The Wealth System at work: The brain disease epidemic

From The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,11381,1283588,00.html

Pollutants cause huge rise in brain diseases

Scientists alarmed as number of cases triples in 20 years

Juliette Jowit, environment editor

Sunday August 15, 2004

The numbers of sufferers of brain diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and motor neurone disease, have soared across the West in less than 20 years, scientists have discovered.

The alarming rise, which includes figures showing rates of dementia have trebled in men, has been linked to rises in levels of pesticides, industrial effluents, domestic waste, car exhausts and other pollutants, says a report in the journal Public Health.

Once again, our dysfunctional Wealth System shows its weaknesses and disadvantages. While members of a relatively small, wealthy elite enjoy the benefits of freedom from want and involuntary work, the very industrial activities that make their position possible can also inadvertently poison them. (Think of wealthy people who develop Alzheimer's apparently caused by environmental toxins.) After all, they have to breathe the same air, drink the same water and use many of the same contaminated products the rest of us have to use. A Wealth System designed according to emerging Supersurvival criteria, based on the quest for engineered negligible senescence, would try to control the long-term costs of our current economic activities and integrate them into current calculations so that the production of what we really need won't threaten our health and safety years down the line.