December 23, 1996

By Michael Field 

A tiny Pacific village may hold a crucial clue to solving frightening neurological diseases including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

   New York neurologist Oliver Sacks goes further, Umatac village in Guam, he said in an interview, "is the Rosetta Stone of neurodegenerative disease".

   Sack's best-known book Awakenings became a movie starring Robin Williams. It told of how he used the drug L-DOPA to bring post-encephalitic patients out of deep comas.

   His latest book, The Island of the Colour-blind, explores strange medical mysteries in scattered Micronesia.

   In 1521 Ferdinand Magellan moored off Umatac and although the island has become a vast US military base it has remained a haven of Chamorro culture and people. Its is the epicentre of lytico-bodig.

   "Here in this village, within the span of a few hundred acres, the secret of lytico-bodig must lie," Sacks writes. "And with it, perhaps, the secret of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, whose varied characteristics it seemed to bring together.... Umatac is the key to them all."

   In the interview he said Umatac may also hold clues to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human equivalent of mad cow disease.

   Lytico-bodig kills 10 percent of all native Chamorro people and up to 70 percent of them may be predisposed to it.

   "A lot of people have been thinking about lytico-bodig, it has been probably been studied on and off for about 30 years and really we have not got a clue about what is the cause of it," he said.

   "There have been periods of intensive speculation, and then, when no answers have come, it has slipped away again."

   Sacks said local cycads or palm seeds, which have been used to make flour could be the key, to triggering the slow tragedy. But something similar to lytico-bodig occurs in Irian Jaya, Indonesia, and the Kii Peninsula in Japan -- without cycads.

   Sacks said Chamorro offer the world in another lesson.

   "Meeting with the people on Guam, and they way the take care of the people suffering, has been a remarkably humbling experience."

   Sacks also visited Pingelap atoll, Federated States of Micronesia, where around 10 percent of the suffer achromatopsia -- true colour blindness. Worldwide achromatopsia affects only one person in every 33,000. Its sufferers have a painful hypersensitivity to the light. They see well at night.

  It is a painful condition, relieved in part by sunglasses.

Sacks says Pingelap came about as the result of a typhoon around 1775 which killed all but 20 people. He said the population quickly built up -- "it was heroic breeding with perhaps a degree of incest" -- but the surviving paramount chief or nahnmwarki, was carrying the recessive gene for colour blindness.

DNA analysis may locate the recessive genetic abnormality which is carried by around a third of the population.

"Science is around 10 years, or maybe tomorrow, will be able to identify the (genetic) marker for achromatopsia," Sacks said.

"I would like to spend at least a year on Pingelap and learn the language before I could tell you what kind of effect that information could have on them."

But he suspects it may not make much difference. Totally deaf couples have gone ahead with children knowing that any offspring would also be deaf.

"They have accepted that, provided they know that the child will be normal in other ways, they accept the deafness."

The same, he has found, with people suffering Tourette's syndrome in which people swear and scream obscenities.

 "When a Pingelapese baby starts to squint and turn away from the light, there is at least a cultural knowledge of his perceptual world, his special needs and strengths, even a mythology to explain it. "

No one born with the ailment on Pingelap is wholly isolated or misunderstood, which is the "almost universal lot of people with congenital achromatopsia elsewhere in the world".

Copyright: Michael Field