There is a medical endemic, of major consequence, that has the potential to be cured in a few short years if funding for new technology is made available, and you need to be aware of the public health importance of this illness.
The Internet medical newsgroup, alt.support.prostate.prostatitis, and the Prostatitis Foundation, are very concerned about the fact that no research is being done by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control on prostatitis.
Prostatitis has been an unsolved endemic in the United States for two centuries. The magnitude of the problem is enormous. It has been estimated by the urologist, Thomas Stamey, that fifty percent of men will experience symptoms of prostatitis during their lifetimes, and the National Center for Health Statistics reported that of the visits of men to the doctor for urogenital problems, twenty-five percent were for prostatitis. The pathologist John E. McNeal found prostatitis in forty out of ninety-one men at random autopsies. At the University of Illinois, Professor of Urology, R. Sharifi, MD, believes that prostatitis is the most common disease of middle aged men.
Prostatitis afflicts men in their twenties and thirties (and all ages) and becomes a lifelong disability, with significant medical costs, that because of the longevity of the disease rise to ridiculous proportions. It is the most widely occurring prostate disease. Prostatitis is a disease of the married monogamous male as well as priests and monks. One theory being that reflux of bacterial strains that are usually normal flora occurs in such cases. Prostatitis research will help to solve the related problems of sexually transmitted diseases, male infertility, female pelvic inflammatory disease (prostatitis is the male equivalent of pelvic inflammatory disease), female vaginosis (it is theorized that the prostate may be the carrier of organisms that cause female vaginosis), male sexual dysfunction, and has pertinence to benign prostatic hypertrophy (twenty-one percent of prostates are infected at TransUrethral Resection of the Prostate with only superficial culturing being done), and prostatitis research has pertinence to prostate cancer, with both prostatitis and cancer occurring in the same anatomic location in the prostate gland–prostatitis perhaps triggering cancer.
Further statistics are difficult to obtain as no serious research effort is underway in the United States to conquer prostatitis despite the known high prevalence of the disease to those working in the fields of urology, pathology, infectious disease, and infertility.
Prof. Dr. LJ. Denis of the International Consultation of Urological Diseases (in official relation to the World Health Organization) writes in a letter of May 10, 1995: “I am afraid that nobody keeps statistics on prostatitis. . . .”
Apparently, prostatitis has been overlooked because it does not kill people and because it is a “shame disease” where those afflicted are unable to talk about it, yet it is perhaps the most curable, and preventative measure for all three of the prostatic afflictions: prostatitis, benign prostatic hypertrophy, and cancer.
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