Chronic Fatigue
Syndrome Radio Show
Jan 4th, 1998
Dr. Roger G. Mazlen, Host
with
Dr. Garth Nicolson
Karl Note:
Click Here to read the comments by Aajonus Vonderplanitz
about "mycoplasma" and that this bacteria is, in fact,
helpful in cleaning up toxic waste in the body.
Aajonus is my Guru when it comes to diet. In his
concept of disease, cooked and bad food bring toxins into
the body and this particular bacteria is just ONE of the
bacteria found, commonly, in people suffering from
Fibromyalgia. It is another example of the cause
and effect being reversed. Most doctors see the
high levels of mycoplasma in the bodies of those with
fibromyalgia, and assume the mycoplasma is the CAUSE of
the fibromyalgia. Aajonus would have you attack the
basic problem, poor food. The bacteria are already
trying to do that!
Dr. Mazlen
We
are going to have with us, today, Dr. Garth L. Nicolson.
He's the Chief Scientific Officer of the Institute for
Molecular Medicine in Huntington Beach, California and as
well, he is the Professor of Internal Medicine at the
University of Texas Medical School at Houston. He's going
to be talking to us about something very important for
the 90's, the new emerging infectious disease, which is
mycoplasma infection. And we're going to go right now to
Dr. Nicolson. Dr. Nicolson, welcome to our show today.
Dr. Nicolson
Well, it's a pleasure to be on.
Dr. Mazlen
We're going to let you start off and maybe define for our
audience, what this organism, the
mycoplasma
is about.
Dr. Nicolson
The reason that this is important to patients with
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or Fibromyalgia Syndrome or Gulf
War Illness is that we found that 50 - 60% of the
patients that have these syndromes have infections,
chronic infections that are the underlying cause of a lot
of their morbidity or their illness and the evidence for
that is that we can find these micro-organisms deep
inside the white blood cells in the blood and they're
systemic. They go to all the tissues of the body and all
the organs of the body and they cause all these complex
signs and symptoms that occur all over the body and we
know them collectively as these names like Chronic
Fatigue Syndrome or Fibromyalgia Syndrome, but the
important thing is that once we can identify if these
chronic infections are there, a patient can be treated.
We have patients that have been sick with Chronic Fatigue
Syndrome or Fibromyalgia Syndrome for decades and they
have not really received an adequate diagnosis. Yes, we
know they had the syndrome but we didn't know what the
underlying cause of the syndrome was. Well, one of the
underlying causes of the syndrome is, we feel, are these
chronic infections and once they can be identified these
patients can be treated. And we have patients that are
now recovering after years of illness. They're getting
their health back. It's a slow process of recovery but
they are recovering. They are going back to work, they're
going back to a normal life again. And I think that's the
good news is for a large number of people. We can
actually help them recover from this disease.
Dr. Mazlen
Well, that's very exciting news and we are delighted to
have you say that here on this show. It offers hope to a
lot of these people. What type of illnesses or syndromes
are associated with mycoplasma infection?
Dr. Nicolson
Well, mycoplasma first are a very simple subclass of
bacteria. They don't have a rigid cell wall like most
bacteria and they have usually less genetic information
inside them and because of that they have to grow
associated with cells in the case the mycoplasma that
invades, for example, mammals or us, and either they have
to grow associated with the cells or inside the cells in
our tissues. So they really don't do well outside the
body. They're not viruses because they have the ability
to self-replicate but they're very fastidious, that is,
they require a lot of metabolites themselves. So these
types of infections have to be associated very closely
with cells or tissues and when they get in the body they
can penetrate, many of them, into virtually any tissue or
cell. Now there are about 50 different types of
mycoplasma so we concentrate only on about 6 and these
are the 6 that are known to cause human diseases and
these 6 are very interesting, because in the case of a
very specialized type of illness, like Gulf War Illness,
we find principally one species of mycoplasma and you
have to realize the Gulf War Illness started in 1991 and
a lot of people came home. Now we have over a 100,000
veterans of Desert Storm that are sick and if you count
their family members it's probably double that, so these
diseases are contagious, although they're not wildly
contagious, they can be passed at a very slow rate
between members of the same family is the usual way it's
passed. People that have close contact. It requires close
contact to pass these types of illnesses because they're
not very invasive in terms of infectivity. But once
they're passed to another patient, that patient will
slowly start to have the signs and symptoms that we see
in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, Gulf War
Illness. It often starts with a low grade fever or
flu-like condition in the lungs, because they're
airborne, that's how they're passed, and this doesn't
resolve very easily. It sort of becomes chronic and so
instead of completely resolving it goes into a chronic
phase and then all the other signs and symptoms like
joint pain, reduced mobility, chronic fatigue, vision
problems, cognitive problems, muscle spasms and burning,
then all these other different 20 to 40 different signs
and symptoms, one by one, tend to come on very slowly.
