Creating pathogen-targeted chick egg yoke antibodies to cure ME/CFS

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So I'm just as skeptical as most people with ME/CFS are about new and wonderful treatments but this has me intrigued for a couple reasons. The following is a blog post apparently written by the daughter of an elderly women whom, with the help of some biologists created antibodies to treat her ME/CFS by injecting her own blood into chickens and then eating the raw yoke. This sounds like quite the treatment and at first it sounded very far fetched to me, but now after some digging it seems that this may have some validity to it.

I'm interested in what others think. Here is the article google translated, semi badly at the end I might add.
 

A.B.

Senior Member
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3,780
So I'm just as skeptical as most people with ME/CFS are about new and wonderful treatments but this has me intrigued for a couple reasons. The following is a blog post apparently written by the daughter of an elderly women whom, with the help of some biologists created antibodies to treat her ME/CFS by injecting her own blood into chickens and then eating the raw yoke. This sounds like quite the treatment and at first it sounded very far fetched to me, but now after some digging it seems that this may have some validity to it.

I'm interested in what others think. Here is the article google translated, semi badly at the end I might add.

One would expect the antibodies in the egg to be destroyed by digestion. Doesn't sound credible to me, but then again, I'm not an expert.
 
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One would expect the antibodies in the egg to be destroyed by digestion. Doesn't sound credible to me, but then again, I'm not an expert.
Good point. I did find that although not common, you can ingest antibodies. In fact this study tries to make the case that it might actually be a better and safer way of administration.

A particularly interesting section of the report to me:

"It is interesting to note that antibodies and other beneficial biologicals such as cytokine cocktails have been delivered in mother's milk for eons and have evolved to survive the harsh gut environment, ensuring their arrival to the mucosal lining of the gastrointestinal tract. These naturally occurring biologicals afford protection against a number of gastrointestinal pathogens, including rotavirus, E coli, shigella, Crytosporidium, C difficile, and H pylori, among others. They also protect us against a number of inflammatory bowel conditions, including ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, non‐steroidal anti‐inflammatory drug induced gut injury, and chemotherapy induced mucositis."
 

Valentijn

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In fact this study tries to make the case that it might actually be a better and safer way of administration.
That paper isn't a study. It's their musings about a hypothesis.

Their support for their hypothesis is cited as being http://www.nature.com.sci-hub.cc/nm/journal/v12/n6/full/nm1408.html. This is a study in mice, which do have a similar immune system compared to humans, but a very different digestive system.

They were investigating the experimental model of a disease, not the diseases itself. Their measurement of a lack of side effects was the scientists belief that the orally administered mice didn't look as wasted and scruffy.

There also seems to be very basic info missing, such as how many mice were used. Their abstract is misleading to the point of fraud, making no mention that the study was not conducted on humans, nor that the autoimmune condition being treated was an induced model.

It's not a basis for drawing any conclusions at all.
 
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@Valentijn good point. This paper doesn't seem to be backed up at all by any real research. I'm still interested to see if there is any research backing the original story. It does seem far fetched but at the same time genuine. I'de like to see some type of data.
 

Hip

Senior Member
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created antibodies to treat her ME/CFS by injecting her own blood into chickens and then eating the raw yoke.

I must say, irrespective of whether this idea works in general (and I have no reason to doubt that it did work for the patient in question), I am highly impressed with the creative lateral thinking that has gone into this treatment. There should be an award for such inspired ideas! A great find, @CaptainA!



What I like is the simplicity and accessibility of this treatment: it does not require some complex laboratory setup producing recombinant proteins; it just requires a chicken and a hypodermic needle!

Even for those with suburban gardens, it may be feasible to keep a chicken at the bottom of the garden in a shed, or in a small chicken run, which will lays eggs. Alternatively, if you know someone who already keeps chickens in their garden (I know a friend of a friend whose does), they might agree to allowing you to use one of their chickens for such an experiment.

It only requires one drop of human blood from the ME/CFS patient to be injected into the chest muscle of the chicken every two weeks, so this drop of blood could be easily obtained using a standard finger-prick lancet, then sucked into a hypodermic needle, and injected into the chest muscle of the chicken. So the whole thing is very easy to do, once you have a chicken.



