Worldwide the number of people that have been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis is somewhere between 2.3 million and 2.5 million. In the United States there are roughly 450,000 to 600,000 individuals that have been diagnosed with MS which mathematically works out to 1 in 4 or 25% of all patients world wide. And that number is quite simply staggering when you consider that there are 7.5 billion, give or take a few million, people now living in this world. Which if my math is correct means that about 3 out of every ten thousand people will be diagnosed with MS worldwide. In the US that number works out to roughly about 2 out of every thousand. I admit these are very rough numbers but there close enough to show that the incidence of MS in the United States is much more prevalent then anywhere else on the planet.
Let’s look at this in a different and even more startling way. If we take the number of US diagnosis’ and divide that into the total number of people afflicted with MS worldwide we find that 1 in 4 or 25% of all people with Multiple Sclerosis live in the United States which definitely begs the question, why? Especially when you consider that we have roughly 5%, or one 20th, of the total world population, again I ask, why?
When I worked through these numbers I did only the Multiple Sclerosis numbers that are easily found on the internet and I didn’t look into all other autoimmune disorders as a whole but I wonder if I did would they show a similar distribution of autoimmune disease in the US as compared to the combined world population?
If my math is even close to being correct it strongly suggests that there is some kind of environmental trigger that is far more prevalent here in the United States then anywhere else in the world that’s the only thing that makes any sense. And in my opinion with this information it should not be all that difficult to determine what that environmental trigger really is which would answer a whole lot of questions about this, and perhaps other, disorders of these kinds and what kick starts these disease processes into over drive.
What do you think? Make some noise whenever and where ever you can. I strongly suspect that we, who have these autoimmune diseases, are the canaries in the mine and are just the first people to succumb to an ever, and increasingly more polluted, and sick planet!
Bill Walker
Multiple Sclerosis And Beyond 