Dying for a Hamburger

Book excerpt: Bubonic plague, Black Death, AIDS… and Alzheimer’s? One in ten people over 65, and nearly half of those over 85, have Alzheimer’s disease. Today, we simply accept the idea that old people lose their minds as a matter of course. But this is a new phenomenon: Up until a hundred years ago, old age was associated with wisdom, not memory-loss, and dementia was known, if at all, as a side-effect of syphilis. Alzheimer’s seems to have appeared out of nowhere in the early years of the twentieth century and now at least 15 million people worldwide are its victims. It’s a horrible disease because it robs people of their identity before it robs them of life. It is incurable and fatal. InDying for a Hamburger, Dr. Murray Waldman, in collaboration with writer Marjorie Lamb, sets out to show that Alzheimer’s is, indeed, a deadly modern plague. They present startling evidence that Alzheimer’s is one of a family of diseases caused by a malformed protein – or prion – that also causes mad cow disease and its human variant, Cruetzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD). Could Alzheimer’s, like CJD, be caused by tainted beef? In this compelling exposition, the authors come to a frightening conclusion about our seemingly insatiable hunger for hamburger.