Army misreads Green Beret's disease (Charges filed for brain disease)

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001798856_soldier23.html

<snip>
"Your conduct is inconsistent with the integrity and professionalism required by a Special Forces soldier," Lt. Col. Christopher Conner wrote April 10.

Confused and disgraced, the soldier moved back into his off-base home where he ate canned meat and anchovies, unaware of the day, the month or the year.

Sensing something was wrong, a neighbor called Alford's parents. They drove 600 miles from East Texas to find a son who'd lost 30 pounds and could no longer drink from a glass, use a telephone, button his shirt or say Amber, the name of his soldier wife who was still stationed in the Middle East.

A month and several hospitals later, Alford's family learned he was dying of a disease eating away his brain. He had Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), an extremely rare and fatal degenerative brain disorder akin to "mad-cow" disease that causes rapid, progressive dementia.

Now, as the 25-year-old soldier wastes away in his boyhood home, his parents and his wife are struggling to understand how the military could have misdiagnosed Alford's erratic, forgetful behavior as nothing more than the symptoms of a sloppy, incompetent soldier.

"He had to hold his hands to keep them from shaking, but they saw nothing wrong with my child," his mother, Gail Alford, a nine-year Army veteran, said recently from her home in a rural community near Marshall, Texas.

Alford's parents say the Special Forces staff told them that a doctor in Kuwait found nothing wrong with him and that a psychiatrist there had said Alford was "faking it."
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[sasquatch]

1. Hey who here remembers support the troops?

That's what the goofy pro war bastards would use as their excuse for supporting the war. Why can't they actually support the troops? Fuck it I'm going to bed to cry:cry: for my country who's joining me?

[UpInArms]

2. so is anyone attempting to find

out where and what this man had been eating?

[leftchick]

3. or if he ever donated blood?

This is pretty fucking scary beyond the deplorable treatment given him....

[DUreader]

5. "he ate canned meat and anchovies"

I know this is after he was sick but people maintain habits when it

comes to eating.

[DUreader]

6. Also notice the article denies a possibility of BSE link

Which can only be determined by autopsy.

[saigon68]

4. TOTALLY DISGUSTING

Support the troops? Yah Right

Used up---- then thrown away!!!!

This kind of shit ruins morale if publicized. I wonder how it got out?

[teryang]

7. What a tragic report

Support the troops, indeed.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

8. "...A military psychiatrist there had said Alford was 'faking it'."....

Is the Army really that desperate to get special forces soldiers back into combat? Sad...really sad.

[amazona]

9. this is terrible, what a sad thing

They need to act on this and find out (if they can) the source of the disease and if he gave blood.

I won't defend the military's behavior but I will say that people with dementia sometimes do try to conceal their disease. Concealing one's illness as long as possible is a primitive animal instinct that kept one alive longer in the wild, since the weak and shaky are picked off first. I've seen it with Alzheimer's. Far from faking illness, he may have tried to pass himself off as healthier than he really was, which may have complicated diagnosis. It is difficult to diagnose rare diseases -- I wouldn't immediately ascribe an evil intent to the doctors.

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

10. Agreed, but I would like to think that the military would insist on

proper medical tests and treatment rather than trying to ascribe everything the least expensive diagnosis.