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The Ombudsman of our area newspaper, The Fresno Bee, devoted her usual Sunday column today to soothing some ruffled feathers. These had resulted from a single sentence in a story about the Pope and his possible diagnosis of PD. The story, which had appeared last week, had originated at the New York Times, and included a sentence that compared the possible necessity to remove the Pope from his lifetime position, to the Kremlin's forced removal of Nikita Khruschev from office. This reminded me that the comments that have been expressed here about the Pope's reference to his affliction as a "gift from God" may not be where we should be focusing our attention. There is an ominous aspect to the speculation that has begun to appear in stories about the Pope's health. These center on his ability to continue to carry out his duties is he has PD. For those of us who are older and are retired, this is not so serious. We get used to having young whippersnappers consider us to be doddering geezers, and we no longer have to get up and prove our worth in the arena each workday. But for all of those growing numbers of young onset PWPs, this is not good news. To have such an august person catapult PD into the international spotlight is very good news. The public awareness of PD can lead to better funding of research. But to equate that problem with the inability to work effectively is bad news indeed. Most young onset PWPs will have many productive years ahead of them these days, and cannot welcome the possibility of having the public equate a diagnosis of PD with incapacity to work and support a family. Martha Rohrer