Dr Igor Markov Says ME/CFS Is Caused by a Bacterial Dysbiosis in the Kidneys, and Says Autovaccine Therapy Cures 93% of ME/CFS Cases

[BrightCandle]

I am not worried about the killing mechanism so much, that seems to me like it has a reasonable test for whether it worked. Any autovaccine made can be put onto an agar and given optimal growth conditions and if anything is still viable it will show up in 24 hours. That seems to me to offer a decent degree of safety for testing if the kill mechanism has worked. Given that heat seems mostly to disrupt energy protein structures I don't think we are really likely to break bacteria cellular walls down without a lot of excessive heat. Thus I think the dangers of live bacteria are relatively low comparatively.

What concerns me is the dose of the end result. Even if we are also putting in toxins it is still all about the dose that can be tolerated. You don't want too little, that might not induce the immune system properly and you definitely don't want too much. Finding the effective point is the dangerous part as I don't see an at home available out of body way to determine what a safe starting point would be.

 

[Hip]

Any autovaccine made can be put onto an agar and given optimal growth conditions and if anything is still viable it will show up in 24 hours.

That's how you test to see if bacteria are alive, but any error in this testing protocol could potentially lead to pneumonia or some other infection. Eg: if the agar dries out, that can kill bacteria. So you could get a false negative. Looking at autovaccine instructions, some professionals test on agar for 7 days rather than 24 hours, to ensure the bacteria are dead.

For someone scientifically minded, and willing to put in the time to learn about microbiological techniques, the risk may be less. But for unscientific ME/CFS patients trying this, I think it would be too dangerous.

And heat inactivation is not the only step: the centrifuging to remove bacterial toxins is also difficult. If you use too much g-force, you can lyse the cells. Around 2000 to 3000 g is OK, but not higher.

Note that most ME/CFS patients can have 2 or 3 bacteria in their urine (Dr Markov usually identifies these, and makes autovaccines for each species found). So you need to be able to separate your urinary bacteria into their component species, and work with each species separately.


A safe alternative would be getting hold of the right mucosal vaccine(s) from Cipher's list which target the bacterial species that the patient found in their urine.

That was the reason @Cipher spend days Googling around the world for bacterial vaccines: the idea is that you may be able to get a Markov-like treatment by identifying the bacteria in your urine, and then buying the appropriate injectable or mucosal vaccine(s) from Cipher's list which target those bacteria.

Even if we are also putting in toxins it is still all about the dose that can be tolerated. You don't want too little, that might not induce the immune system properly and you definitely don't want too much. Finding the effective point is the dangerous part as I don't see an at home available out of body way to determine what a safe starting point would be.

The Uromune mucosal vaccine has 0.2 billion bacteria per each sublingual dose. A vaginal mucosal vaccine suppository for recurrent UTI used 1 billion organisms in total.

It's fairly straightforward to determine bacteria counts per ml using a microscope. So you can get quite precise dosing. Typically in a broth, you get bacterial counts of around 1 billion per ml, sometimes higher, depending on conditions. On a 9 cm diameter agar plate, you typically get about 250 billion bacteria growing across the whole surface (at least when I grew my bacteria on nutrient agar plates, I tended to get these sort of counts).

But in any case, mucosal doses would probably be best titrated up, to try to prevent too much immune activation too quickly. Dr Markov's vaccines and autovaccines are titrated up, and other injectable bacterial vaccines I have used in the past are also titrated up.

 

[GlassCannonLife]

I would love to see the homemade project finished by you guys at some point..! Seems like a great and safe option for us

@Hip what else would be needed for you guys to establish this - is it far off?

I was just thinking back about my pre-ME years.. Definitely started getting increasingly fatigued after a certain point where I had some weird kidney symptoms (temporary pitting edema in my lower legs). It took years of very slowly building fatigue and normal life until I caught the virus that finally started me having actual ongoing issues that then also slowly worsened over a year almost until I became truly "mild".. I wonder if it has been a kidney issue for me the whole time?


Of course desparate minds find narratives that fit though so who knows.


Edit:
Just saw your most recent post here (above mine)! Seems like @Cipher's list would be the way to go..?

 

[Living Dead]

Sorry for not reading the entire thread. If I have bacteria growing, how do I identify the species?

 

[Aidan Walsh]

What is the situation now there with the War in Ukraine? Is their Office still operative?

