While the case may be thin, the author weaves his tale like a medical thriller
By Charles Godfrey
"Brain Trust: The Hidden Connection Between Mad Cow Disease and Misdiagnosed Alzheimer's Disease," by Colm Kelleher, Paraview Pocket Books, 312 pages.
It reads like Godzilla. But there is a more palpable colossus in this story, filled with smoking guns and kuru-flecked brain slurry. In Brain Trust, Colm Kelleher spins a web of deception, corner-cutting and "don't see, don't tell" attitudes about an invasion of North America by prion disease. All these questionable activities are performed by the respectable medical profession and honourable livestock corporations.
The reader's mind is seized by a clutch of mutilated cows north of Denver, where part of their bodies targeted by bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) were surgically separated from their carcasses. Using Sherlockian deduction and speculation, the author ties an increase of prion disease in mice, mink, and rain forest deer herds and cattle to an alleged current epidemic of Alzheimer's.
Kelleher, while seeming to construct a seamless track from kuru in New Guinea to scrapie in Ireland, to mink in Iceland and Saskatchewan and a biological warfare experimental farm in Washington, is careful to occasionally signal the right-of-way with "seems to" and "may have." But his invocation of citations from Science, Nature, the Lancet, the British Medical Journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association and veterinarian journals is heady persuasion. En route he recruits three Nobel Prize winners.
Although an association between BSE and Creutzfield-Jacob disease is current, Kelleher arches this span to Alzheimer's. This may be a bridge too far, but the author has laid the first few planks, and has written the best medical thriller in years.
Charles Godfrey works in rehabilitation medicine at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto and publishes books on medical history.
Source: http://www.medicalpost.com/mpcontent/ar ... 90703_5392
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