[quote]Mick28 wrote:
storey420 wrote:
No offense Mick but you really seem to be out of your element here and demonstrate a lack of basic understanding of some of these questions. Please don’t take it as a dismissive personal attack but your replies seem highly uniformed on medicine and would equate to me telling Rainjack what is what in accounting–how the hell would I know?
Yet you are the one who touted Trudeaus book. I wonder what everyone thinks of that…never mind…I already know.
Yes infection can absolutely drive blood pressure.
You’ve made that claim three times now. Yet, still no proof to this wacky notion.
Post some proof or stop posting this nonsense.
Fair enough?
If you need me to dig up facts to demonstrate that “Big Pharma” or more appropriately, the drugs they manufacture, kill people then you are just being lazy. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence a click away on google.
Can a prescribed medicine kill someone?
Yes.
Anything that has the capability of helping also has the capability of harming as well.
With that said, you have not laid out any sort of believable case for prescribed medicine doing more harm than good.
You seem to be caught up in a world where “everyone knows why bother to research” notion. Perhaps you and your friends walk around all day thinking thoughts like this. But here’s a news flash: That does not make it true!
Now once again I tell you, pony up the proof or stop posting this drivel.
This is from the JAMA, a mainstream trade journal in 1998 "Prescription medications are vitally important for treating medical conditions, but they are also the #4 leading cause of death, cause more than 1 million hospitalizations annually, and are a major cause of disability and drug dependency.3 "
Just as I’ve said, anything that helps can also hurt. What about the millions of people who are helped by these medications? Should they be represented in your natural supplements are the only way to go fantasy?[/quote]
John Parks Trowbridge M.D., specialist in alternative approaches for over 20 years, sees this discovery as an exciting new choice in health care. Rather than just treating disease, people can choose to restore better health, reduce use of drugs dramatically, even avoid risks of surgery and hospital tests.
“Nanobacter treatment,” explains Trowbridge, “is one of the last pieces in the puzzle of not just treating but even preventing heart disease, perhaps high blood pressure, and a whole host of other “degenerative” long-lasting diseases.” Head of the Advanced Training Program in Heavy Metal Toxicology in 1996-1998 and a Fellow of the American College for Advancement in Medicine, Dr. Trowbridge pioneered development of an advanced chelation therapy program since 1993. “Nanobacteria treatment,” explains this author of 7 books including 3 on chelation as an effective method to remove unsuspected toxic metals contributing to heart and blood vessel diseases, “adds a dramatic new dimension to our efforts to return people to active, independent living.”
another:
Health and Disease > Men�??s Health Issues
The Nanobacteria Revolution
by author Zoltan P. Rona, MD, MSc
Are heart disease, dental plaque, kidney stones, and a host of other calcium-deposit diseases really caused by an infection? Research in the past decade suggests that diseases in which calcium accumulates inappropriately in the body (i.e., outside of your bones) may be caused by a bacterial infection.
The Discovery of Nanobacteria
More than a decade ago, researchers in Australia discovered that stomach and duodenal ulcers were caused by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori. Antibiotic therapy successfully eliminated the infection, and ulcers healed dramatically, yet it took conventional medicine more than 10 years to accept H. pylori as the cause of ulcers. Prior to widespread acceptance of H. pylori, conventional doctors blamed stress and hyperacidity, ignoring the most effective treatment against ulcers.
Similarly, since 1990 there has been mounting evidence that abnormal calcification may be caused by a bacterial organism about 1/100 the size of a conventional bacterium, called Nanobacterium sanguineum (�??nano�?? is the Latin word for very small or minute). While other microbes like Chlamydia and assorted fungi have been implicated in the development of abnormal calcification, research indicates that the more likely cause may be nanobacteria.
Researchers E. Olavi Kajander and Neva Ciftcioglu discovered in 1995 that nanobacteria secrete a sticky, calcium-rich coating that allows them to adhere to cells inside artery walls and to each other. The coating then calcifies into a shell, protecting the bacteria from the immune system as well as all antibiotics, radiation, and even chemotherapy. An inflammatory cascade is initiated in the artery or organ that ultimately forms hard calcific plaque. The plaque layers continually grow over a period of years, eventually leading to blood vessel or organ disease. Due to their small size, nanobacteria slip through conventional filters and can contaminate vaccines and other biological treatments.