If I understood the Swedish-English translation correctly, this ME/CFS patient had a bacterial infection with TWAR (Taiwan acute respiratory agent), which is the old name for Chlamydia pneumoniae. Ref: 1

Chlamydia pneumoniae is an intracellular bacterium, and is a known cause of ME/CFS. Dr John Chia has found that 9% of his ME/CFS patients have their disease is attributable to Chlamydia pneumoniae.

I am wondering whether this chicken egg yoke technique could be used as a treatment for Lyme disease.



Whether this chicken egg technique would work for viral forms of ME/CFS is unclear. In enterovirus-associated ME/CFS for example, there are already high levels of enterovirus antibodies in the patient's blood, but this does not help the patient much, because in chronic enterovirus infections, the virus lives as an intracellular non-cytolytic infection which antibodies cannot touch.

And if you look at treatments such as intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) therapy for ME/CFS (where extra human antibodies pooled from blood donors are injected into the patient's blood), this has had mixed results, although sometimes it can be pretty effective. Although with IVIG costing $25,000 for a course of treatment, this chicken method is a great deal cheaper!



Egg yolk appears to contain a different immunoglobulin to the normal human IgG and IgM. Egg yolk contains a high concentration of a type of immunoglobulin called immunoglobulin Y (IgY). Apparently IgY does not bind to cellular Fc receptors, and IgY does not activate the complement system.

It says here that:
Chicken antibodies offer many advantages to the traditional mammalian antibodies when used for the detection of mammalian antigen. Due to the evolutionary difference chicken IgY will react with more epitopes on a mammalian antigen, which will give an amplification of the signal.



And it seems that the use of IgY from chicken egg yolk to fight infections has been quite well studied in both humans and animals:

This study found that IgY isolated from chicken egg yoke and injected into dogs infected with canine parvovirus was able to fight the infection and prevent death.

This study found intranasally administered IgY from chicken egg yolk reduced influenza B virus replication in mice.

This study on humans found that a IgY spray was effective in treating bacterial pharyngitis.

This study on humans found that orally administered IgY from chicken egg yolk was effective in preventing and fighting Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections in patients with cystic fibrosis (this study was longitudinal, using orally administered IgY for up to 10 years on these patients).

This study on gerbils found IgY isolated from chicken egg yolk was effective in treating Helicobacter pylori infection of the stomach.

This study found that IgY administered orally and intranasally protected mice against against lethal H5N1 influenza infection. This study also found that after injecting chickens with just two doses of inactivated influenza viruses, the chickens produces high levels of anti-influenza virus IgY in the blood and eggs, which lasted for at least 2 months.

• In Asian countries, IgY has been clinically tested as a food supplement and preservative. Yogurts containing anti-Helicobacter pylori urease IgY (IgY that targets the enzyme urease made by Helicobacter pylori) have been shown in humans to reduce urea levels (measured by the urea breath test).



Just for reference, I will paste the translated article here:
It is possible to get well, albeit with primitive and odd methods!

Village Mats Lindström May 28, 2016


I received an inbox from Thomas who wanted me to write about his mother Maj-Britt who suffered from ME/CFS and recovered through a strange method.

Here is Thomas' story:

My mother Maj-Britt has been a really alert woman for many years, just turned 84 years old. However, she suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome (ME / CFS) when she was 61 years old, in 1993. She had then been suffering from a long-term infection and fever for several months. In just five minutes this day, she suddenly transformed from an otherwise decently alert 61-year-old to a bedridden creature with paralyzing fatigue. She and my father sought medical attention, but no one could help her.

My mother is a humble woman, but still a real fighter, who does not give up in the first place when problems grow big. Time passed, however, and the bed became her haunt most of her time. She was also referred to psychiatry for investigation. When the final conversation was over, my mother asked:

- Am I mentally ill?
"No, you really are not," replied the doctor.

After many years, a doctor finally managed in 1999 to find IgG and IgM antibodies against twar in her blood following tips from a well-known twar doctor.

Even a well-known doctor and even a professor had then seen live bacteria in her blood in live blood tests. She was now finally something concrete on the tracks.

My mother received a total of five courses of antibiotics and briefly got better from a couple of them. But very quickly the problems were the same again. When the most effective antibiotic was used a second time, she became severely hypersensitive to the treatment and had to stop the treatment immediately. After that, there were no more antibiotics available that could be effective. My mother was thrown back on square one again.


