NewScientist (22 December 2018, paywall) notes the latest evidence of Alzheimer’s, one of my personal bugaboos, spreading from person to person:
GROWTH hormones given to children decades ago seem to have spread proteins linked to Alzheimer’s disease.
Between 1958 and 1985, approximately 30,000 children around the world received injections of human growth hormone extracted from the pituitary glands of dead people. These were used to treat genetic disorders and growth deficiencies.
Three years ago, while looking at the brains of eight people who had such injections and later died of the rare brain disorder Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), John Collinge at University College London and his colleagues noticed they all had beta-amyloid proteins in their brains.
Beta-amyloid is known to accumulate and form sticky plaques in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. These eight people didn’t have Alzheimer’s, as they all died from CJD at a young age, but Collinge says that had they lived, the presence of beta-amyloid suggests it is possible that they would have gone on to develop the illness.
I can hear the cries of the anti-science types from here. Deliberate poisoning and all that shit. This part’ll be ignored, or not understood:
The team wondered whether growth hormone itself stimulates the accumulation of beta-amyloid proteins or if the hormones were contaminated with this protein. To investigate, Collinge and his team examined samples of the growth hormone given to these eight people, which had been archived in the UK. They found beta-amyloid proteins in those samples. Also present were tau proteins, which are implicated in Alzheimer’s too.
The growth hormone used by the eight people who died of CJD was extracted from cadavers using one particular method. So Collinge and his team also looked at growth hormone prepared from cadavers using three other methods, and found no sign of beta-amyloid or tau proteins.
Of all the sciences, I often think biology is the most difficult; I’ve read somewhere that astronomers claim the innards of a star are nowhere near close to the complexity of the innards of a frog. My point? Medicine is damn hard, and sometimes I tire of people running around with their eyes bugged out over the latest medical faux-pas. Sure, sometimes there’s real, culpable fault to assign when it comes to medical blunders. Human greed can infiltrate the medical community like any other, and the pharma industry has spent decades casting that greed as a virtue rather than the corrupting influence that it is.
But the anti-vaxxers just make me tired and cynical about whether it’s real worth saving humanity.
