Staying Alive

Staying Alive
By
Robert E. Reis

“An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.” -  Mohandas Gandhi

In 1972 the medical establishment had decided that infectious diseases were being eradicated in the developed world. It decided the future of medicine was finding solutions for the problems causes by non-infectious diseases.

The consensus was wrong on two counts. It did not foresee AIDS, Legionnaire’s disease, Ebola, Marburg, antibiotic-resistant TB, “flesh-eating staph, hepatitis C, and Rift Valley fever. Stomach ulcers and some forms of cancer and some forms of heart disease, definitely; all cancers and all heart diseases and diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia are possibly caused by infections.

Robert Koch won a Nobel Prize in 1905. His four postulates set the gold standard for proving that a disease is caused by an infection. The infectious agent must be found in a subject with the disease. The bug must be isolated and grown in a culture. Injecting the bug into a healthy subject must cause the disease. The bug must be recovered from the subject and shown to be the same specific causative agent as the original.

Following Koch’s four postulates revolutionized medicine, but people take the easy way out. When it was difficult to discover the cause of an illness medicine often decided to claim the illness was hereditary, or environmental, or “multifactorial.” Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, schizophrenia and stomach ulcers were not considered infectious diseases in 1972.

The medical establishment listed environmental factors, smoking, diet, drugs, aspirin, stress and other reasons among the causes of peptic ulcers. Infection was not mentioned at all.

In 1981 Australian researchers reviewed the medical records of patients whose stomachs were infected with a bacteria they happened to be studying. They noticed that when one of the patients was treated with tetracycline for unrelated reasons, their bacteria and that patient’s peptic ulcer both disappeared.

Today, few scientists doubt that peptic ulcers are caused by an infection.

The medical establishment had a similar list for heart disease in the 1990s. They identified the culprits as stress, smoking, poor diet, and so forth.

Enter Chlamydia pneumoniae, a bacterium that causes pneumonia and bronchitis. It is a relative of Chlamydia trachomatis that causes blindness and female infertility.

Two Finnish scientists discovered this new infection in 1985. They found that 68% of Finnish heart attack victims had antibodies for the new bug as did 50% of patients with coronary heart disease. Only 17% of the healthy controls had the antibodies.

From 1991 on reports of tissue full of Chlamydia pneumoniae from the clogged arteries of heart disease patients have accumulated.

Pathologists have recently reported Chlamydia pneumoniae in the diseased sections of the autopsied brains of late-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

Some scientists are predicting the evidence will show that atherosclerosis is a chronic lifelong arterial infection.

National Institutes of Health and the Pfizer Corporation have just begun a four-year study involving 4,000 heart patients that will last four years.

In 1910 Peyton Rous discovered that chickens infected with the eponymous Rous sarcoma virus developed cancer two weeks after infection.

Cancer rarely develops rapidly in humans. Symptoms of cancer often appear after a person has experienced many decades of irrelevant “risk factors”.

In 1979 a retrovirus endemic in parts of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean was linked to certain leukemias and lymphomas; the cancer appeared decades after infection.

The Epstein-Barr virus has been linked to more than three different types of cancers.

Scientists have shown that almost all cases of cervical cancer are associated with the same virus that causes genital warts.

The bacterium that is the major cause of peptic ulcers is now blaimed for a sixfold increase in the risk of stomach cancer.

There is a mouse mammary tumor virus that causes breast cancer in mice. The mother passes on the virus in her milk. The female offspring only develop active cancer when they are producing milk. Researcher suspect there is a similar virus among humans.

Paul Ewald is prominent evolutionary biologist at Amherst College and the author of the Evolution of Infectious Diseases. Gregory M. Cochran is a Ph.  D. physicist who lives in Albuquerque. They began collaborating in 1992 when Ewald was one of three biologists asked to review an article by Cochran that elaborated a theory that human homosexuality might result from result from the manipulation of the host by an infectious agent. Cochran had observed there is a fungus that can infect a plant and take control of the plants reproductive machinery so instead of pollen it produces fungal spores. The article was rejected, but Ewald was impressed by the logic.

Ewald has thought a lot about the strategies of infectious organisms.

An airborne respiratory pathogen spreads more efficiently if the host is well enough to go to work and sneeze on people in the subway. A germ that can travel from person to person by a carrier, such as a mosquito or a tsetse fly, can afford to become very harmful. A sexually transmitted pathogen must await its few opportunities patiently. It spreads most efficiently when those infected have no symptoms and don’t know they are sick. Some pathogens linger in the host forever, others attack and disappear, but the immune system remains stuck in the active mode causing permanent damage.

