Ron Davis's trypanosome 'signature' finding (IIMER conference 2018)

For anyone interested it might be worth trying to find something about the research behind this Daily Mail article suggesting that EBV following an earlier threadworm infection might be a cause of MS. It looks like they are considering the predisposing factor and the triggering factor. This being MS there is no mention of the perpetuating factor.
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5980549/Doctors-think-discovered-cause-MS.html

I know. I know. This is the Daily Mail. But you have to pick up information where you can.

 

It all goes down the pan as they say.

In the days of the Raj and the Burma war thousands of Brits came back with what was known as 'tropical sprue'. Bowel habit would be changed out of all recognition often for decades. Imagine how unsuspecting Gloucestershire E coli would respond to a daily dose of vindaloo. They run a mile. Steatorrhoeaand lactose intolerance were common.

But nobody got ME.

 

Mmm. Florence Nightingale' s illness ( purported to be ME) manifest after the Crimean war...foreign conditions, stress .....

 

Ah, but it could have been the stress!

 

I have often thought that the inoculations you need to get when traveling to some countries may have been a trigger for some.

 

The furthest my daughter had been was Greece, and that was 3 years earlier.

I was born in Africa and visited a different part in my 20s. I didn't get ME. Our son has been to China/S America/India...
He got Type 1 diabetes shortly before he was 17, at which time Greece was the furthest he'd been.

ETA Typos

 

It's an interesting question as to whether ME/CFS is a 'new' illness or not. Certainly it's seen as something that only entered public consciousness in the past few decades. Off the top of my head I can think of three reasons why that might be the case:

1) The hygiene hypothesis: it is true that Brits sent out to Empire would be exposed to all sorts of nasties while they were there. But unlike today, they'd have grown up in an environment in which they'd have had regular exposure to an equivalent amount of different bacteria/parasites growing up. For example, infant mortality in the UK in 1900 was more than five times that of India today (www.gapminder.org). Fair to say that if you made it to adulthood you had a well-primed immune system. So perhaps people really didn't contract ME/CFS until the recent day.

2) People did have it, but it wasn't discussed or diagnosed. There's already the mention of Florence Nightingale above and I've also heard ME/CFS as being one of the four hundred diseases that historians have retrospectively diagnosed Charles Darwin with. But given that today ME/CFS is a disease of exclusion - a mysterious illness where patients are serious ill but (routine) tests are normal - it would be hard to identify as such when no such tests were available. I imagine serious illnesses with little in the way of explanation were the norm. We should remember that while ME/CFS is seen as a rich White person's disease, the one study that looked at prevalence in Nigeria suggested a higher rate of ME/CFS in adults there. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17439996)

3) Bit of a grim thought this: but in an age where there was no welfare state would we expect to see reports of people suffering decades-long illnesses that left them totally incapacitated? Or would they have simply not survived?

(FWIW it's worth I think I've put these are in decreasing order of likeliness)

 

Cleaning out the attic in our summer house I found some medical books from 1933 after my great great aunt who was a nurse. Not that long ago, but long enough. These books list “neurological fatigue conditions following traumatic events or infections” as completely commonplace and an expected possible outcome, specifying that some will recover or improve over a few months but others will be impaired for years or even permanently.

 

CWI ( Crimean War Illness) ...

 

I traveled a lot the first few years after I got ME, I’ve had Delhi Belly, Pharaoh's Revenge and the equivalent in Turkey, Thailand and several other countries in South-East Asia. My symptoms first started after a Hep A + B vaccination, though, so I always think of it as the trigger.

Each of the infections made my ME permanently worse, I think — either that, or the ME was just getting worse anyway. (I didn’t know I had ME at the time, didn’t even know ME existed. It took many years before I got the diagnosis.)

 

Doh, what trypanosome does at a molecular level I have linked to ME symptoms many times in many discussions. Its about modifying a specific eicosanoid response.

 

I was born in Malaya before it federated, so I guess I am an army brat. I passed through Lebanon briefly when a plane was diverted due to active warfare. I have never been to Africa.

 

The two hit hypothesis is about having one infection impacted by another. Its why incubation times in ME pandemics might not reflect the actual cause. So combination events, together or sequential, might be an issue. Its not proven though.

 

... or pink fuzzy aliens. Or those damn flesh eating unicorns, they are everywhere.

(PS I was thinking about a quote from a game that I like, "A vault hunter, that's like a unicorn!")

 

bit more to it than that:
https://www.s4me.info/threads/florence-nightingale-nursing-icon-and-malingerer.2339/

 

Yup. We just withered away and died. Or pushed through, collapsed of exhaustion, and then died. Or were accused of being possessed by devils and were burned to death or abandoned. Or . . . Well, you get the idea!

 

The closest I ever got to Africa was the "Jungle Cruise" ride at Disneyland... and I still got this disease.

 

I contracted an unpleasant disease in Sri Lanka where I was on holiday in about 2004, d and v etc, 4 years before I was diagnosed with ME. We had been very very careful, no salads, ice, sealed bottles etc.

Husband recovered and I didn't. Was not feeling dreadful but still had the runs so went to GP at home. Was astonished to get a phonecall a few days later from the doctor to say I had cholera. Was checked for public health issues- did I work with children, or prepare food commercially, given antibiotics, and that was it.

I didn't feel particularly ill other than the first 2 days or so. It's just a good story. Not many people have had cholera. I never connected it with ME.

ETA: should have said not many people in west with good public health have had cholera.

 

Maybe this is a dumb question, but wouldn't protozoans, like trypanosomes, be fairly obvious in the blood stream? Perhaps they can hide out somewhere, but, from what I've seen, diagnosis is confirmed by blood test. Or is the the idea be that the immune system may be continuing to react to a past infection that has cleared?

 

Per Davis’ speech, not necessarily. If I recall correctly, there are two geographically distinct varieties associated with African Sleeping Sickness. One variety is easy to find. The other is extremely difficult to find.