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

[Gingergrrl]

I would still not risk it with that type of anesthesia and surgery after what happened to me getting mono right after surgery (and I was healthy then!). I think it is a big risk factor for many of us. I just wish I understood it better.

 

[Hip]

If I remember rightly, @zzz and @Gingergrrl, didn't you both have your ME/CFS appear after minor surgery with a local anesthetic?

 

[Gondwanaland]

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.

Whaaaat, no abx, NSAIDs, SSRIs, statins, acetaminophen, Bblockers, anesthetics, blood thinners??? You lucky gal!

 

[Gingergrrl]

If I remember rightly, @zzz and @Gingergrrl, didn't you both have your ME/CFS appear after minor surgery with a local anesthetic?

@Hip Not exactly. Mine was a bigger surgery even though I said "minor" and I was put to sleep for it with anasthesia but MAC not general. I developed mono from EBV right after surgery which was confirmed by two different tests at the time. It took several months to recover and then I got a second virus about 10 mos later (maybe the coxsackie virus- I will never know?) which led to the ME/CFS. But my EBV IgM titers also re-activated and stayed that way. I was completely EBV negative even on IgG prior to the surgery (tested in 2010) and somehow had not been exposed until age 41 (2012) which led to a very severe case. Not sure if any of this info is clear or helpful but wanted to explain.

 

[Strawberry]

Speaking of toxic exposure, @Hip or anyone who knows, is there any way at all to know if it is caused by toxin exposure? This is one on my list of my "potential" triggers, although there are potential signs of issues even earlier.

To be specific, about 1987 or 88 I inhaled this: http://msdsreport.com/ds.cfm?msds=BQKRY&name=IBM 3800 TONER&mfg=PELIKAN INC TONER DEVELOPER DIV in a work related accident. Whether or not it caused my issues is debatable, but I wonder if it can ever even be proven if it is? Does it stay in the system? Or does it eventually flush out?

 

[SilverbladeTE]

Well talking of full toxic exposure, I lived right next to one of the biggest steel works in Europe, assholes built it with NO separation between it and the town
So it is also one of the worst polluted sites in Europe and we've got a life expectancy lower than North Korea
Ergo heavy metals etc plus radium and others from my Dad's work in clockwork factory


see? no separation, should be at VERY least a mile preferably 3 miles between such a site and habitation

 

[Undisclosed]

Repeated or prolonged exposure to organophosphates may result in the same effects as acute exposure including the delayed symptoms. Other effects reported in workers repeatedly exposed include impaired memory and concentration, disorientation, severe depressions, irritability, confusion, headache, speech difficulties, delayed reaction times, nightmares, sleepwalking and drowsiness or insomnia. An influenza-like condition with headache, nausea, weakness, loss of appetite, and malaise has also been reported.

 

[SilverbladeTE]

Kina
British government covered up health problems in workers who made nerve gas for the government during the Cold War. It was Britain who invented the "V" agents which are a lot more powerful and way more persistent than Sarin.
all this could have been avoided if they had been honest, get the facts out decades ago and had OPs banned, but, fat chance!
Politicians who took bribes from companies to cover up problems from such poisons should be sentenced to life cleaning up contamination!

 

[Hip]

I developed some psychosis symptoms during my exposure to organophosphates, which is not an unusual occurrence when the exposure is significant. I suddenly felt completely detached form normality, and this lasted a good 6 to 12 months. Mentally I was living on another planet during that time. It was a horrendous period for me.

During this time, I was unable to produce any seminal fluid. This complete dried up. Malathion is known to cause testicular toxicity and affect spermatogenesis:

Malathion-induced testicular toxicity is associated with spermatogenic apoptosis and alterations in testicular enzymes and hormone levels in male Wistar rats

At the time I had no idea of why this was happening to me, but I had a hunch it was due to a toxic exposure of some sort. It was only a year later that I discovered, through questioning people in the house, that a large amount of organophosphates has been spilt indoors and not properly cleaned up.

I spoke to one of the UK's experts in organophosphate poisoning, Elizabeth Sigmund, who worked tirelessly to bring to light the dangers of organophosphates, in spite of the pesticide industry downplaying these dangers. She told me that people with significant organophosphate exposures like mine fell into to categories: those that slowly got better over the years, and those that slowly got even worse, even after the organophosphate exposure was over.


Then just as I was starting to recover from that organophosphate poisoning episode, I caught a nasty respiratory virus; that was perhaps too much for my system, and ME/CFS soon ensued.



By the way, you don't need to worry about organophosphate residues in food, because I read these are generally negligible, and of no real concern. You need to be directly poisoned with organophosphates to start getting these severe symptoms.