And in fact, if you look at Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or
Fibromyalgia, most people that have had these illnesses
have had them for years and they have a very slow onset
so they have a long phase in which this chronic condition
slowly becomes worse and worse and worse. Now, in some
cases it resolves, but in most cases, most patients it
does not resolve. And it is there and there is really no
real effective treatment that will eliminate it
completely. There are treatments that will shelf some of
the signs and symptoms, but none that really eliminate
all of the signs and symptoms, so what we have found is
that if these chronic infections are the underlying
reasons and there could be many reasons that people have
these chronic illnesses, if they're chronic infections
that are involved, once these are identified, then we can
prescribe the correct antibiotics to treat them and it's
a slow process but people can recover.
Dr. Mazlen
We're going to come back and talk about treatment in a
little while. I want to mention that information with
regard to your institute can be obtained through your
website, www.immed.org.
Dr. Nicolson, talk to us now a little bit about how treatable are these diseases. If you catch them early is it different then when you catch them late or are they all treatable more or less with the same effectiveness?
Dr. Nicolson
Well, you know these illnesses, these syndromes, they're
very complex and they often have a number of underlying
reasons for the illness. We've concentrated on illnesses
that are caused by infections. These are chronic
infections that can be identified in about 60% of
Fibromyalgia patients, about 60% of Chronic Fatigue
patients and 50% of Gulf War Illness patients. Once these
are identified then they can be treated with a regimen
with antibiotics, vitamins and nutritional support and
some other important nutritional considerations that are
involved in these treatments.
Dr. Mazlen
Does everybody respond to treatment?
Dr. Nicolson
So far, we've found that at least three quarters of the
people that start this treatment have recovered. Not
everybody recovers and we attribute that to the fact that
a lot of people have multiple reasons for their chronic
conditions. Some people have severe chemical exposures,
for example, and those are not treated at all by the
antibiotic regimen. Other people have viruses that are
very important in the etiology of their illnesses and
those aren't touched by the antibiotics, although
recently, we found a combination of antivirals and the
antibiotics. In fact, there are 2 or 3 physicians that
are using this now in various parts of the country, in
Toronto, for example, and in various locations, and these
have proved to be very effective and that might go along
with the idea that these diseases are multifocal. They're
caused by a number of different insults on the body and
viruses are one of the insults. These primitive
mycoplasma are another insult. Chemicals are another
insult. And so we kind of have to treat these in
combination to really get the maximun affect.
Dr. Mazlen
Now, you had mentioned to me when we were talking on the
telephone previously, at another time, that in the Gulf
War Syndrome, that the mycoplasma might be genetically
altered. Do you want to comment on that?
Dr. Nicolson
Well, this is quite different from what we found in the
civilian populations of the US and Canada. We don't see
any evidence for any genetic alteration of these
micro-organisms but we did find in the Gulf War Illness
patients that there were some unusual genes that were
associated with the mycoplasma that we found deep inside
the cells in these patients bodies. And one of those
genes was the HIV-I envelope gene and this a gene that
encodes a capsid or surface component of the HIV or AIDS
and this is a component that the virus uses to bind to
and enter cells and so we think that this gene may have
been put into this primitive bacteria to increase its
penetration in the cells. Now, this was the only gene we
found from the HIV. We couldn't find any of the other
genes, so it wasn't that the HIV virus entered the
mycoplasma somehow. It appears as if a part of this gene
or the whole gene, we don't think the whole gene but a
part of it, may have been placed into the bacteria or the
mycoplasma to increase its pathogenicity. That's really a
theory at this point. It hasn't really been proven, but
it's very suspicious that we find this in some of the
Gulf War Illness patients who are extremely sick, some of
them have actually died from their illness.
Dr. Mazlen
I just want to make it clear to our listening audience
that this is not what you find in the Chronic Fatigue
Syndrome or Fibromyalgia patients who are here in the
United States that you're studying, is that correct?
Dr. Nicolson
That's absolutely correct. We have not seen that except
in one exception, and that's in a group of prison guards
and their family members in Texas that we were studying
because they had Gulf War Illness before the Gulf War.
