anciendaze
Senior Member
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It would be much more convenient for ID specialists if all infectious pathogens had signed onto their rules about rapid reproduction/replication. Many have not. Nor is there any evidence that antibody titers correlate well with degree of infection in chronic infectious disease. You would think these MDs had slept through the classes which discussed the development of immune tolerance. This is nothing new; there were good reasons tests for TB based on response to tuberculin often did not work on people who were chronically ill. This can still happen if you do not identify the infection right at onset when immune response is strong and specific.
What they are actually saying is that diseases which don't obey their rules for acute disease are not serious problems. They are all convinced, for example, that EBV, HSV, CMV, etc. is in everybody, and doesn't cause problems, except in those rare cases where it may cause cancer, MS or fatal encephalitis. (This is a particular problem for those patients on this forum who have recurring EBV infections.) The diseases being denigrated are certainly inconvenient for ID specialists. They are also inconvenient for patients.
Settling the controversies over Lyme disease is not going to be easy. It was hard to begin with because all doctors had been ignoring all patients with such symptoms for a long time when a cluster of cases around Old Lyme CT caught researcher's attention. There is absolutely no evidence that this was due to introduction of a new pathogen. The distribution of b. burghdorferi indicates it has been around for centuries.
We now know the spirochete is pleomorphic and can form biofilms. Both characteristics enable it to evade detection by routine blood tests. We are still learning about related spirochetes infecting humans. Some appear to be essentially harmless. Treponema denticola is an example. Unfortunately, this has sometimes turned up in the brain during autopsies of patients who died with dementia. Dementia has become a major medical problem with serious economic implications, and people who don't die earlier of other causes have about 1 chance in 3 of suffering dementia.
The extreme cases of chronic infectious disease are tied to HERVs. Some of these represent retroviruses which infected human ancestors 100 million years ago. Most are quite thoroughly defective. This doesn't mean all are either ancient or inactive. Many which are normally inactive in healthy individuals become active in pathological states. HIV is known, for example to activate HERV K-111. This has even been proposed as a marker for infected cells.
Other examples are more controversial, breast cancer typically activates HERVs derived from beta retroviruses related to one which causes mammary tumors in mice. MS can actually produce replication-competent virions resembling a presumed progenitor of HERVs derived from gamma retroviruses. These are not convenient to handle in the laboratory because they are quite slow to replicate, and contamination is easy. If, however, you are looking for the cause of many chronic illnesses you should expect a human pathogen causing them, if such exists, to have a very long latent period to match the time from infancy, when people are easily infected, to sexual maturity, when they can pass the infection to a new generation. Pathogens which replicated as rapidly as those studied in mice would likely kill a human host before being passed on.
My position is unpopular and does not have official backing. I believe all humans are infected with a variety of infectious agents which are currently disregarded the way TB or poliovirus was disregarded for thousands of years. These only benefit the species in the sense of eliminating any individuals whose immune systems are not in top condition from breeding pools.
If you want to go back to nature, and nature's way of dealing with chronic disease, returning to a state in which infant mortality claims about 25% of all children before age 5 would eliminate many individuals who now spend way too much time in doctor's waiting rooms. If you want to deal with many degenerative diseases of unknown etiology, where it is virtually impossible to work backwards from a pathological state which has grown worse over a decade or more, you will need to do a better job of detecting changes that take place at the front end of the pathology, when doctors insist the patient should be healthy.
Unless the gulf between ID specialists and specialists in areas like cardiology, neurology, rheumatology and oncology is narrowed we are not going to make great strides in preventing those diseases which take more and more time from healthy adult life in populations which are largely free of acute infectious diseases.
added: rheumatology to list of medical specializations disconnected from ID.
What they are actually saying is that diseases which don't obey their rules for acute disease are not serious problems. They are all convinced, for example, that EBV, HSV, CMV, etc. is in everybody, and doesn't cause problems, except in those rare cases where it may cause cancer, MS or fatal encephalitis. (This is a particular problem for those patients on this forum who have recurring EBV infections.) The diseases being denigrated are certainly inconvenient for ID specialists. They are also inconvenient for patients.
Settling the controversies over Lyme disease is not going to be easy. It was hard to begin with because all doctors had been ignoring all patients with such symptoms for a long time when a cluster of cases around Old Lyme CT caught researcher's attention. There is absolutely no evidence that this was due to introduction of a new pathogen. The distribution of b. burghdorferi indicates it has been around for centuries.
We now know the spirochete is pleomorphic and can form biofilms. Both characteristics enable it to evade detection by routine blood tests. We are still learning about related spirochetes infecting humans. Some appear to be essentially harmless. Treponema denticola is an example. Unfortunately, this has sometimes turned up in the brain during autopsies of patients who died with dementia. Dementia has become a major medical problem with serious economic implications, and people who don't die earlier of other causes have about 1 chance in 3 of suffering dementia.
The extreme cases of chronic infectious disease are tied to HERVs. Some of these represent retroviruses which infected human ancestors 100 million years ago. Most are quite thoroughly defective. This doesn't mean all are either ancient or inactive. Many which are normally inactive in healthy individuals become active in pathological states. HIV is known, for example to activate HERV K-111. This has even been proposed as a marker for infected cells.
Other examples are more controversial, breast cancer typically activates HERVs derived from beta retroviruses related to one which causes mammary tumors in mice. MS can actually produce replication-competent virions resembling a presumed progenitor of HERVs derived from gamma retroviruses. These are not convenient to handle in the laboratory because they are quite slow to replicate, and contamination is easy. If, however, you are looking for the cause of many chronic illnesses you should expect a human pathogen causing them, if such exists, to have a very long latent period to match the time from infancy, when people are easily infected, to sexual maturity, when they can pass the infection to a new generation. Pathogens which replicated as rapidly as those studied in mice would likely kill a human host before being passed on.
My position is unpopular and does not have official backing. I believe all humans are infected with a variety of infectious agents which are currently disregarded the way TB or poliovirus was disregarded for thousands of years. These only benefit the species in the sense of eliminating any individuals whose immune systems are not in top condition from breeding pools.
If you want to go back to nature, and nature's way of dealing with chronic disease, returning to a state in which infant mortality claims about 25% of all children before age 5 would eliminate many individuals who now spend way too much time in doctor's waiting rooms. If you want to deal with many degenerative diseases of unknown etiology, where it is virtually impossible to work backwards from a pathological state which has grown worse over a decade or more, you will need to do a better job of detecting changes that take place at the front end of the pathology, when doctors insist the patient should be healthy.
Unless the gulf between ID specialists and specialists in areas like cardiology, neurology, rheumatology and oncology is narrowed we are not going to make great strides in preventing those diseases which take more and more time from healthy adult life in populations which are largely free of acute infectious diseases.
added: rheumatology to list of medical specializations disconnected from ID.
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