Celiac Disease Quadruples in 50 Years!

[Trawley Trash]

Don Wiss wrote

> Unrelated to your question here's a new page I found there
> where they tested 50 year old blood samples:

> Celiac Disease Quadruples in 50 years
> http://glutenfreeliving.com/news-flash.php

> The punch line is "celiac disease is occurring more often and results
> in higher death rates when not diagnosed"

This warrants a thread of its own.

It sounds like a breakthrough, but like many a statistical
study the controls are not right. Murray had controls for
age and birth year. The problem is that all the 1952 group
were in the Air Force, but the comparison group was not.
How many celiacs do you know who can eat military style without
being sick? Celiacs either do not go in the military in the
first place, or they get out as quick as they can. This is
true even if they do not know they are celiac.

The men in the Air Force gave blood samples for a study on the
treatment of strep throat. This is not a statistically random
sample. You get strep throat by being, ah, social. People who
are sick with celiac do not go out and party. We also have extra
strong immune systems that are easily triggered. So even if we
are in the military, our chances of having strep throat are less
than average.

I do not like to see exaggerations like this paper, and the
publicity it gets is not helpful to us. There will be a political
reaction, and people with celiac disease will be
ridiculed and force fed just as I was when I was young.

The implication that there are lifestyle or environmental
changes that cause celiac opens up a pandoras box.
We will forever be guilty of faulty life styles:
we are too clean, we are too dirty, we should eat bean sprouts,
if only we ate Kosher, all our problems would vanish. Have
you not heard these and a hundred other suggestions by people
who claim to be well-meaning? They do not mean well at all.
They only want to simplify their own job by refusing to recognize
our problem.

To our military leaders we are nothing but shirkers and malingerers.
No evidence will ever convince them otherwise. The only answer
they ever have is "there is a war going on." They said that even
when there was no war.

Many studies have shown the incidence in the general population
is slightly less than one percent. Whether this is increasing
or not, we cannot tell from the stolen blood samples this
researcher took with him when he left his military post.