“Five cases of residents, living in the same street or in a perpendicular street for one of them, having contracted the disease between 2007 and 2022” were confirmed, indicated the ARS, specifying that it was not aware “other cases reported in the municipality”.
The ARS contacted the national public health agency to “determine whether there is in fact a statistical excess of diseases in the observed population” and, if this excess exists, “to determine whether there are one or more local causes for this grouping of cases, other than chance, on which it is possible to act”, indicated Santé Publique France to AFP, confirming information from Picard Mail.
At this stage, “investigations are ongoing” and have “first of all, the objective is to carefully document the cases”, stage “indispensable” to the investigation of the cluster.
For neurologist Pierre-François Pradat, ALS clusters are frequent and linked to chance
Some situations “unusual” of clustered cases of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) “have been reported to Public Health France over the last 10 years, without it being possible at this stage to hypothesize a common cause among the different cases.”
For Pierre-François Pradat, neurologist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital and co-president of the scientific council of the Association for Research on ALS (ARSLA), the clusters are “frequent” and linked to “chance”, he puts it into perspective.
According to him, five cases of Charcot disease since 2007, “this is not a gigantic excess incidence given a disease that is still quite common”, he adds, specifying that the disease was of genetic origin for 10% of patients.
With AFP
