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    Created in 2008, Phoenix Rising is the largest and oldest forum dedicated to furthering the understanding of and finding treatments for complex chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), fibromyalgia (FM), long COVID, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and allied diseases.

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Guardian: UK Govt. knew of danger of organophosphates, ignored it (Mar quoted).

JPV

ɹǝqɯǝɯ ɹoıuǝs
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858
Mother nature may be a bitch but much of mankind is sociopathic. Pick your poison...
 
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Hip

Senior Member
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17,824
but much of mankind is sociopathic.

This is the viewpoint that Mike Adams's Natural News website unfortunately tends foster in people. I have an acquaintance who frequently reads Mike Adams's website, and assumes everything written on its is gospel truth. He knows very little about science, so cannot critically assess the articles and statements.

The result is that he increasingly sees the manmade world as a dark place, and looks cynically at human activity. So this is the sort of mental outlook that Mike Adams in engendering in people: cynicism. Not a great gift to the world. Cynicism is not the same as skepticism.

Skeptical scrutiny and assessment of the activities of authorities is an essential thing. And vice versa: skeptical assessment of the activities of the general public is also an essential thing. In fact you can never fully trust either group, and I think the best thing about a good democracy its that it sets up these two groups, the authorities and the general public, so as to keep a skeptical eye on each other.
 
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picante

Senior Member
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829
Location
Helena, MT USA
Mother nature may be a bitch but much of mankind is sociopathic. Pick your poison...
1-2% is the figure I keep seeing for psychopaths, aka sociopaths. 20% or so are suppressive types who block efforts at improvement. 80% yearn for and strive for improvement in society. So I guess we know who's in power now.
 

picante

Senior Member
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Location
Helena, MT USA
I suspect this Mike Adams dude is a non-entity for most people here, @Hip. I'm just interested in hearing about toxic exposure and its role in ME/CFS, because my life started with toxic exposure.

Any idea which of the body's enzymes deal with perchlorate detoxification? Rocket fuel for the Cold War: It was in our water supply when I was growing up. Nobody knew.

But that's the good ol' American weapons addiction coming back to bite us in the "arse", as @SilverbladeTE might put it.
 

Hip

Senior Member
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17,824
Well Humans as individuals tend to be benign :)
Put them in groups though and it's a different matter.

I once came across an analysis of why so much heinous activity was perpetrated by the Nazi party. The view was that the individuals were not evil, but rather the structure of the Nazi party was such that it encouraged the worst in people. So structural issues in a society are always important.
 

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
I'm just interested in hearing about toxic exposure and its role in ME/CFS

As far as I am aware, the only toxins that have been linked to ME/CFS are:

• the three classes of pesticide mentioned above,
• mycotoxins from mold growths,
• ciguatoxin exposure (which comes from certain fish) causes ciguatera, which can later sometimes lead to ME/CFS.

More speculatively tung oil, a natural wood vanish that comes from the seeds of the tung tree, is believed to trigger ME/CFS.

I don't know of any other toxins that are linked to ME/CFS.



Perchlorate I don't know anything about, but it seems to be linked to thyroid disorders. I could not find any link to ME/CFS.
 

picante

Senior Member
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829
Location
Helena, MT USA
I think the link to ME/CFS would be an indirect one for many toxins taken in isolation. The entire toxic load would be more relevant. Mine included perchlorate, mercury, lead, 2nd-hand smoke, common herbicides and pesticides, plus some combination of the vaccine adjuvants used in the late 50s and early 60s. Those are the ones I know about.

The perchlorate was already affecting my thyroid function in my 20s, but I didn't realize what the symptoms meant.

The first aluminum adjuvant was approved 90 years ago, with no safety studies. They're still assuming it is safe, and many vaccine safety studies now use aluminum hydroxide in the placebo.

The trigger for my 23-year illness was reactivated EBV. But why would my immune system let that happen? Would that have anything to do with overall viral load? Would it have something to do with live-virus vaccines, or the the viruses that were included unintentionally? Our polio vaccine had SV40 in it, and a cocktail of other monkey viruses that came to light later.

