On 5/22/1999, the People's Pharmacy did a program on Celiac Disease. Joe and Terry's guests were Drs. Alessio Fasano in Baltimore and Peter Green in New York. Connie was also in the studio at WUNC.

Several people asked Connie to summarize this radio program. She was working in the studio during the show and was unable to take notes. Here is a little of what she remembers.

"Basically, we were attempting to raise people's awareness of Celiac disease. Toward that end, the following topics were covered: The many faces of celiac disease; how it often does not present with frank diarrhea and wasting; the progress made in the last decade towards being able to screen and diagnose the illness more easily; how this has led to findings of much higher incidence than previously thought; how much farther ahead other countries are than the US in recognising how prevalent CD actually is; the research study now underway in the US to corrrect that. Also, the physicians outlined how the body responds to gliaden; how the damage to the intestine then leads to problems in other parts of the body, e.g. osteoporosis, anemia, nightblindness, etc; again, many of the difficulties caused by the illness. There were some calls from listeners, and there was a brief patch-in of Dr. Michael Freemark, who described research he is conducting at Duke, to assess whether children with type1 diabetes who also have indicators of CD but are asymptomatic should be placed on a gluten free diet even thought they feel fine. Unfortunately, we ran out of time before we could talk at any length about living with CD. Other than my saying that there are now a great many vendors of GF food, and that the web is a wonderful source of information, the whole "You can handle this thing" part was not covered. I did provide the List's web address, as well as some phone numbers."

If you want to get a copy of the tape, you can go to www.peoplespharmacy.com, or call 1-888-31RADIO and ask for program #268. I think the tapes cost $13.