The Calcium Bomb
A newly published book, The Calcium Bomb: The Nanobacteria Link to Heart Disease and Cancer by Douglas Mulhall and Katja Hansen (Midpoint Trade Books, 2004) provides a comprehensive list of health conditions reversed by killing off nanobacteria:
aortic valve sclerosis
bladder stones
bone spurs
breast implant calcification
calcium deposits in the skin (calcinosis cutis)
kidney stones
prostatic stones.
The authors contend that �??no diet, drug, or therapy has shown clinical trial evidence of reversing every measurable indicator of heart disease, including inflammation, clotting, and soft and hard plaques that contain calcium deposits.�?? They claim that this is because nanobacteria are the cause of calcium deposits�??and conventional medicine isn�??t treating patients for nanobacteria. Studies discussed in The Calcium Bomb indicate that nanobacteria are found in human blood; they reproduce much more slowly than most viruses and bacteria; and they can be observed and cultured from the blood of healthy humans using special methods.
Ignored by Conventional Doctors
The idea that bacteria could be responsible for abnormal calcification in arteries, tissues, and organs is a very difficult concept to grasp in the context of a medical system that focuses on drugs and surgeries that treat the symptoms more often than the causes of disease. Most medical doctors believe that the cause of abnormal calcification is, as yet, unexplained.
Conventional doctors believe that blood is sterile, despite studies in the past decade that suggest otherwise. Dark field microscopy and various blood culturing techniques have demonstrated the presence of numerous bacteria and fungi circulating in the bloodstreams of healthy people, including Bartonella, Brucella, and Candida. Researchers have been able to isolate nanobacteria from coronary artery disease plaque and have observed kidney stones in animals exposed to nanobacteria. However, instead of ridding the body of nanobacteria, the posited cause of the calcium deposits, conventional medical practice is to perform
and another:
The Nanobacteria Link
to Heart Disease and Cancer
Nanoparticles are implicated in the harmful calcification that’s common to many illnesses.
A simple treatment is now reversing the symptoms, especially in heart disease,
so why aren’t the health authorities telling patients and doctors about it?
Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 12, Number 5 (August - September 2005)
PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia. editor@nexusmagazine.com
Telephone: +61 (0)7 5442 9280; Fax: +61 (0)7 5442 9381
From our web page at: www.nexusmagazine.com
by Douglas Mulhall © May�??July 2005
Based on the book The Calcium Bomb
by Douglas Mulhall and Katja Hansen
(The Writers’ Collective, 2005)
Millions of seriously ill patients are unaware that heart disease is being measurably reversed with an approach pioneered by researchers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and in Finland, aided by Mayo Clinic and Washington Hospital Center findings. This approach is now prescribed by hundreds of doctors for thousands of patients. A similar approach has been developed with prostate disease at the renowned Cleveland Clinic in Florida. According to doctors, both approaches are practical options for those whose other medicines and surgery have failed. So why aren’t other desperately ill patients whose treatments don’t work being told about it?
In July 2004, the medical journal Pathophysiology published a peer-reviewed research paper with the innocuous title “Calcification in coronary artery disease can be reversed by EDTA�??tetracycline long-term chemotherapy”.1 In plain terms, it meant that hardening of the arteries was being reversed. Not only were rock-hard calcium deposits being reduced, but chest pains were being resolved in most patients and bad cholesterol levels were being cut beyond what other medicines had achieved. The findings were important for patients whose other drugs and surgery weren’t working, i.e., the “cardiac cripples”, whose numbers are in the millions and whose doctors have told them there is nothing more to be done. They were the ones who responded most favourably to the new approach.
