Who Would Have Thought That Willand Pond Would Be The One?

There have been many suspected geographic and vocational ALS clusters -- Guam, Kennedy Space Center, Massachusetts, San Antonio... football and soccer players, golfers, firefighters,...  There has been one certain vocational cluster -- U.S. military personnel.

Who would have thought that concern over a pond in New Hampshire would have been the one to stick in America's attention and get some action?

http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090613/GJNEWS_01/706139949

Suspected clusters magnify the need for us to have a comprehensive and statistically sound registry of all cases of ALS in the United States.  Are these suspicious groupings of cases significant?  If we started counting cases in an orderly manner, would we find a different baseline of ALS prevalence than we assume today?  Do we have a lot of questions that need to be answered?

Perhaps a pond in New Hampshire will finally get the CDC moving with some speed and purpose to at least count the noses and collect the dots so that scientists might connect those dots.  The ALS Registry Act was passed last year, yet today, we're still waiting for a registry.