First attempt at reversal

In an article in the magazine 2000s Vetenskap, she later read about how to grow antibodies against one's own infection by transmitting the infection to a cow who then began to produce antibodies against the infection. If you then drank the colostrum, you could ingest antibodies against your own infection.

Since my parents lived in the country, a cow was bought. Maj-Britt's GP helped her take venous blood and then injected it into a muscle in the cone. My mother then drank the colostrum for 6 weeks with a strong hope of getting better. But even here, the investment failed. No progress was made at all.


Here came the beginning of the turn

In the spring of 2002, my mother read a new article in the journal Land about researchers at Akademiska who worked to develop antibodies against infections by injecting infected blood into pectoral muscles on chickens. She called a professor and an associate professor several times and managed to find out how to carry out such a project yourself. She was told that it was enough to inject a drop of her own blood into the hen's pectoral muscle and then repeat this every fortnight for 2.5 months. Then you wait a month. During this time, the hen produces lots of antibodies against the infection or infections you have. The antibodies then end up largely in the egg yolk.

After that, you should preferably eat the egg yolk in principle raw because the antibodies are heat-sensitive. However, it is possible to boil the eggs for a maximum of 3 minutes so that only the white has time to coagulate. It is also best if you take a teaspoon of bicarbonate together with the egg yolk to quench the hydrochloric acid which can also kill the antibodies.

During the first time, a simpler method was tested where the hens each received a drop of blood from my mother in the water they drank. This was repeated every fortnight for 2.5 months. About a month after the treatment, my mother started eating the eggs. But this did not yield any results either.

By this time I had started to get curious about the chicken project and called one of the researchers myself to see if it could work with giving the hens blood in the water they drank. The answer was no. In such a case, one must inject a drop of the infected blood into the hen's pectoral muscle in order for it to have a chance of being successful.


Here came the turn

Syringes and other equipment were procured. Time was now running out if all treatments and egg laying could be carried out before the autumn cold took over.

My mother used a razor blade to cut a finger so they got a drop of blood for each hen. This procedure was performed 10 times from July 2002. Once the treatment period of the hens was complete, my mother waited a month before the egg yolk began to be eaten. The eggs were then ready to be eaten in late autumn.

It normally takes three months before the blood is renewed, but already before Christmas my mother was so much better that she was able to clean a large part of the 210 m2 villa for Christmas. My father helped to the extent that old farmers usually do with the Christmas cleaning. Everything looked so infinitely much better now.

But at the end of February 2003, my mother had a stroke. She managed it but the rehabilitation took its time. It was not until October 2003 that she had recovered so much that she took part in a 1 km bicycle race. However, she walked up each hill. You are not so fit after 10 years of serious illness.

Everyone who took part in the bike race took part in the draw for a brand new bike. When the bike race was over, it was my mother who won the bike. That bicycle was used extensively for many years. Do not actually know if she still has it left. But one thing I do know. My mother is completely healthy today!

As siblings, we occasionally comment that our mother probably only takes out her teenage years now. She is very difficult to get hold of and keep track of!

Our mother has now been healthy for many years and we have become accustomed to this. We have also learned that it is important to never give up.

How were the hens? Everyone survived the experiment.

Do not give up you friends!

Thomas

Read more about how antibodies from chickens can cure many diseases here



About Mats Lindström

My name is Mats Lindström and my wife has been seriously ill with ME / CFS since 2008. I spend a lot of my free time trying to find good symptom relief and preferably a cure for the disease. The most important thing in that work, I think, is to make visible the seriousness of the disease, to get politicians, research and healthcare, but also the public to understand the importance of helping this patient group who suffer immensely - both from the disease and society's ignorance. My hope is that a biomedical research worth the name will start in Sweden. I run some of my own Facebook groups where the biggest one is called Database ME / CFS. The members consist of both ME / CFS patients and relatives from Sweden and Norway, among others. https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=REC8VA5SSABBS
 
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Hip

Senior Member
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Wouldn't this work like Transfer factor?

Transfer factors are found in cow colostrum and chicken egg yolk, but transfer factor itself is not an antibody as such, but rather an immune messenger molecule. It might of course also play a role, but I suspect the main effect comes from the IgY antibodies found in chicken egg yoke.
 