Then, in February 2005, a paper published in the prestigious Journal of Urology by researchers from the Cleveland Clinic, one of the leading urology hospitals in America, reported “significant improvement” in chronic prostatitis�??a growing problem for millions of men�??again, where other approaches had failed.2
The studies, although otherwise separate, had a compelling link. They used a cocktail of well-known, inexpensive medicines that have been around for half a century but were never before used in this combination. Both reports urged more studies to confirm their conclusions, and emphasised that not every patient experienced a reversal; only a majority did. Nonetheless, the results were encouraging. Chronic diseases that had befuddled modern medicine were being reversed.
To put a human face on this, take the case reported by Dr Manjit Bajwa of McLean, Virginia, who did not participate in the clinical studies but whose experience with one patient paralleled study results. Dr Bajwa reported in a testimonial of 5 May 2005:
"Two years ago I had a patient with severe coronary artery disease with a 75�??85% blockage in left coronary and two other arteries. Open heart surgery was recommended as stents could not be put in. The patient was told he would probably die within two weeks if surgery was not performed.
"He declined surgery and instead chose chelation. [Author’s note: chelation in this case is an intravenous form of heavy metal removal.] After twenty-five treatments of chelation, his angina worsened [author’s emphasis]. With [his] heart calcium score of 2600, I started the nanobacteria protocol. Within two to three weeks his angina abated. He was able to return to all his normal activities and exercises in two months.
“Nanobacteria protocol helped this patient measurably, when other treatments had failed. I am quite impressed with his results. With heart calcium scores of 750 or more, nothing else seems to work.”
Bajwa and her patient are far from alone. In Santa Monica, California, general practitioner Dr Douglas Hopper said he recorded impressive results with a diabetic patient when he used the treatment to help her recover from congestive heart failure. Hopper then put his patient on the same treatment used in the clinical study: a regimen of tetracycline, EDTA and nutraceuticals,3 administered by the patient at home. Note that this was not intravenous chelation, which has been broadly analysed and critiqued, but, instead, a mix of oral and suppository treatments.
In Toledo, Ohio, cardiologist Dr James C. Roberts, who pioneered early patient treatment with this approach, has on his website case histories from dozens of patients who have shown remarkable improvement. In Tampa, Florida, cardiologist Dr Benedict Maniscalco, who supervised the clinical study [Pathophysiology study, referenced previous page], reports that patients who stayed on the treatment after the study was completed showed dramatic reductions in their heart disease symptoms. There are many more examples.
Normally results such as these, when reinforced by clinical studies, however preliminary, would be cause for loud celebration. If the findings had been reported by a major pharmaceuticals company, they could have easily made the front pages of medical news services because, until then, no one had reported reversing the symptoms of such diseases to such an extent. More encouraging still, because the medicines have been around for many years and their side effects are minimal and well known, the new approach is already available across the USA and used with thousands of patients. That leaves thousands more doctors with millions more patients who might benefit right now. On top of that, a blood test based on the new approach has been used to identify heart disease early in patients who show no outward symptoms.
Why, then, has the response from government authorities, medical associations and health experts been cavernous silence?
To understand this requires looking at a scourge that has been with us for millennia, and which science has been at a loss to explain until now. It is known as calcification.
CALCIFICATION
Calcification is a rock-hard mix of the most plentiful minerals in the body: calcium and phosphorus. Normally this calcium phosphate mix is essential for building bones and teeth. But as we age, and sometimes when we are still young, some of it goes haywire, stiffening arteries, roughing up skin, destroying teeth, blocking kidneys and salting cancers.
The arithmetic is frighteningly easy. Calcification doubles in the body about every three or four years. We can have it as teenagers and not notice, although it mysteriously accelerates in some athletes. Then as we age and also live longer, it becomes so endemic that most people over seventy have it.
For decades, calcification has been growing imperceptibly in tens of millions of baby boomers. Politicians and pundits are among the high-profile victims of this slow-motion explosion that is ripping apart healthcare with skyrocketing treatment costs. In December 2004, doctors diagnosed US President George W. Bush with one of the more commonly known forms: coronary artery calcification. Former President Clinton required emergency surgery because doctors missed much of his calcification when they used older tests to track it. Vice President Dick Cheney and many of his Senate colleagues are calcified. At least three sitting US women governors have had it in breast cancer as well. And they are not alone. Media types who cover politics or poke fun at it haven’t escaped. Larry King and David Letterman are both calcified, as are many ageing news anchors. A much younger CBS Early Show co-host, Rene Syler, has it too.
