...some more.
Recently I posted an article from the University of Michegan which
announced that they had discovered that tiny organisms bored into the
white blood cells of people with rheumatoid arthritis and hid there,
travelling around and triggering an immune response. 60 years ago Dr
Thomas McPherson Brown postulated the same by theory, saying
mycoplasma hid inside white blood cells, hitching a ride to colonise new
areas in synovium tissue of people with RA, and was laughed at and
ostracised by the medical community in general.
The U of M discovery vindicated Dr Brown in a couple of ways. Firstly,
organisms directly related to if not responsible for RA DO hid inside
tissue and white blood cells (a particularly aggravating trait as it's the
WBC's job to gobble up invaders, but how can it when the invader is
INSIDE it?). Also, they have practically proved that RA IS an infection of
some sort, a fact glossed over by a complete lack of emphasis on it in the
article.
For people who have read The New Arthritis Breakthrough these are
familiar concepts.
Dr Brown also postulated that mycoplasma colonise in certain areas of
synovium, for example, in the knee. There it could happily live for years,
multiplying, hanging out, and sending out waste. Suddenly, it would
reach critical mass and an allergic response to the waste would be born in
the host (the arthritic). The immune system would then be alerted and
send a bunch of immune response stuff to the offended area, trying to
attack the mycoplasma. But since the mycoplasma were hiding right
inside the tissue, the immune response would attack the tissue in a futile
attempt to do it's job, appearing to the outside viewer to be attacking
healthy tissue. This theory had also been pooh poohed by the mainstream
medical community.
Dr Brown believed that people with RA had perfectly healthy immune
systems and that the immune system was doing exactly what it was
designed to do: drive out invaders. The problem was the invaders
were tricky, hiding, shape shifting things which were incredibly adept at
fooling and outsmarting the host's immune system.
Today on the roadback bulliten board someone posted this abstract to a
study (sorry---I don't have the complete study unless someone is willing
to cough up some dough). The abstract deals with how Lyme's disease
works. Many of Dr Brown's hypothesis were formed by looking at Lyme's
disease, the one type of arthritis CONCLUSIVELY PROVEN to be infectious.
Here is the abstact (the url is at the bottom of this post):
Hidden in plain sight: Borrelia burgdorferi and the
extracellular matrix.
Cabello FC, Godfrey HP, Newman SA.
Department of Microbiology and Immunology, New York Medical College,
Valhalla, NY 10595, USA.
Borrelia burgdorferi, the tick-transmitted etiologic agent of Lyme
borreliosis, can colonize and persist in multiple tissue sites despite
vigorous host immune responses. The extracellular matrix appears to
provide a protective niche for the spirochete. Recent studies in mice
suggest that B. burgdorferi interacts in various ways with collagen and its
associated molecules, exploiting molecular and structural features to
establish microcolonial refugia. Better knowledge of the genetic and
structural bases for these interactions of B. burgdorferi with the
extracellular matrix will be required before an understanding of the
persistence of B. burgdorferi in the tissues and development of chronic
infections can be achieved.
PMID: 17600717 [PubMed - in process>
What that means, in plain English, is the organism responsible for Lyme's
disease gets into the host and hides inside the tissues and cells, where it
establishes colonies. This is exactly as Dr. Brown imagined and believed
60 years ago.
And so the evidence slowly accumulates........
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?
cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=17600717
Edited for spelling
I find it interesting that the Lymes exploit collagen. Lots of posts on how most AI diseases are collagen diseases on the RB. Hmmmmm.
Anybody have any idea what the link to collagen and estrogen is?
Pip
Gimpy,
Thanks for posting this. This was actually what I read a while back in a book by Dr. Brown but my brain just couldn't remember all the words that were used.
Pip - they share the same last three letters? That's kind of a joke, but it may help find your connection. The "gen" in the two words would have to be identified to its meaning, then you would have to parse out the estro and the colla, and perhaps that's the connection. It's been a long time since my studies on the origins of language, but that might be where your answer will come from.