Lamb Marjorie - Dying for a hamburger: modern meat processing and the epidemic of Alzheimers Disease

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Contents

To the memory of my father, Cy Waldman, a gentle man.

MW

To my daughter Keri and all my nieces and nephews.

The future is yours.

MJL

PREFACE

For thousands of years the elderly were regarded as wise. Its only in the last few decades that this attitude has undergone a change. Now the elderly are often regarded as foolish and forgetful people who must be cared for as if they were children. The reason for this transformation is simple: Almost half of those older than eighty-five are suffering from Alzheimers disease ( AD ).

During the research for this book several startling but easily verifiable facts came to light.

First, Alzheimers is a relatively new disease. Prior to about 1900 there is no mention of this disease in any medical, religious, or secular literature. We find dementia associated with syphilis or vascular disease, but nothing resembling AD . Alzheimers did not even have a name.

Secondly, although Alzheimers is a disease of the elderly, the reason for our current epidemic of AD is not related to our increased lifespan. Most of the gains in life expectancy have been made at the bottom of the scale. That is, infant mortality has declined sharply in the past century. But those individuals, hundreds of years ago, who survived to middle age could look forward with some confidence to a relatively healthy old age. Even before the advances made in medicine and hygiene in the twentieth century, thousands of people lived well into their seventies, eighties, and nineties and yet we find no evidence of an epidemic of dementia in that population corresponding to the numbers we see today.

Thirdly, Alzheimers appears to have emerged in different parts of the world at different times over the last one hundred years, and there are still large parts of the world where it is relatively unknown. In these regions, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease ( CJD ) is also rare. We will examine evidence that variations in diet may explain why this is so. Well look at a relatively unknown infectious agent called a prion, consider the horrible neurological diseases that it causes, and see how prions could become widely distributed in our food. The history of the mad cow, or BSE , epidemic in Great Britain may provide a clue.

The rapid rise in the rate of prion diseases is one of the most fascinating stories in modern medicine. It is a story of cannibals, both two- and four-legged, of men and women who ended up dying in dreadful ways because they wished to grow taller or have children, and of inadvertent government and industrial bungling, some of which continues to this day.

This is a cautionary tale of what happens when science lags behind industrial innovation, and how nature can sometimes wreak terrible vengeance on those who are completely unaware that they have violated her laws.

Remarkably its also a story with a happy ending. Instead of working toward simply alleviating the symptoms of neurological diseases or looking for a cure, we can work toward prevention. Prion diseases have a long latency period, so the current rates of disease probably reflect practices that were current from ten to twenty years ago practices that conformed to generally accepted government and scientific norms of the time. It may turn out to be the case that these practices, as presently organized, need to be changed for health reasons. But industry cannot reasonably be blamed for not knowing this in advance of the scientists. And changes are already being implemented in the way meat is processed and tested in most countries of the world. Perhaps with a few other simple measures, twenty years from now AD will be on its way to becoming an historical footnote, comparable to the Black Death.

ACRONYMS