Health officials consider a country to have a “high” rate if they have more than 30 cases per 100,000.  The MS Society of Canada estimates the rate of MS in Canada is as high as 240 per 100,000 people - so prevalent that reports show that one out of every two Canadians know someone with MS.

CBC News reports incidence among the different provinces, from a high of 340 cases for every 100,000 people in the Prairies to a low of 180 cases per 100,000 in Quebec. Research shows that women make up a disproportionate number of MS sufferers: they are victims of the disease more than men by a factor of about 3 to 1.

About 400,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with MS, twice as many women as men.

Speculation regarding the cause of MS has ranged from environment, genetics, birth control pills, vitamin deficiencies (especially Vitamin D), exposure to pesticides and even differences in the pathogens (viruses, bacteria etc.) that affect people in different climates (people who live closest to the equator have the lowest incidence of MS).

Canadians are at the center of another neurological disease cluster discussion – actor Michael J. Fox and four other members of a television crew he worked with from 1976-1980 have all contracted Parkinson’s, an event that has a probability of about 1 in 1,000 according to Director of the Neurodegenerative Disorders Center at the University of British Columbia Dr. Donald Calne.

As is the case with the Canadian MS cluster, experts speculated that pharmaceutical drugs (such as Thorazine, Reglan, or Resperidal) were behind the formation of this disease cluster. Resaearch has shown that farm workers who used the weedkiller Paraquat – common during that time – demonstrated up to three times the normal incidence of Parkinson’s.

As for why MS is seen clustering in Canadians, particularly women, Professor of Neurlology George Ebers at the University of Oxford theorizes the culprit is “… something presumably that is preventable, we just need to find out what it is in the environment or….an environmental interaction with genes.”

 
You can watch videos of Canadian women MS patients after CCSVI Intervention treatment here and here. And videos of Canadian men MS patients getting Liberation treatment (as it was dubbed by Dr. Zamboni) are here and here.