As we learn more about it, calcification is competing to be the leading medical disorder. Although it is nowhere on the “Leading Causes of Death” list, it contributes to most diseases that kill us, including heart disease, diabetes and cancer. The numbers are staggering. For the 60 million Americans who have heart disease, most have calcification. Of the millions of women who develop breast or ovarian cancer or who have breast implants, calcification is a warning. Men with prostate disease often have it, as do kidney-stone sufferers. Athletes with stress injuries like bone spurs and tendonitis get it frequently.
Most of us don’t know the pervasiveness of calcification because it has a different name in many diseases, and here are just a few: dental pulp stones, hardening of the arteries, kidney stones, pitcher’s elbow, bone spurs, microcalcification in breast cancer and “brain sand”.
Unsuspecting patients aren’t the only ones in the dark. Many doctors are unaware of new studies that show calcification is toxic, causing acute inflammation, rapid cell division and joint destruction. Oddly, these nasty effects are well known to specialists who study calcification in arthritis, but awareness of them hasn’t translated very well to the cardiovascular community, with the result that calcification is still misperceived by many as an innocent bystander instead of an inflammatory devil.
The double-think about calcification is illustrated by how it is treated in breast cancer. When microcalcification is detected in the breast with routine scans, it is a warning sign for cancer and the deposits are biopsied for malignancies. This was the case, for example, with Connecticut Governor Jody Rell in early 2005. Doctors found cancer in the calcium deposits in her breast before scans detected a tumour. This let them surgically remove it before it spread to her lymph nodes.
That typifies one perverse advantage of calcification: it helps doctors pre-empt more serious disease. In some ways, it is a canary in the mine of the body. And yet, if cancer is not found in calcium deposits, these are often declared as “benign” and patients are told there is nothing to worry about.
The same thing goes for heart disease. Coronary artery calcification is seen as an excellent predictor of the illness. Tens of billions of dollars are spent every year on scanning technology to identify the telltale thin white lines that betray its presence. Yet most doctors see calcification in the arteries as something that comes along later once the disease takes hold, despite evidence that calcium phosphate crystals generate the same type of inflammation that, according to cardiologists, plays a big role in heart attacks.
Incredibly, with all the advanced detection techniques, there has been no way to find calcium deposits where they get started in the billions of capillaries in the human body�??so, without being able to see the starting point, doctors often conclude that what they don’t see isn’t there. But make no mistake: calcification is there, and it is a medical disorder. It was registered in 1990 as a disorder under the International Classification of Diseases list of the World Health Organization and was adopted by WHO member states as of 1994 (see International Classification of Diseases (ICD)).
When well established, calcification stares defiantly at radiologists every day from X-rays as it multiplies incessantly. There has been no proof of where it comes from, and there is no known way to prevent it or sustainably get rid of it without removing it surgically. Due to its gestation period of years before it triggers real trouble, it has just begun sucking the life out of baby boomers and their healthcare budgets.
Among its more exotic effects, it threatens space exploration when it disables astronauts with unexpected kidney calcification and it is a budget-breaker for pro-sport-team owners who lose athletes to its ravages. At the more mundane level, it complicates root canals and it disrupts the lives of otherwise healthy young people when it strikes as kidney stones. Worst of all, it infiltrates plaque in heart disease and stroke and it plugs bypasses and stents used to fix our internal plumbing.
The US National Library of Medicine holds thousands of research documents referencing calcification, and various medical journals cover it in depth. GE Healthcare, Toshiba, Philips and Siemens sell thousands of machines for detecting it.
TREATMENT A THREAT TO PHARMCO PROFITS
But with all this money being thrown at calcification, there has been virtually no success at finding the cause. So when researchers such as those at Mayo Clinic and NASA find something that seems to cause it, and clinical studies show that a new approach seems to get rid of it, you’d think that most of the medical establishment would be rapt with attention, right? Wrong.