Apparently if we stopped using pesticides, we would lose around 30% of our crops to insects. So there is a good case for pesticides. But clearly we need safer ones.

Neonicotinoids pesticides were developed in the 1990s to replace organophosphates, due to the latter's toxicity to humans. However, unfortunately these neonicotinoids have been associated with honey bee colony collapse disorder, and also ill effects on birds, and so some types of neonicotinoid pesticides have been banned in Europe.

 

[zzz]

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.

The original paper cited above noted your main point; this is why the substance was referred to as a ciguatoxin epitope, rather than ciguatoxin itself. Here is the first paragraph of the Introduction of the first paper:

This study was initiated on the premise that patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), myalgic encephalomyelitis, and chronic ciguatera poisoning (CCFP) show similar clinical symptoms (1–3). The persistent occurrence of an endogenous lipid similar in structure to ciguatoxin (4) is one of the clinical features of these diseases.

The central point here is that this endogenous lipid behaves similarly to ciguatoxin. Reading your referenced post from Rich, he states that this lipid was later identified to be cardiolipin. Unfortunately, he does not cite any sources. However, this in no way changes the effects on the sodium channel, which appear to be quite real. General anesthetics that use the sodium channel have a history of causing problems in people with ME/CFS, Both the ciguatera toxin and its epitope lower the threshold for opening voltage-gated sodium channels in synapses of the nervous system, . For this reason, it seems to be important to avoid anesthesia that uses the sodium channel, as its effects with this lipid appear to be additive.

I would still not risk it with that type of anesthesia and surgery after what happened to me getting mono right after surgery (and I was healthy then!). I think it is a big risk factor for many of us. I just wish I understood it better.

Surgery in general is very traumatic, and your getting mono could have simply been a result of the trauma weakening your body enough for the EBV to reactivate. It's not clear whether or not the anesthesia played any part. But certainly, avoiding anesthesia that uses the sodium channel does appear to be wise, and I don't see anything in the thread that @Hip referenced that contradicts this.

If I remember rightly, @zzz and @Gingergrrl, didn't you both have your ME/CFS appear after minor surgery with a local anesthetic?

I had very minor surgery to remove a small basal cell carcinoma, which had developed on the site of an old shingles lesion. I felt fine for 24 hours after the surgery; I felt no direct side effects at all. However, as the lesion was at the end of a nerve that connected directly to the spine where varicella zoster viruses were dormant, it apparently reactivated the VZV which caused my relapse 24 hours later - a relapse that occurred over a period of a couple of seconds. During the next week, I actually had a minor recurrence of shingles, verified by my physician, so it seems indeed that that the VZV reactivation was the cause of my relapse. The use of a small amount of local anesthesia appears to be entirely coincidental; I had had similar amounts of local anesthesia for various dental procedures over the preceding years while I was in remission with no negative side effects.

 

[picante]

Whaaaat, no abx, NSAIDs, SSRIs, statins, acetaminophen, Bblockers, anesthetics, blood thinners??? You lucky gal!

Now that you mention it, I was given amoxicillin when I had mono. After 5 days with zero effect, I told the doc this must be a virus, because abx are frighteningly effective, in my experience. That's when he threw erythromycin at me.

So maybe 2 antibiotics were more devastating than one.

By that age (35), I already had an acute case of medical distrust due to prior misdiagnoses. I tended to avoid doctors and drugs. So 2 days later, I was back at the clinic demanding a test for mono.

Doc: "You can throw those antibiotics away."

 

[Hip]

The central point here is that this endogenous lipid behaves similarly to ciguatoxin. Reading your referenced post from Rich, he states that this lipid was later identified to be cardiolipin. Unfortunately, he does not cite any sources.

No unfortunately he doesn't, and I just took Rich at his word. I did just now try to find any publication where Hokama says that its was cardiolipin after all that he found in ME/CFS patients, but I could not find any. A list of Hokama's papers in PubMed is give here.

However, this in no way changes the effects on the sodium channel, which appear to be quite real. General anesthetics that use the sodium channel have a history of causing problems in people with ME/CFS, Both the ciguatera toxin and its epitope lower the threshold for opening voltage-gated sodium channels in synapses of the nervous system, . For this reason, it seems to be important to avoid anesthesia that uses the sodium channel, as its effects with this lipid appear to be additive.

I read just now that local anesthetics block voltage-gated sodium channels, whereas some ciguatoxins have the reverse effect, and lower the threshold for opening of these channels.