 

[Hipsman]

Sorry for not reading the entire thread. If I have bacteria growing, how do I identify the species?

You need to send the bacteria to Dr. Igor Markov's Clinic in Ukraine for them to identify it. @Hip posted info on how to do that in the document here.

What is the situation now there with the War in Ukraine? Is their Office still operative?

The clinic website says they re-opened since 18.04.2022.

 

[Aidan Walsh]

@Hip what else would be needed for you guys to establish this - is it far off?

I was just thinking back about my pre-ME years.. Definitely started getting increasingly fatigued after a certain point where I had some weird kidney symptoms (temporary pitting edema in my lower legs). It took years of very slowly building fatigue and normal life until I caught the virus that finally started me having actual ongoing issues that then also slowly worsened over a year almost until I became truly "mild".. I wonder if it has been a kidney issue for me the whole time?


Of course desparate minds find narratives that fit though so who knows.


Edit:
Just saw your most recent post here (above mine)! Seems like @Cipher's list would be the way to go..?

I recently was found to have a large oversized lopsided Kidney on ultrasound & I was sent to see a Urology Surgeon & he said it was normal. I asked why this size he said likely something Genetic, which does not give me any answers

 

[Aidan Walsh]

You need to send the bacteria to Dr. Igor Markov's Clinic in Ukraine for them to identify it. @Hip posted info on how to do that in the document here.


The clinic website says they re-opened since 18.04.2022.

thanks, Hipsman

 

[kangaSue]

I recently was found to have a large oversized lopsided Kidney on ultrasound & I was sent to see a Urology Surgeon & he said it was normal. I asked why this size he said likely something Genetic, which does not give me any answers

If it's the left kidney that's oversized, the left renal vein being compressed between the aorta and superior mesentery artery can sometimes be a cause of this - renal Nutcracker syndrome.

 

[Atlas]

@Hip I noticed you wrote in the patient how-to pdf that Dr. Markov says he has detected high levels of bacterial toxins in the blood of over 800 ME/CFS patients, using a commerical toxemia lab test available in Ukraine... And that many different endo and exotoxins were present, not just LPS.

This seems to me like a crucial finding, did he say this in the Q&As somewhere? I'm wondering, did he say anything about testing any of those same patients after treatment/remission to verify toxins were reduced? I.e. to have an objective measurement of remission. That is the kind of data that I feel like we need to get researchers to look at this more.

 

[Hip]

This seems to me like a crucial finding, did he say this in the Q&As somewhere?

Dr Markov has a paywalled document which details the bacterial toxin findings. Basically toxicologist Dr Borys S Sheiman in the Ukraine developed a means to detect bacterial toxins in the blood, and Dr Markov sent his ME/CFS patients' blood to be tested by Dr Sheiman's test, and it was found that ME/CFS patients tend to have high level of these toxins.

Some info about this test in the first post of this thread, in the section entitled "Analysis of the Blood of CBIS Patients for Toxic Bacterial Proteins".

I've not been able to find any comparable bacterial toxin tests in the West (apart from tests which measure blood LPS levels). And also, I discovered that it is difficult to detect bacterial toxins; as far as I can determine, the only way in the West of detecting the presence of these toxins in the blood is via Raman spectroscopy, which I believe is a technique confined to the research lab.

 

[BrightCandle]

apart from tests which measure blood LPS levels

Where did you find LPS blood tests?

 

[Atlas]

It also seems the theory would match well with the "Itaconate Shunt" theory, where the innate immune system is activated which would explain mitochondrial dysfunction. That theory is one of my favourites, because if the brain is burning neurotransmitters like glutamate and precursors such as glutamine for fuel, the resulting complete inability to think matches well with my lived experience of brain fog. My thought was something like: if there is a certain level of bacterial toxins in blood, could the innate immune system turn on while it's waiting for the expected pathogen to be found by the adaptive immune system, but if the pathogen is never found (because there's no raging infection but only a dysbiosis in the kidneys which is constantly pumping out toxic blood) the innate immune system stays on chronically which keeps the itaconate pathway on... Which in turn causes not only mitochondrial ATP production to be severely stunted, but amino acids to be burnt up everywhere, which might cause other problems, not only brain fog because lack of neurotransmitters, but increased ammonia, and maybe even not enough Glutamine available for the gut lining, if the entire body is burning it chronically...? Which if one exerts too much could deplete Glutamine and cause further gut leakage, adding to the toxemia problem, causing more microclots (toxemia causes microclots), as well as potentially resetting any kidney bacteria dysbiosis that had begun to heal... (I found a study on page 16 of this CDC presentation that bacteria are released into the blood after exercise in ME)