Only a few small studies have been co-financed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to look into this, and neither has to do with the treatment. The only thing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) seems to have done is to make rumblings about whether the treatment is legitimate, although the active ingredients�??tetracycline and EDTA�??have been FDA approved for other uses for decades. So far, no government agency has made public note of the peer-reviewed studies that many physicians say are so promising.
According to doctors familiar with the approach, here are a few reasons why the treatment has not been given the attention that it seems to merit…
The most perturbing for patients: the treatment is relatively inexpensive and produces poor profits compared to other drugs. It is exponentially cheaper than open heart surgery. Because it does not have to be taken for life at full dose�??as is the case with most other heart drugs�??it does not provide the steady cash flow that other medicines do.
Although the treatment is initially used alongside other medicines as a precaution to make sure patients don’t switch prematurely and suffer problems, evidence suggests that the new approach might replace more profitable blood thinners and anti-inflammatories that are staples of the pharmaceuticals industry.
And if the approach continues to reverse coronary artery disease, it will cut down on expensive surgical procedures that are the financial mainstay of hospitals.
That’s not to say surgeons don’t want to get rid of calcification. New stents that go into arteries are specially coated with time-release drugs that seem to ward off calcification. But that only happens where the stent is located, not in the other 99.999 per cent of the arteries.
Also, the EDTA�??tetracycline�??nutraceutical combo that has demonstrated such promise is not the only treatment shown to work. A group of drugs known as bisphosphonates, used for example to treat osteoporosis, has been shown to be effective in the lab against some calcification. But bisphosphonates can have nasty side effects, especially with the type of regular application that seems to be necessary to reverse heart disease in seriously ill patients. Due to these risks, the only present approach that seems to be safe and effective in reversing heart disease is the one that uses the EDTA�??tetracycline�??nutraceutical mix.
Critics claim the reason why the treatment isn’t adopted more broadly has nothing to do with money but instead with science. They say researchers can’t show how the treatment works.
NANOBACTERIA DISCOVERED IN OUR BLOOD
It all comes down to a sub-microscopic blood particle known as a nanobacterium, discovered in 1988 by Finnish researcher Dr Olavi Kajander at Scripps Research Institute in California.
The particle has a special habit no other blood particle has been known to possess: it forms a rock-hard calcium phosphate shell that is chemically identical to the stuff found in hardening of the arteries, prostate disease, kidney disease, periodontal disease and breast cancer. The problem is, the particle is so small that it apparently can’t accommodate nucleic acid strings that, according to commonly accepted wisdom, would let it replicate on its own and be alive. So scientists are stumped over how it manages to self-replicate.
For 15 years, microbiologist Dr Neva Ciftcioglu (pronounced “shift-show-lew”) has been peering with an electron microscope at this blood particle that critics say doesn’t live. But according to NASA colleagues and Mayo Clinic researchers, the question of whether it lives is less important than what it does. Despite or perhaps due to its tiny size and genetic elusiveness, this speck may be the Rosetta stone for a calcified language found in most diseases on the Leading Causes of Death list.
Like her science, Ciftcioglu’s life is full of unusual turns. Being a woman microbiologist from Turkey speaks volumes. Throw into that her once-fluent Finnish, a position at NASA and professorships on both sides of the Atlantic, and you’ve got a determined character struggling with a stubborn scientific cryptogram.
Ciftcioglu’s work with nanobacteria began when her PhD scholarship took her to the University of Kuopio in Finland, where alongside her once mentor, biochemist Olavi Kajander, she developed the antibodies necessary to find the particle in the human body. A decade later, her work caught the eye of NASA chief scientist Dr David McKay and she ended up at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, gathering science awards that testify to her success.
Now Ciftcioglu and long-time collaborator Kajander, who discovered the nanoscopic artifact, stand at the eye of a growing storm. They and their colleagues are garnering praise and scorn because they claim to have evidence for why most of us are literally petrified by the time we die. More profoundly, their work may influence how new life is found on Earth and other planets.