Vinpocetine, a supplement I find quite useful for ME/CFS brain fog, and have taken daily for a number of years, is a potent inhibitor of voltage-gated sodium channels, which would be similar to a local anesthetic, I presume. Vinpocetine also has effects on calcium and potassium channels.

Lidocaine and ketamine, two of Dr Goldstein's favorite ME/CFS drugs, block voltage-gated sodium channels as well.

How all this fits together, I am not quite sure at the moment.

 

[JPV]

During the next week, I actually had a minor recurrence of shingles, verified by my physician, so it seems indeed that that the VZV reactivation was the cause of my relapse. The use of a small amount of local anesthesia appears to be entirely coincidental; I had had similar amounts of local anesthesia for various dental procedures over the preceding years while I was in remission with no negative side effects.

Were you put on a course of antibiotics post surgery? I wonder if that might have also been a factor since there is so much speculation that antibiotics can throw the microbiome off balance.

 

[brenda]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consett_Iron_Company#/media/File:United_Kingdom._Consett,_England._Night_and_day,_seven_days_and_seven_nights_a_week,_whirling_smoke_cloud_rise_from..._-_NARA_-_541767.tif

My home town in action before the steel works were pulled down. I grew up a couple of miles away from it but blow me, I moved right besides it in my early 20's, as SB says, right besides the community. People die early here of strokes or cancer or they end up on street drugs.

 

[picante]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consett_Iron_Company#/media/File:United_Kingdom._Consett,_England._Night_and_day,_seven_days_and_seven_nights_a_week,_whirling_smoke_cloud_rise_from..._-_NARA_-_541767.tif

Good God! That is heart-wrenching.

 

[Undisclosed]

I would like to actually discuss the organophosphate issue (thread keeps going off-topic). Does anybody recall the name of that woman who lives in the UK who has such extreme chemical sensitivities that she has to live in a shack, in the cold, with no help from the government. I don't know what happened to her. Wasn't it exposure to sheep dip that she feels caused her illness?

Here are some articles that I found related to OP's:

• Wednesday, November 11, 1998 Published at 11:27 GMT Sci/Tech Doctors warn on sheep dip
• The Myth of the Malingerer
• Farmers' illness link to sheep dip
• Crucial sheep dip poisoning document ‘destroyed’
  
• Toxic times – exposure to multiple chemicals
  
  

 

[Sasha]

@Kina - http://forums.phoenixrising.me/inde...lian-mccarthys-den-project.29094/#post-443174

 

[Undisclosed]

Thanks so much for the link @Sasha -- for anybody who is interested here is a link to a Guardian article about Gillian (it was sheep dip poisoning that she mentions as one of the causes of her illness (multiple chemical exposures)) -- http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2008/jan/05/weekend7.weekend3

 

[picante]

Toxic times – exposure to multiple chemicals

From the above article, I think this is interesting:
"The major chemical exposure suffered by these veterans is now recognized to be low dose exposure to the nerve agent sarin together with chlorpyrifos (an organophosphate) and pyridostigmine bromide 28 which act at the same sites."

On a related subect:
In most of the discussion I see about MCS, there is a lot of talk about "allergies" to toxic substances. I find this very weird. I understand allergies as being an immune response to something that's normally benign, like strawberries or latex or pollen.

I can understand that potent toxins like sarin (it's classified as a weapon of mass destruction) and mercury and organophosphates can overwhelm the body's detox systems (and also induce actual allergies). But when a person becomes hypersensitive to carpet fumes or memory foam or fabric conditioners (dryer sheets), it's due to the chemical toxins and their body's inability to deal with them.

What do you think? Is there an immune response involved, too?

 

[picante]

http://www.pan-uk.org/pestnews/Issue/pn72/pn72p9.pdf
I'm still going through this article slowly; there's a lot in it, and this seems highly relevant to anyone exposed to organophosphates. It also has some references to studies on combinations of chemicals:

"Synergism
Toxic effects of some chemicals can be multiplied by orders of magnitude in the presence of structurally different compounds, for example, pyrethroids, organophosphates and DEET (an insect repellent) [32,33,34]. It has been
established that malathion and permethrin act synergistically making their use as a combined treatment for head lice in children particularly unwise. Many pesticide formulations contain more than one active ingredient.

Furthermore, compounds used as solvents, dispersants and wetting agents in pesticide formulations that are generally regarded as inert may also be toxic in their own right, trigger MCS, and/or act synergistically, for example phenols in organophosphate pesticide [35] and in some herbicide [36\ formulations. It is unusual for pesticides to be applied alone; therefore mixtures of active compounds and ‘inerts’ must be fully tested."​