As previously speculated iirc, a virus might be able to trigger the disease activation if the constantly leaking bacterial toxins have "primed" the immune system so that with the presence of a latent virus the immune system overreacts and potentially turns on the innate immune system chronically. Or, could it be the other way around, that a virus or other high physiological stress causes leaky gut and the leaked bacteria then colonize the kidneys to form a long-term dysbiosis. [this previously mentioned study mentions that mucosally adapted bacteria can translocate to colonize other organs. The kidney dysbiosis theory is that the mucosal immunity on the kidney mucous membrane is dysfunctional. But could it also be that there is no dysfunction but the problem bacteria have become mucosally adapted. In that case, and if the theory turns out to be a major thing, susceptibility to ME/CFS would be largely influenced by whether one has mucosally adapted strains in their microbiome].

Or even if it could also be both, that a virus can trigger the dysbiosis by initiating a leaky gut, and then the latent virus can perpetuate the illness because the dysbiosis primes the immune system to overreact to the virus. So that as long as both the latent virus and the kidney dysbiosis (factoring in the leaky gut) remain, the ME/CFS remains.

Or what about BBB permeability... because bacterial toxins like LPS can cause the barrier to leak. If whatever else in the body that shouldn't normally be able to make it to the brain can now make it, that could explain how any sufficiently potent combination of kidney dysbiosis+latent virus+gut leakage could cause things like microglial activitation or neuroinflammation. And would explain how a significant proportion of people might achieve remission if one of their main perpetuating factors from those three is removed.

Hmm, interesting to think about, with now increasingly brain fogged thoughts... I should stop

 

[Atlas]

I've not been able to find any compatible bacterial toxin tests in the West (apart from tests which measure blood LPS levels).

Yeah, I've briefly looked around too but only found ELISA kits for LTA and LPS, and I could only find them in bulk (though my search was far from extensive). Sorry, I must have missed or forgotten the section on Toxic Bacterial Protein Analysis when I first read your first post... Thanks for that.

I am in process of preparing my dipslides, and the first thing that showed up for me was Enterococcus faecalis, according to the Markov clinic bacteriologist, and I can visually confirm that it was an enterococcus because I have enterococcus-selective agars. Even before I sent the picture of it, Dr. Markov thought I would almost certainly find Enterococcus faecalis, because he says it is associated with more severe courses of illness.

So, I am going to start trying this treatment soon... and I am hoping to find some way to test my LPS and LTA levels before I start; I have been thinking of trying to find someone to do it independently, so that if the autovaccine treatment works for me I can test the levels again and bring my evidence to researchers in my country to try to get someone to look into this for a small trial at least.

 

[Hip]

Where did you find LPS blood tests?

I am not sure where to get a LPS blood test, but @Martin aka paused||M.E. mentioned he had such a test (and his levels were normal). There was a study on ME/CFS patients, and it was found that LPS was often elevated.

However, Enterococcus faecalis, the bacterium Dr Markov most commonly finds in ME/CFS patients' urine is gram positive, so does not have any LPS. Another bacterium he often finds in ME/CFS, Staphylococcus, is also gram positive, and has no LPS. So you might have high levels of Enterococcus and/or Staphylococcus toxins in your blood, but your LPS levels may be normal.

The E. coli that he commonly finds in ME/CFS patients' urine is gram negative though, so will contain and secrete LPS.



It's incredible that medical science has this amazing ability to detect genes, even when only the the tiniest amounts are present, and then utilises this ability to identify viruses or bacteria in the blood or tissues by PCR tests, or more recently, by next-generation sequencing (NGS).

Yet we have almost no ability at all to detect bacterial toxins in the blood. This is a major blind spot in medical science, and if ME/CFS is indeed cause by bacterial toxins, this blind spot in our scientific instruments could explain why we have not yet been able to find the cause of ME/CFS.

I wonder how many other diseases might also involve high levels of bacterial toxins in the blood, but we do not know, because we have no easy way of detecting these toxins. Like autism for example, which like ME/CFS also involves gut issues and dysbiosis.