SELF-REPLICATING NANOPARTICLES
An intense dispute has raged for years that connects how we look for infection in the body with how we look for bio-kingdoms on Earth and throughout the universe. Researchers have long sought terrestrial extremophiles that tell them what might survive on Mars, while others doubt the wisdom of looking for life on Mars at all. The mystery remains: what is the most effective way to find novel organisms?
Until recently, every life-form was found to have a particular RNA sequence that can be amplified using a technique known as Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR). Nucleic acid sub-sequences named 16S rRNA have been universally found in life-forms. By making primers against these sub-sequences, scientists amplify the DNA that codes for the 16S rRNAs. Resulting PCR products, when sequenced, can characterise a life-form.
One high-powered group persuaded NASA with a “Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” line and lobbied successfully to use the same method employed for years: get a piece of RNA and amplify it. The group�??led by scientists such as Dr Gary Ruvkun at the Department of Genetics in Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, and advised by luminaries such as Dr Norman Pace at the University of Colorado�??got money from NASA to build a “PCR machine” that would automatically seek such clues in harsh environments such as those found on Mars.
Other scientists known as astrobiologists say the PCR machine approach is a waste of money because such amplification shows only part of the picture�??not what nature might have done on other planets or, for that matter, in extreme Earthly environments.
However, their argument always suffered from lack of evidence�??that is, until 2003 when scientists associated with the San Diego�??based Diversa Corporation and advised by Professor Karl Stetter, of the University of Regensburg, Germany, published the genome of an extremophile known as Nanoarchaeum equitans, which Stetter’s team had discovered in Icelandic volcanic vents.
N. equitans was special because it had the smallest known genome found so far, but it also had another intriguing trait. With Nanoarchaeae, the particular 16S rRNA sequence found in other life-forms wasn’t in the place that it was expected to be and did not respond to conventional PCR tests. The 16S rRNA sequence was different in areas addressed by the PCR primers and did not amplify. Stetter noted that the so-called universal probes that work with humans, animals, plants, eukaryotes, bacteria and archaeae did not work in this organism.
How, then, was the discovery made if the organism couldn’t be sequenced in that way?
Stetter had found that the organism’s sequence where the traditional “universal” primers are located was abnormal. This finding let him use other means to sequence the gene. In reporting their discovery in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,4 the Stetter team observed that the information-processing systems and simplicity of Nanoarchaeum’s metabolism suggests “an unanticipated world of organisms to be discovered”. In other words, it might be the tip of a nano-lifeberg.
Stetter’s finding gave ammunition to scientists such as Neva Ciftcioglu who say they have found other extremophiles, including human nanobacteria, that cannot have their nucleic acids detected with standard PCR amplification.
One of the differences between Stetter’s N. equitans and the nanobacteria found by Ciftcioglu and Kajander’s team is that Nanoarchaeae need another organism to replicate, whereas at least some nanobacteria seem to replicate by themselves. Another difference is that Nanoarchaeae are slightly wider: 400 nanometres compared to 100�??250 for nanobacteria. The greater size allows for what conventional wisdom says is the smallest allowable space for life-replicating ribosomes.
Which leads to the question: how do nanobacteria copy themselves? Evidence for self-replicating nanoparticles has been around for years in everything from oil wells to heart disease, but failure to sequence them using regular PCR led some to dismiss them as contamination or mistakes. However, researchers have found characteristics that make the particles hard to explain away. They replicate on their own, so are not viruses. They resist high-level radiation, which suggests they are not bacteria. They respond well to light, where non-living crystals don’t.
So if they aren’t viruses, regular bacteria or crystals, what are they?
Some supporters of standardised 16S rRNA tests are quick to discount nanobacteria. That’s not surprising. If a novel nucleic sequence holds true with other extremophiles as with N. equitans, then a machine that searches for life using standard PCR tests might miss them and be obsolete. Conscious of this, the PCR machine team has said that as part of their work, they plan to “search for the boundaries” of the 16S sequences, but what exactly that means and how they plan to overcome the problem hasn’t been set out yet.
Reputations, money and perhaps the foundations of life ride on the 16S rRNA dispute. Resolving it may determine who gets money to find the next great biological kingdom.
