please see faustmanlab.org
pubmed.org faustman dl
pubmed.org ristori+ bcg
and ej ratner the lancet. p 106 jan 14 1978 describing the cause and treatment of causalgia
patient was mrs j edward spike jr and her personal physicician was mark altschule of harvard
i should like to tslk with you sbout trigeminal neuralgia etc
Save the Germs
With modern medicine killing off whole categories of bacteria and viruses — including benign ones that promote health — scientists propose a way to preserve microbes that may rescue us one day.
Malachi Ward
Set in a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Swiss Alps on the eve of World War I, Thomas Mann’s novel “The Magic Mountain” delves deep into the “feverish process of decay and repair” that is life.
In the century that has passed, the use of antibiotics made tuberculosis disappear from the modern world. But now a drug-resistant form of this horrible bug has appeared — and we have nothing in our medicine chest with which to fight it. Enamored of the antibiotics’ power, medicine has overprescribed them, making a new pandemic possible when the old strain of bacteria adapted.
But humans are resilient too, and we’ve known for decades about “good germs” that can resist or defeat “bad germs” in our bodies. The trouble is that industrial environments, antibacterial drugs and sophisticated medical procedures can kill off those good germs while letting bad ones grow unchecked.
Last month, a team of scientists led by Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, a Venezuelan now at Rutgers University, suggested a source of new cures: Create a global microbe vault or system of vaults, perhaps where the climate is easy on refrigeration, to collect and preserve such beneficial microbes, particularly from countries least affected by modernization. Who knows the magic that surviving ancestral biotics might hold for understanding and curbing today’s diseases?
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In the magazine Science, Professor Dominguez-Bello, Rob Knight of the University of California, San Diego, Jack A. Gilbert of the University of Chicago and Martin J. Blaser of New York University Langone Medical Center argue for the urgency of preserving stool samples and matter swabbed from the skin, mouth, vagina and nose, especially from remote traditional peoples, before modernity kills off these microbes.
The key to understanding the proposal is that not all germs are bad. Some bacteria and viruses aid digestion; others regulate immune systems. But modern medical, dietetic and hygiene practices have put many on the endangered list. The scientists argue that the diversity of the human populations in which they occur creates diversity in how they function. There are even germs that display “amphibiosis”: They can be good or bad depending on which other microbes are present, or on their human hosts’ genes, age or environment.
Put simply, while we were nearly eradicating TB, the arsenal of wonder drugs — along with practices like elective cesarean sections, processing foods and purifying water — were carpet-bombing many good microbes, alongside toxic germs, that come with birth. We get them when we squeeze through the birth canal and when we drink breast milk — a co-evolution of mothers and microbes unbroken for at least 200,000 years.
Researchers like Jeff Leach, who has studied Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, and Cecil Lewis and Alexandra Obregon-Tito, who have worked with the Matses people in Peru, have documented that beneficial germs have been disappearing less often in less developed societies.
Americans may have lost half their microbial diversity in recent decades. In China and India, the loss grows ever faster as those countries’ development accelerates.
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