The questions we ask on these forums are often the questions that medical politics shoves under the rug. Or to call it by a more accurate name, medical fascism. Call it whatever you like, it's the age-old issue of who has the authority to speak. Galileo took issue with it, and so do many of us.
 

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
I think the link to ME/CFS would be an indirect one for many toxins taken in isolation. The entire toxic load would be more relevant.

Do you know of any studies that have linked an individual's entire toxic load to the triggering of any disease? I have not seen any, but would be interested if you knew of some. There was speculation that Gulf War Illness might arise from certain toxic combinations, but generally I have not seen much evidence along these lines.

Usually specific toxins cause specific diseases, because toxins have specific actions in the body. If two toxins were to work in tandem to create a disease, they would have to do so via specific biochemical pathways.


Would it have something to do with live-virus vaccines,

Certainly I think we can blame ME/CFS on a lack of vaccines. If we had had coxsackievirus B, echovirus and Epstein-Barr virus vaccines in our youth, most of us here might have never developed ME/CFS.

I actually think it is criminal that a vaccine for coxsackievirus B and echovirus has not been introduced. There are apparently no major technical challenges to developing such a vaccine (unlike the EBV vaccine, which is still in development, and has technical challenges to overcome).

Yet for some reason, few ME/CFS patients seem to call out for more viral vaccines. I know a vaccine will not help people who already have ME/CFS, but it would likely prevent the next generation from developing this disease. We may well be able to eradicate most new cases of ME/CFS with such vaccines.

Perhaps this is just selfishness, and lack of interest in future generations.


The trigger for my 23-year illness was reactivated EBV. But why would my immune system let that happen?

Your reactivation may have happened as a result of catching another pathogen, which you may have done asymptomatically, so that you were unaware you caught it. Dr Chia has shown for example that catching an enterovirus often causes varicella virus reactivation.
 
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alex3619

Senior Member
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13,810
Location
Logan, Queensland, Australia
If two toxins were to work in tandem to create a disease, they would have to do so via specific biochemical pathways.
I don't have a reference but this effect is hypothesized. Two herbicides (I think) were used in an area. Either area was safe to live. Where both were used there was a very high incidence of childhood cognitive issues. I think this was in Mexico or New Mexico. Whether or not this stands up to further scrutiny I do not know.

However it is theoretically possible that overlapping issues from different toxins might create additional problems. It remains a valid hypothesis. These chemicals, where tested for safety, are never tested in combination with other chemicals. To do that is a problem in combinatorial explosion ... totally unfeasible. So it requires community surveillance to find out what is happening ....and such surveillance is politically discouraged.
 

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
There are two things here: one is the idea that a specific combination of say two or three specific toxins could cause a disease together, even though they are safe individually. There were animal models showing this to be the case with some of the Gulf War Illness drugs and chemicals.

The other is the idea that toxins are like straws on a camel's back, and the more straws you place on its back, the more likely it is to break. I don't think that this "too many straws" model of disease causality has been demonstrated anywhere.
 

Gingergrrl

Senior Member
Messages
16,171
• ciguatoxin exposure (which comes from certain fish) causes ciguatera, which can later sometimes lead to ME/CFS.

@Hip Is this the same toxin or entity that is related to certain forms of anesthesia? I had a minor surgery in 2012 (I had monitored anesthesia not general) but had a horrific recovery, got very ill, and within one week was diagnosed with mono from EBV. Could the ciguatoxin relate to my case? I know there is nothing I can do about it now but am still curious.

ETA- Am asking in general for anyone who knows, not just Hip! Thanks.
 

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
@Gingergrrl
You're thinking of curare, used as a muscle relaxant during anesthesia, and originally used by South American Indians to make poison arrow heads for hunting. I am not aware of any chemical connection between ciguatoxin and curare.
 

Gingergrrl

Senior Member
Messages
16,171
@Gingergrrl
You're thinking of curare, used as a muscle relaxant during anesthesia, and originally used by South American Indians to make poison arrow heads for hunting. I am not aware of any chemical connection between ciguatoxin and curare.

I think it is ciguatoxin that is somehow connected to anesthesia but I do not recall the details. It was from a post by @zzz unless I am totally screwing up the word which is possible! Am still trying to figure out if it relates to my case.
 

picante

Senior Member
Messages
829
Location
Helena, MT USA
Thank you, Alex, you said it so much better than I could.

