Welcome! I am a Crohn's colitis survivor, fighter and persistant proactive patient that will not stop the search.. 4 THE CURE! Meanwhile, I will utilize this blog to educate, support and provide up to date, valuable information about Crohn's Disease, IBD, IBS and many other chronic conditions.
Showing posts with label Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis. Show all posts
Informative 3 min. YouTube video to raise awareness about the Crohn's-MAP bacteria connection. How humans are exposed and vulnerable to MAP - There are now ways to test for MAP. I also posted the links that were provided on the YouTube page under the video for further reading/info.
- The Crohn’s MAP Vaccine A modern therapeutic Vaccine against MAP has been created. Preliminary studies in animals have shown it to be safe and effective. Next, a trial in humans is needed to take the vaccine from lab to clinic. Professor John Hermon-Taylor, King's College London http://crohnsmapvaccine.com
A writer for Psychology Today, contributes the following article (and 2 more that I will post after this article) pertaining to something that I have read up on and firmly believe is the culprit to Crohn's disease. Everyone should read this information and remember it. I think a lot of people have been made hopeless or skeptical in regards to Crohn's disease because people are told so many things that contradict that there will ever be a cure. Doctor's have been telling people for decades now that there will never be a cure. It's a new day people, get out of the rut of thinking in the past and open your mind to new developements and discoveries. It's worth it and I am super duper hopeful.
Through luck, hard work, good fortune, perseverance, and wonderful doctors, I seem to be one of the few people in the world who can claim to be “cured” of Crohn’s Disease. I’ve told this story before, in several places, but I feel a need to get the information out to a more general audience, even though this is not a psychology story but a medical and scientific one. In September, 2005, I wrote a small article for the PCC SoundConsumer, a very small newspaper published by a local Seattle natural foods grocery store, about my experience with Crohn’s Disease.http://www.pccnaturalmarkets.com/sc/0509/sc0509-hw-crohns.htmFor some reason, that little article went viral, and to this day I receive letters from people from all over the world asking for information about Crohn’s Disease and its probable connection with a specific microbe, mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP). I told the story again in a scientific journal, the Paratuberculosis Newsletter,http://www.paratuberculosis.info/web/images/newsletters/2012q2.pdfBut that journal is not highly visible. Since 8 years has gone by, and I have much more information now, I am going to put this on Psychology Today, for the benefit of all of those who suffer from Crohn’s or who love people who suffer from Crohn’s. I will have to tell this story in several segments, since Psych Today restricts individual posts to about 800 words. Please bear with me. I will be providing a lot of information, references, and information that is crucial to individual and public health.Single case reports are no longer the fashion in modern medicine. We all know that an n of 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 ad infinitum equals nothing in terms of proving causality in “evidence based medicine”. Proving anything in the case of Crohn’s Disease is difficult. See this excellent review of this situation, Causality and gastrointestinal infections: Koch, Hill, and Crohn’s by Anne-Marie Lowe, Cedric P Yansouni, and Marcel A Behr, Lancet Infect Dis 2008:8: 720–26. You must understand that for scientists today, a single case report is virtually meaningless. However, my victory over Crohn’s Disease doesn’t prove anything by itself, but I think that it matters insofar as it suggests the desirability of pursuing a more detailed scientific inquiry. Furthermore, there are hundreds of thousands of people with Crohn’s, many of them children, who are being treated under a different paradigm, and with variable success. Moreover, I think many of those people got sick because they consumed contaminated food products without knowing it, sometimes years before the disease manifested itself. I think there is better way to treat Crohn’s, and better yet, to prevent it. In brief, I think I was “cured” of Crohn’s Disease with antibiotics directed at the eradication of Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis.Background: MAP is a small bacteria in the same family as leprosy and tuberculosis. In 1894, two veterinarians, Dr. H.A. Johne and Dr. L. Frothingham, identified this organism in a cow with weight loss and poor milk production in Germany. It is an acid-fast bacterium, like TB and leprosy, but has other properties as well. The best place to read about MAP is on the web sitewww.johnes.org Farmers rapidly learned that their cows could develop either bovine TB or what came to be known as Johne’s Disease. Both were serious and expensive for the farmers. However, for various reasons, everyone agreed that tuberculosis could be transmitted from cows to people, and many