The Island of the Colour-Blind by Oliver Sacks

Author:Oliver Sacks [Sacks, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447204947
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK
Published: 2014-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

The unknown environmental factor, it seemed likely, had to do with low calcium and magnesium levels in the drinking water, and the consequences of these on the nervous system. Such low levels, he speculated, might trigger a compensatory reaction in the parathyroid glands, leading in turn to excessive absorption of calcium, aluminium, and manganese ions. The deposition of these in the nervous system, he felt, might result in the premature neuronal ageing and death seen with the lytico-bodig.

It was John’s hope, in 1983, that he might join Gajdusek’s team and help crack the disease at last. But Gajdusek told him he was too late – the cause of the lytico-bodig had now been established, and in any case the disease had almost vanished, because of the shift to a Western diet, which was high in calcium – there was not much left to do, and his team would be pulling out of there soon. John was surprised to hear Gajdusek express himself so forcefully, he told me, and disappointed, because he had hoped to work with him. But he decided to come to Guam none the less, if only to take care of patients as a physician, and not as an investigator.

But the very day after John arrived on Guam, he had an experience comparable to Zimmerman’s nearly forty years before: working in the naval hospital in Agana, he saw a dozen patients with the lytico-bodig in his first clinic. And one of them also had a supranuclear palsy – a complex disturbance of gaze, in which the patient can look sideways, but not up or down. This had never previously been reported in lytico-bodig, but it was the hallmark of the syndrome John and his Toronto colleagues had delineated nearly twenty years before. This convinced him that lytico-bodig was neither extinct nor comprehensively described, and that there was still time and opportunity for its further investigation.

Guam had superb medical facilities on the naval base, but in the outlying villages, basic medical care was very inadequate, and neurological care scarce – there was only one overworked neurologist, Dr Kwang-Ming Chen, to care for 50,000 Chamorros, and 100,000 other residents of the island as well. Not only were there still many hundreds of Chamorro people with lytico-bodig, Chen told John, but new cases kept appearing – several dozen a year, he thought, and these new cases sometimes took forms different from either the classical lytico or bodig; the man with supranuclear palsy was a case in point.

In particular, John observed, he began to see increasing numbers of elderly people, women especially, who had severe memory disturbances, amnesiac syndromes, without any dementia; catatonia without parkinsonism (like Estella); dementia without parkinsonism (like her sister-in-law); arousal-disorders (like Euphrasia); or unclassifiable syndromes (like Juan’s), novel forms of the disease never described before.

John was still excited by the mineral hypothesis, and he wanted to pursue it, to gather more conclusive evidence. He invited an old friend and colleague from Toronto, Donald Crapper McLachlan (a neurologist and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.