Hip

Senior Member
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If the highlighted method in the quote was used for a diagnosis, measure of improvement, or in any way to give credence this theory then it may be indicative of the level of evidence.

Yes agreed that the live blood analysis is a bit of a pseudoscientific escapade, but the fact that her ME/CFS symptoms improved on antibiotics (before she became allergic to them) does suggest a bacterial infection.

She also had IgG and IgM antibodies to Chlamydia pneumoniae, although my understanding is that Chlamydia pneumoniae testing is not very accurate.


The egg yoke IgY treatment did seem to make a major difference to her health, since she was bed-bound with ME/CFS, but in under a year after starting this treatment she was able to take part in a bicycle race.
 

Hip

Senior Member
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In case anyone missed it, the above Swedish article also links to a second article explaining more about how chicken IgY antibodies can be used to treat diseases:

Antibodies from chickens might cure many diseases

Here are some excerpts from the article:
It started already for almost 20 years ago when Anders Larsson at the Clinical Chemistry in Uppsala contacted Hans Kollberg with his pioneering studies of antibodies from hens.

The method can serve to bacteria, viruses, fungi and protozoa In an extensive research survey (2015) introduced Kollberg to chickens have an ability to form antibodies against the principle of most germs that can infect humans.

Kollberg begins the article with the following (freely translated from English)
The alarming rise of resistant microbes (bacteria, viruses, fungi, protozoa ) is today one of the biggest threats to people and the environment. This article will promote the use of avian antibodies as a replacement or supplement to antibiotics and thus reduce the development of antibiotic-resistant microbes .

Among others are the following infections up - Multi-resistant bacteria, ESBL, MRSA and VRE
- Most viruses
- Candida albicans (yeast infection)
- Cystic fibrosis
- Intestinal infections such as Escherichia coli, Salmonella and Chlostridium difficile
- Streptococcus mutans, which causes tooth decay
- Haemolytic streptococci that cause tonsillitis
- Gingivitis causes bad breath by gum infections - Pharyngitis (throat inflammation)




It is also worth looking at the research paper mentioned in the above article, which is this one:

Avian Antibodies (IgY) to Fight Antibiotic Resistance

I particularly like the idea mentioned in this paper that egg yoke IgY antibodies could be orally or intranasally administered to humans to help fight against pandemic influenza.

And the following excerpt from the paper is fascinating:
Many countries including Vietnam introduced mass vaccination of poultry with H5N1 vaccines. In a study from Vietnam eggs were bought directly on the supermarket. Specific IgY-H5N1 was found in these eggs.

When administered intranasally in mice before and after lethal infection with H5N1 and related H5N2, IgY could prevent infection resulting in complete recovery.
 

Helen

Senior Member
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One would expect the antibodies in the egg to be destroyed by digestion. Doesn't sound credible to me, but then again, I'm not an expert.
Quote: " Then you should preferably eat the yolk basically raw because the antibodies are heat sensitive.However, you can boil the eggs up to three minutes so that only the whites have time to clot.Best is also taking a teaspoon of baking soda along with the yolk to extinguish the hydrochloric acid which can also kill the antibodies." (My bolding)

@matsli , as you were the "publisher" of the stories, do you have any comments that would add to this thread?

@serg1942, @Sushi, you are the experts and experienced on LDI treatment. Can you see any connection between these treatments?
 

barbc56

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The egg yoke IgY treatment did seem to make a major difference to her health, since she was bed-bound with ME/CFS, but in under a year after starting this treatment she was able to take part in a bicycle race

But we don't even know if this story is true or not. That's the problem with ancedotal reports and this is only one anecdote from one reader of a blog. You need a lot of ancedotal reports plus other backup data, before it's even worth considering something like this as possible hypothesis.

If there is some science behind this that says eggs may be a good way to transfer antibodies, I haven’t seen anything here which would translate into a specific treatment where your blood is injected into the chicken breast and then eating the yolk raw as anything other than an old wives tale.
 
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Hip

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But we don't even know if this story is true or not. That's the problem with ancedotal reports and this is only one anecdote from one reader of a blog. You need a lot of ancedotal reports plus other backup data, before it's even worth considering something like this as possible hypothesis.

So what does the scientific method tell you when you are uncertain of the truth? Answer: get more data, do more experiments. If everyone followed this idea of waiting until there is more data, we would never get any more empirical evidence.