Ewald examined the means of transmission and has suggested ways to persuade an infection agent to adjust its behavior.

Ewald and Cochran have used Darwinian principles to create a new theory that explains why many diseases long attributed to genetic or environment factors must be infectious diseases.

They note that genetic traits that are unfavorable to an organism’s survival or reproduction do not persist in the gene pool for long. Logic tells us that any inherited disease or trait that has a serious impact on fitness must fade over time. The genes that spell out that disease or trait will be passed on to fewer and fewer individuals in future generations. Common illnesses with severe fitness costs that have existed for many generations are unlikely to have a genetic cause.

In biology, fitness means reproduction.

A disease that kills its host before the disease can reproduce reduces the disease’s fitness to zero.

A disease that kills its host before the host can reproduce reduces the host’s fitness to zero.

Imagine an inherited, that is, non-infectious, disease that causes people with the disease to have one percent fewer children than people who do not have the hereditary disease.

Eventually the number of people with the disease will dwindle close to zero.

Of the forty diseases most hostile to human fitness, prevailing medical opinion says that thirty-three are infectious and three are indirectly caused by infection.

Ewald and Cochran reason that most fitness-antagonistic diseases must infectious, not genetic.

(There are genetic diseases that balance there fitness costs with a benefit like sickle-cell anemia.)

Doctors know syphilitic dementia is caused by infection, but since Freud looking for an infectious cause of mental dysfunctions has not been a popular field of research.

Doctors also know that St. Vitus’ dance is a side effect of an untreated streptococcal infection. Streptococcal antibodies find their way into the brain and attack a region called the basal ganglia, causing characteristic clumsiness and arm-flapping movements along with obsessions, compulsions, senseless rituals, and obsessions. It was only recently that a researcher made the connection with the symptoms of the mental condition called obsessive compulsive disorder. There is now a recognized syndrome called pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcus, or PANDAS.

It is now known that a mental disorder can result from a lingering immune response to an infection.

Since the 1920s researchers have pointed out there are seasonal and geographic patters in the births of schizophrenics. Mainstream psychiatry ignored them.

The popular fad among mainstream psychiatrists today is looking for a genetic cause of schizophrenia.

Ewald and Cochran assert that infection must be a factor in schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia affects about one percent of the population. Schizophrenia has a devastating effect on the reproductive fitness of its sufferers. If it were a genetic condition its frequency should have declined over time to approach the background mutation rate of spontaneous mutations. It has not.

They point out that those diseases that have been proven to be genetic effect one person in 7,000 or one person in 50,000 or one per 100,000. Schizophrenia affects one person in 100.

Borna virus can infect almost all mammals. Animals infected with Borna virus may display depression, apathy, weak legs, abnormal body postures, a staggering gait, learning disorders, exaggerated startle responses, and hyperactivity.

Scientists have not yet found a smoking gun. But an infectious cause of schizophrenia looks more and more likely.

Ewald still upholds his hypothesis that homosexuality is the result of an infection. Homosexuality has severe fitness costs. Homosexual men have only 20 percent as many children as heterosexual men. Were homosexuality a genetic condition it should quickly have dwindled towards the rate of natural random mutation. It has not.

What other illness does the evolutionary biological approach suggest are likely to be the result of infections?

Rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, most cancers, multiple sclerosis, most major psychiatric diseases, cerebral palsy and many other diseases are likely candidates.

Ewald say we should be looking for the indicators of an infectious spread of the disease. Is there geographic variation or temporal variation?

Multiple sclerosis is a likely candidate. There are isolated populations that did not have multiple sclerosis previously, but where it suddenly appeared and spread. It is far more common the further away one lives from the equator. The disease follows a pattern of remissions followed by relapses like many known infectious diseases.

Ewald points out that Koch’s principles are not easy to apply when there are long delays between the onset of infection and the onset of disease. Cause and effect can be difficult to identify. Pathogens that temporarily infect a host, but permanently disrupt the orderly responses of the immune system will obviously be difficult to identify.

The lessons I have learned in this and in my previous explorations of the medical world are that mainstream medicine has a habit of loudly claiming knowledge it does not have, of dispensing treatments unrelated to the causes or cure of various diseases, of discounting evidence when it does not suit their current fad, and insisting on public health policies for which the evidence is slim, non-existent or simply invented.

“Ah yes, truth. Funny how everyone is always asking for it but when they get it they don’t believe it because it’s not the truth they want to hear.”  - Helena Cassadine

Posted by Robert Reis on Wednesday, September 12, 2007 at 06:34 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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