 

[Hip]

but if the pathogen is never found (because there's no raging infection but only a dysbiosis in the kidneys which is constantly pumping out toxic blood) the innate immune system stays on chronically which keeps the itaconate pathway on... Which in turn causes not only mitochondrial ATP production to be severely stunted, but amino acids to be burnt up everywhere

I have yet to read up about the itaconate research, so do not know much about it.

But I do find it intriguing that four independent ME/CFS research groups have found that there is "something in the serum" of ME/CFS patients, such that when you expose ME/CFS patient blood serum to healthy cells in vitro in a cell line, those cells rapidly develop energy metabolism abnormalities because of that noxious substance in the blood.

I wonder whether this mysterious substance in the serum could be Dr Markov's bacterial toxins.

 

[BrightCandle]

Ah OK, thought there might be a test we can buy in the UK because I would really want to do that. An overall test for bacterial toxins in the blood could be great but I hadn't found anyone doing them.

Professor Kell (Action for ME presentation) also showed that LPS in the blood produces microclots and that this matches the microclots they find in ME/CFS patients blood, that does look different to the clotting that the covid spike produces. Its quite interesting that clots form with ridiculously tiny amounts of these things in the blood produces different clots and may one day be used to determine what is in the blood.

I suspect the issue with detecting toxins in the blood is a lack of amplification methods. With most genetic, bacterial and viral testing you either have a lot of material to begin with or more usually you use mechanisms to grow the sample to amplify it and then it becomes more easily detectable. Toxins presumably don't amplify with any existing mechanisms and potentially can't be aplified at all and thus in the tiny quantities they appear in can not be easily and simply tested. Even if you did do a large sample (say 500ml of blood) you would need a mechanism to separate your chosen toxin(s) from the rest of the other tiny items in the blood many of which are unidentified. Requires a lot more science to get to something usable and until then its stuck in research with very expensive low volume testing methods. But microclot testing on healthy blood may actually be a unique area of science that uses the bodies response to toxins to identify them and be the easy route to identification if we pursue it and they do indeed turn out to look different for difference diseases and causes.

 

[Hip]

I suspect the issue with detecting toxins in the blood is a lack of amplification methods. With most genetic, bacterial and viral testing you either have a lot of material to begin with or more usually you use mechanisms to grow the sample to amplify it and then it becomes more easily detectable. Toxins presumably don't amplify with any existing mechanisms and potentially can't be aplified at all and thus in the tiny quantities they appear in can not be easily and simply tested.

Yes, that's a very good point, the success of the PCR method is based on amplification of DNA or RNA, but there is no way we know to amplify proteins.

Another issue is that even the most microscopic amounts of a bacterial toxin can cause major adverse effects or death. Just 1 or 2 microgram of LPS injected into the blood is lethal for humans, and similarly for other bacterial toxins.

So you can imagine that even with bacterial toxin doses say 10 to 100 times smaller than this lethal dose, you may still get major adverse effects, but effects which are not quite strong enough to kill you. ME/CFS might just involve constant 24 hour exposure to sub-lethal amounts of bacterial toxins.

The sub-lethal levels of bacterial toxins found in ME/CFS patients might be something like 0.1 microgram or less in the whole body. This amount when diluted into the 40 litres of body fluid will equate to blood toxin concentrations of about 2.5 picograms per ml. That will be very hard to detect.


My guess is that the bacterial toxin test developed by Ukrainian toxicologist Dr Borys Sheiman will involve adding a patient's blood serum sample to a healthy cell line in vitro, and then observing any noxious effects the serum has on the cells.

I wonder if it might be possible to develop a bacterial toxin tests based on having a set of monoclonal antibodies, with different antibodies designed to bind to different bacterial toxins. The binding of those antibodies might then be detected via radiolabeling them, or some other method of detection.

 

[Garz]

yep there are fluorescent antibody labelling methods also - an antibody to what you wish to detect is first designed - then you bind a fluorescent dye to the other end of the antibody
when the antibody binds to its target you can detect the level of fluorescence in the sample.

i had heard CRISP-R technologies are being developed for super specific and sensitive detection of various substances - as a whole new testing methodology - not just as a means of gene editing. but i suspect this is at east 5-10years out

 

[BrightCandle]

Evidence that Covid 19 causes the bacteria in the gut to escape into the blood causing secondary infections:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33395-6