT aslo indicated a nobel prize winning scientist tried to bring this problem with mad cow to the attention of the USDA but nothing happened.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/25/national/25WARN.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Expert Warned That Mad Cow Was Imminent
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
ver since he identified the bizarre brain-destroying proteins that cause mad cow disease, Dr. Stanley Prusiner, a neurologist at the University of California at San Francisco, has worried about whether the meat supply in America is safe.
He spoke over the years of the need to increase testing and safety measures. Then in May, a case of mad cow disease appeared in Canada, and he quickly sought a meeting with Ann M. Veneman, the secretary of agriculture. He was rebuffed, he said in an interview yesterday, until he ran into Karl Rove, senior adviser to President Bush.
So six weeks ago, Dr. Prusiner, who won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on prions, entered Ms. Veneman's office with a message. "I went to tell her that what happened in Canada was going to happen in the United States," Dr. Prusiner said. "I told her it was just a matter of time."
The department had been willfully blind to the threat, he said. The only reason mad cow disease had not been found here, he said, is that the department's animal inspection agency was testing too few animals. Once more cows are tested, he added, "we'll be able to understand the magnitude of our problem."
Kind of sounds like 9/11, doesn't it?
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