What's with Multiple Sclerosis and the Irish?

Is MS caused by some Irish gene? If it is, it’s probably a green gene.

With the embarrassingly little that we know about Multiple Sclerosis, I would guess Ireland's high rate of MS is just some aberration in demographics. It would be good to have statistics of Scotland and Wales.

We just finished MS Awareness Week, and we’re in the middle of March, National MS Month. I salute those afflicted with MS, and I hope MS Research gets better faster.

The tree map below shows that Ireland has the highest MS rate of 60-some countries analyzed. Following Ireland is Hungary, Canada and Russia. The U.S. is 11th.

The world map below is another way to look and understand this data.




Thanks to Many-Eyes.com for the visualization capabilities. Data was obtained through the MS International Federation web site.

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