I haven’t seen anything here which would translate into a specific treatment where your blood is injected into the chicken breast and then eating the yolk raw as anything other than an old wives tale.

Have you not read the studies I quoted above? The methodology used in these studies involves injecting the target pathogen into the muscles of chickens, in order to stimulate the immune system of the chickens to form IgY antibodies that specifically target that pathogen. Those IgY antibodies are conveniently placed in the egg yoke, making it very easy to then administer to the patient.

For example, in this study they used this methodology:
Five high-health-status, 20-week-old Roman laying hens housed at an experimental animal center were immunized intramuscularly with influenza B virus (HA titer of 64) that had been inactivated using beta-propiolactone.

This study says:
Specific pathogen-free laying White Leghorn hens were immunized intramuscularly in the breast muscle with a mixture of two strains of formaldehyde-fixed P. aeruginosa: PAO1 (ATCC 15692) and Habs1 (ATCC 33348).

This study says:
Brown Leghorn hens (25 weeks old; n = 15) were immunized intramuscularly with H. pylori whole-cell lysate (200 μg/ml, protein) using an equal volume of Freund's complete adjuvant (Difco Laboratories). Each hen was injected at four different sites (250 μl per site) of the leg muscle. Three booster injections, with Freund's incomplete adjuvant, were given at 2-week intervals following the first injection. One month after immunization, the eggs laid were collected daily for 1 month



Since pathogens circulate in the patient's blood, by injecting a drop of the patient's blood into the muscle of the chicken you are hopefully introducing those pathogens into the chicken.

There may be some shortcomings of this drop of blood method when it comes to those with enterovirus-associated ME/CFS, because in chronic enterovirus infections, you do not find many viral particles in the blood.
 
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barbc56

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What I get from your citations is that these may be viable treatments in a clinical setting under controlled conditions using scientfic data collecting, citations, etc. etc. I have no problem with that and appreciate that you provided some scientific backup.


But the above is a far cry from reporting that someone's mother bought a chicken, keeping it in the backyard, injecting it with her blood and then eating the raw yolks and the only citation is your own blog. That's not the way to lay out a convincing conclusion or say this is why we should believe this theory.

The first is science while the second is superstition.
 
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Hip

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That's not the way to lay out a convincing conclusion or say this is why we should believe this theory.

You are misunderstanding something here: nobody is suggesting that this N=1 experiment in Sweden is a convincing conclusion; but it is a very interesting starting point, with a reasonable theory behind it, for those ME/CFS patients who like to explore new treatment possibilities. Perhaps you may not be one of those explorer types, but you find other individuals who are.
 

Seven7

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My only note is, if it would be blood transferable is great but I had a kid and she does not have CFS so far, So you would have to watch the chicken to be tired to be sure the "transfer" of blood did take the cfs then you take the eggs. And so, do you inject chickens until one happens to get cfs. I just don't think would be as easy as just injecting one chicken.

But the idea is genius.
 

barbc56

Senior Member
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You are misunderstanding something here: nobody is suggesting that this N=1 experiment in Sweden is a convincing conclusion; but it is a very interesting starting point, with a reasonable theory behind it, for those ME/CFS patients who like to explore new treatment possibilities. Perhaps you may not be one of those explorer types, but you find other individuals who are.

I guess you can't deny that it won't catch your attention!
 

Hip

Senior Member
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@lnester7
The chicken does not have to develop ME/CFS for this to work. Providing you transfer the pathogen or pathogens underpinning your ME/CFS to the muscle of the chicken, the chicken should develop IgY antibodies to it, especially if you repeat the process of injecting a drop of your blood every 14 days for several months, as this lady in Sweden did before she started eating the raw chicken egg yoke.

Alternatively (or in addition), for those patients like myself who have a chronic sore throat lasting many years, caused by the virus that triggered their ME/CFS, the saliva may contain viral particles. I know that that even 18 months after catching my virus, I was infecting other people with it by ordinary social contact, presumably via saliva. So saliva may be another route to infecting the chicken with your ME/CFS virus.

It may be enough to put some of your spittle on the chicken's food every day, and they may then catch the viral infection that way. Enteroviruses are very cosmopolitan viruses, and can infect a number of species, so hopefully can infect chickens. This study indicates that chickens carry a diverse range of picornavirus infections (enterovirus is in the picornavirus family).
 
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