NANOBACTERIAL INFECTION
How relevant is the outcome for human welfare? In 2004, researchers reported finding nanobacteria in everything from heart disease to cancer and kidney stones. Medical researchers reported to the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2004 that a test for nanobacteria is an accurate predictor of heart disease risk. But the work that these researchers say may already have saved lives has been ridiculed by critics who claim that such nanobes don’t exist, which in turn has made funding for basic research hard to get.
Who is right? One well-respected astrobiologist observer qualified the struggle this way: “Unless we declare [the nano-organism scientists] incompetent, then the info they have gathered is rather compelling that something interesting is going on.”
That’s why a few intrepid investors have plopped US$7 million and counting into a Tampa biotech start-up devoted exclusively to Ciftcioglu and Kajander’s discoveries about the calcifying particle. For the big pharmaceuticals companies that’s pocket change, but for these entrepreneurs it’s a pocketful of faith that’s been keeping them on edge for years. And it’s starting to show some results, as published research from NASA, Mayo and various universities indicates. Moreover, despite its relative financial insignificance, this venture may end up wagging the dog due to a long-overdue paradigm shift in, of all things, the space program.
After decades of resistance, NASA�??provoked by successful upstart private projects such as the X Prize, which led to the first private foray into space�??is now collaborating with fledgling companies, instead of just corporate behemoths, on intractable problems: in this case, why perfectly healthy astronauts come down with kidney and other calcifying disorders. The result: in March 2005, NASA’s Johnson Space Center put the finishing touches on a tightly secured lab aimed at decoding nanobacteria found at the core of kidney stones. After some serious growing pains, the lab is finally beginning to look into what Ciftcioglu and Kajander began examining so many years ago: the genetic content of nanobacteria. Meanwhile, Ciftcioglu and others have published results showing that nanobacteria multiply five times faster in weightlessness than in Earth gravity,5 which may explain why calcification shows up so suddenly in space.
But while researchers argue over what this nanobacterium is and how it multiplies, doctors are finding that, when they treat it with a medical cocktail, their patients improve.
Nor is it unusual that doctors are succeeding before science figures out why. Antibiotics were used successfully against bacteria long before scientists deciphered DNA. Doctors stopped infecting patients by washing their hands long before they were able to identify all the viruses and bacteria that they inadvertently transported from patient to patient.
Most recently, a vaccine that prevents cervical cancer has been put on the market. It apparently works by targeting the human papilloma virus. Problem is, researchers can’t show exactly how the virus causes cancer; they can only show that when it is stopped, the cancer doesn’t occur. But that hasn’t prevented the drug from being patented and put on the market. The history of medicine is full of such examples where patients improve with treatments whose mechanisms aren’t fully understood at the start.
The idea that infection could be at the heart of chronic illness is intriguing because it has been around for more than a century but only now is regaining favour due to discoveries of, for example, a vaccine that prevents cervical cancer (as mentioned above). The resulting debates over infection in chronic disease have a novel twist because they are driven by new diagnostic technologies that give researchers the molecular accuracy required to confirm older theories about infection. On one hand, clinical results suggest antibiotics alone do not prevent the rate of heart attacks among coronary patients.
On the other, discoveries that infection is responsible for most stomach ulcers and some cancers support the long-held idea that the same might be true in heart disease, if only science could find the right infection and get rid of it.
Some say that nanobacteria may be one such infection. Yet scientists’ inability to fully explain the genetics of nanobacteria is being used by high-ranking medical authorities as an excuse to ignore the pathogen and its treatment.
This is especially perplexing because scientists involved in the discoveries work at some of the highest level institutions in America, including NASA, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Washington Hospital Center and many others, and are not only respected in their field but are also award winners. Other centres of excellence internationally, such as University Hospital in Vienna, have also isolated the pathogen and observed it in diseases such as ovarian cancer.
For decades, scientists have shown that disease can be caused by contaminants that are not “alive” and cannot replicate on their own.
Environmental toxins, many viruses and, most recently, particles known as prions have all been shown as players in disease processes, although they cannot self-replicate.
So it seems unusual that nanobacteria would be discounted just because no one has yet shown how they multiply. Which takes us to the question of where nanobacteria might come from.