Perhaps this is just selfishness, and lack of interest in future generations.
This is the same brand of lunch meat we see these days in the hysterical media. Just heap judgment and blame on anyone who questions vaccine safety.

I've watched a couple generations go by, and the increase in neurological diseases and immune-related diseases has been frightening. It is vital to decrease neurotoxic exposures on all fronts if we don't want to end up with a large population of neurological cripples.

So you see that we both have concerns for the current generation and the future of humankind; it just takes different forms. We need a lot of information that just isn't available. The questions I have are ones that have not received much scientific funding. You can call this a lack of evidence. I call it actively blocking scientific progress on important issues -- vested interests making sure there is a lack of evidence.

A scientific point of view:
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fneur.2015.00004/full
A legal point of view:
http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/pelr/vol28/iss2/6/
 

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,824
@picante
The possible selfishness I was talking about refers to the ME/CFS community, myself included, who rarely focus any of their advocacy time to trying to get vaccinations against the ME/CFS-associated viruses developed and introduced.

Trying to fight off a viral infection by eventually developing better antivirals or immunomodulators is one approach; but preventing those viral infections in the first place will probably be a lot easier. Coxsackievirus B is also linked to sudden heart attacks and type 1 diabetes, so its possible that a coxsackievirus B vaccine will reduce the incidence of these conditions as well as a ME/CFS.


Vaccine safety is an important issue, and it's not a contradiction to want to see a few more vaccines introduced, and to also want to see better research on vaccine adverse events and safety.

I suggested elsewhere that it might be possible to replace aluminum hydroxide adjuvant with something else that acts as an immunostimulant.

This 2008 paper said that the aluminum hydroxide adjuvant may boosts immunity by inducing uric acid, and thereby activating inflammatory dendritic cells. If that were the case, I wonder if you could simply replace the aluminum hydroxide adjuvant in the vaccine with uric acid itself, which would not accumulate anywhere in the body.
 

zzz

Senior Member
Messages
675
Location
Oregon
I think it is ciguatoxin that is somehow connected to anesthesia but I do not recall the details. It was from a post by @zzz unless I am totally screwing up the word which is possible! Am still trying to figure out if it relates to my case.

You are correct. From the PR article A Neurological Channelopathy in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS)?
Ciguatoxin – greatly increased levels of the ciguatoxin epitope, a marker of altered sodium channel activity, in most CFS patients provide the best evidence yet a (sodium) channelopathy occurs in CFS. Whether these findings reflect a chronic disease process or something more specific to CFS is unclear but research, thankfully, is underway to elucidate the intersection between CFS and ciguatera (Pearn 2001, Hokama et .al. 2002, 2003a/b).

The references are elucidated in full in the original article.

Since some anesthetics use the sodium channel, if this channel is already disrupted "in most CFS patients", then the use of such anesthetics in general anesthesia can have much more powerful effects than intended, both immediately (a dangerous level of CNS depression) and long term (much longer recovery times from anesthesia).

From the National CFIDS Foundation Web site:
Information about anesthesia

Anesthesia has adversely affected patients with CFIDS (also known as chronic fatigue syndrome and myalgic encephalomyelitis). The reason for this has been found. Recent research* funded by the National CFIDS Foundation, Inc. found that a substance, much like ciguatera toxin, is being produced in the body by a disease process in those with CFIDS/ME/CFS. Dubbed the “ciguatera epitope,” this research explains the danger of using any anesthesia that uses the sodium channel at the cellular level. Some anesthesiologists have had success blocking the sodium channel during anesthesia for CFIDS/ME/CFS patients.

*J Clin Lab Anal, 6/2003, Hokama et al
*J Toxicology, 12/2003, Hokama et al
 
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Hip

Senior Member
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17,824
Apparently that study finding ciguatoxin in ME/CFS patients did not pan out. It was later discovered that the ciguatoxin test they used was actually detecting cardiolipin. See this post.

However, even though we now know ciguatoxin is not generally found in ME/CFS patients, you can still develop ME/CFS from being poisoned by ciguatoxin arising from an external source (ie fish).
 
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