printMy inclination is to say that Mitochondrial Disease, “a new and rapidly developing medical subspecialty,” is one of those made-up maladies Americans excel at conjuring and then milking for attention, attention-seeking activism, fund-raising, etc. There are rewards and reinforcements to be had in cultivating disease.
Mine is a hunch. However, so does the gamut of “Mitochondrial diseases” appear to be more conjecture than science—to say nothing of the circularity in the argument for their existence: A person lacks energy, therefore the Mitochondria, the locus of energy in the cells, is faulted.
I know nothing about the epidemiology of mitochondrial disorders, although the one study focuses on populations in the more affluent parts of the world: Northern England and Northern Finland.
Perhaps Africans are too preoccupied with survival to “develop” this malady?
The context: Fox-News host Megyn Kelly has been banging on non-stop about the mitochondrially impaired girl, Justina Pelletier. The 15-year-old girl was “taken into Massachusetts State Custody after her parents disagreed with doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital over her treatment plan.”
A guest summed up the travesty more succinctly than the host:
Boston Children’s Hospital and the Department of Children and Families, DCF, [took] this child away from these parents, who love this daughter and who want to care for this daughter, and who simply disagree with the recent diagnosis of a newly minted physician who only had been out of medical school for seven months, who disagreed with her actual treating physicians from Tufts..
Irrespective of whether this newly minted disease is mythical or authentic—there is absolutely no ambiguity in the following: The hospital staff involved in removing this girl from her loving parents, together with the personnel from the Department Which Ought To Be Dissolved; they all belong behind bars for their actions.