UK SEES HUGE RISE IN ALZHEIMERS, PARKINSONS

Report warns of a "potential major public health problem in the not-too-distant future".

Deaths in the UK from brain diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's have soared in the past two decades, a study has found. The study examined rates of the diseases in much of the Western world from 1979 to 1997. "This has really scared me" Professor Colin Pritchard, who led the study, told The Observer in August. "These are nasty diseases: people are getting more of them and they are starting earlier. We have to look at the environment and ask ourselves what we are doing."

The report on the study by a Southampton University team appeared in the journal Public Health earlier this year. It was also mentioned in the Independent, the Observer and the Daily Mail. It finds that cases of Alzheimers and other dementias have trebled in men and increased by 90 per cent among women. In the late 1970s, there were about 3,000 deaths a year from brain diseases in England and Wales. At the end of the last decade, that figure had risen to 10,000.

Cases of Parkinson's disease and motor neurone disease increased by 50 per cent in the UK and most other industrialised countries - similar to that of cancer cases over a similar period. However, the increase was generally lower in Japan, leading to speculation that diet could also be a factor.

The researchers are blaming the increase on higher levels of pesticides, industrial chemicals, car exhaust and other pollutants.

"There's no single cause ... and most of the time we have no studies on all the multiple interactions of the combinations on the environment," Professor Pritchard said.

Research for the Parkinson's Disease Society (PDS) had already pinpointed pesticides as a possible cause for the disease, which now affects 120,000 people across the UK. Ten thousand more people are diagnosed every year - one in 20 of them under forty.

"Investigations into incidences of Parkinson's in agricultural communities, for instance, have repeatedly linked high exposure to certain pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers with the disease"
The Parkinson's Disease Society.

The PDS also cite a study in rats published in Nature Neuroscience, which pointed the finger at rotenone in particular. The study found that, in rats, this household insecticide - widely used and marketed as 'natural' because it is eventually degraded in the environment - can cause major features of Parkinson's. The hypothesis emerging from the study is also that low levels of noxious substances - including other pesticides with similar action - may, over time, instigate a molecular chain of events that eventually leads to Parkinson's.

Rotenone, as well as being a popular household insecticide, is one of the six chemicals allowed to be used in organic farming. It was also recently found, in several studies in the USA, to be carcinogenic. It appears in the widely available Bio Derris Liquid Plus; manufactured by PBI Home and Garden Ltd. PBI Home and Garden Ltd is a subsidiary of Bayer UK.