public health measures were put into place to stop bovine TB. However, to this day, the USDA and the IOE, the World Organization for Animal Healthhttp://www.oie.int/deny that MAP is a “zoonotic disease”, a disease that can be transmitted from animals to people. The ostensible reasons for this are that MAP cannot be visualized in human tissues with ordinary microscopes (while it is easy to see MAP in animal specimens); PCR studies and other DNA fingerprinting technologies yield ambiguous results; and nobody dares to try the experiment to prove Koch’s postulates, which would be to grow human MAP in culture, and then feed those germs to human infants. That would be immoral and ridiculous. For various reasons, scientists dispute the claim that MAP causes Crohn’s Disease because Koch’s postulates have not been fulfilled, even though nobody has ever grown M. Leprae (the germ that causes leprosy) in culture. It has to be grown in the foot pads of armadillos…. Koch’s postulates are not applied to viruses, prions, or other pathogens. Even though MAP comes very close to meeting Koch’s postulates, its pathogenicity is disputed. (There was even an experiment in the 1980s in which MAP was grown from human biopsy specimens, and then fed to baby goats. The goats got Johne’s Disease. But it was a small n…) As a result, animals that test positive for MAP are not culled and eliminated from human food products. They can be sold for meat, into the food supply. Moreover, viable MAP can be cultured from milk, including pastuerized milk, around the world. MAP is a very stubborn bacteria, resistant to heat and chlorine. It thrives on biofilms, and has a persistent spore that can last for years. The incidence of Crohn’s Disease in the world has grown in proportion to the use of dairy products. For example, Japan had little Crohn’s 100 years ago, and now it is becoming a significant problem. When you go to the grocery store and consider buying raw milk products, remember that MAP is endemic to cows, sheep, and goats, and roughly 1% of pasteurized milk in the US contains viable MAP.
This is another great article. I knew that Dr. Borody, a doctor and professor out of Australia, developed FMT's (Fecal Matter Transplants) and was 1st to use the transplants to treat c-diff. Interesting enough he is also considering FMT's for other digestive problems and even neurological conditions. It will be interesting to see what illnesses are helped with this procedure. Here in the US doesn't even have a billing code for FMT's AND the FDA have only permitted transplants for difficult cases of c-diff, patients who do not respond to the antibiotic, that only around 30% of the patients respond to. FMT's have a 90% recovery rate. The question again is why not go with the treatment that has a higher success rate rather than lower. Very sad that the US is so slow to adopt new and smarter treatments that will get people well. I won't even go there today. It is an issue that probably raises my blood pressure if I think about it too long. Not even joking. Anyway, after reading this article, I found out that Dr Borody also was the innovator for RHB-104 that is currently in the trial stages at this time. If you have Crohn's and don't know what RHB-104, read up on the treatment. I have some blog posts that will give a good amount of information about the therapy. It will make you smile and give you a boost of hope for something that may actually be able to eradicate Crohn's all together. That is exciting! Professor Thomas Borody gets it! He seems to understand the nature of digestive diseases very well. He is certainly the man who is making some progress with developing real solutions to treat the actual condition and not just remedy the symptoms of a disease. His name is one to remember and follow as he implements treatments that seem to be successful so far. Part of this article gives a little in depth look at his life and how he chose to dedicate his direction to gastrointestinal diseases. Note: I have underlined parts of the article that I felt were things to take note of. He has the stomach for it | JPost | Israel News: '' Prof. Thomas Borody Photo: Courtesy It’s amazing when in medicine, ideas that had seemed ridiculous – such as a chronic infection instead of an annoying boss causing ulcers – eventually become accepted truisms. Even though stools are considered dirty and something to get rid of, gastroenterologists have discovered that they can transplant feces from healthy donors into patients and very often relieve their chronic bacterial infections, irritable bowel disease (IBD), colitis, constipation and even some neurological conditions.
Prof. Thomas Borody, the founder and current medical director of the Center for Digestive Diseases (CDD) in Sydney, Australia, is a major innovator in these surprising treatments.
The CDD is considered a unique medical institution offering novel approaches in researching, diagnosing and treating gastrointestinal conditions. CDD offers a range of services in the day-procedure unit and houses a research and innovation department for conducting clinical trials in collaboration with universities, pharmaceutical companies and medical societies – all focusing on gastroenterology.