Now unfortunately, there was some experimentation going
on in this particular prison unit that we were studying
and we think that we the Dept. of Defense may have been
involved in some illegal testing and I don't want to go
into that because it's very contentious at this point and
it's being hotly denied by the government and you can
imagine why.
Dr. Mazlen
OK, we won't go into it. We'll focus more on Chronic
Fatigue Syndrome which is basically what our listening
audience is composed of. Now you mentioned that 75% may
recover but you also mentioned to me when we were talking
privately that this organism is partially anerobic so for
that reason, sometimes, when people go through air
travel, let's say they're traveling to some destination,
their disease may worsen. Can you explain that?
Dr. Nicolson
Well, we think that one of the problems that many
patients that have Fibromyalgia or Chronic Fatigue
Syndrome have is that when they travel by air they
relapse very heavily, that is their signs and symptoms
become worse. This is commonly found and it's not just so
much the stress of traveling, we think there's another
element involved and that's that when they travel they
fly under conditions of reduced oxygen pressure, so the
partial pressure of oxygen is actually reduced in the
cabin of the aircraft flying at 20 - 30,000 feet. This is
especially apparent in people who fly in helicopters so
we have a lot of pilots that have contacted us,
particularly helicopter pilots that become very sick
after flying. And in some cases the people get temporary
relief by going on hyperbaric oxygen, that is oxygen
under pressure that increases the partial pressure of
oxygen. All of this is consistent with what happens with
a mycoplasma infection. These infections are what's known
as borderline anerobes. That is, the micro-organism
prefers low oxygen tension, so if you over exert, for
example, and you starve your tissues for oxygen, that
will actually stimulate the growth of these
micro-organisms, or if you fly in an aircraft for a long
period of time, a long flight, that can stimulate these,
and so the signs and symptoms can become worse after such
an event.
Dr. Mazlen
Now, it's important before we get through the show today
which is obviously a half hour show, to talk briefly
about testing patients for this. How do you test a
patient if they want to find out if they have this? What
are the options?
Dr. Nicolson
First, we have developed these tests over the last 5 or 6
years and they're very sensitive tests and there are only
a few places that can conduct these tests. We use blood
as the starting point. We analyze the white blood cells.
We use two different types of extremely sensitive
techniques. Both of them are molecular biologic
techniques, one is called nucleoprotein gene tracking and
the other is called forensic polymerase chain reaction.
Now without going into any detail, both of these are
based upon the genetic makeup of the micro-organism and
they're extremely sensitive. In fact, we have a contract
from the Dept. of Defense to train Dept. of Defense
personnel. They'll be coming out to our institute in a
couple of weeks to be trained on how to do these
different tests. People can call our institute at
714-903-2900 or go to our website which you gave and get
informatiion on how to be tested. We're a non-profit
institute so we accept a donation in lieu of paying for
the test and once people give the donation, then we do
their test. We obviously have to recover the cost of
doing the test. We have thousands of people contacting us
for information on how to get the tests run and so we
provide that information, we send them a package of
publications, for example, reports and how to sign up for
the test, how to send the blood, information they can
take to their physicians and so on. They send their
blood, they usually get their results back in three or
four weeks.
Dr. Mazlen
Well, that's exciting because a lot of times testing is
not available when a new organism or a new disease is
being looked into.
And now we're going to wrap up this most exciting topic which we're going to have to continue again at a later date with Dr. Garth Nicolson. Dr. Nicolson, I have a question for you as we close the show. I'd like to know, in terms of the extent of this infection, we know it's present in Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and the Gulf War Illness as describe in your excellent work. Is is also more prevalent than that? Do other people have it?
Dr. Nicolson
What we're finding is that we can't detect these highly
pathogenic mycoplasma species in normal adults, so it's
obviously much more prevalent in the patients with
disease. We're looking at a number of other disorders,
the most recent one we're looking at is Inflammatory
Bowel Disorder and we're finding it there as well. It's
very interesting, these different disorders, depending
upon the organ system that's involved may involve a
different species of mycoplasmas. The highly penetrating
types of mycoplasmas are the ones that cause the most
systemic or system-wide illnesses and those are the most
dangerous and we're very conscious of this. A lot of
people, for example, are having heart problems because of
endocarditis, because of infection of the heart by these
different micro-organisms. So that's something that we're
looking into right now that's very important.
Dr. Mazlen
Yes, that would be very important. Do patients
occasionally die from this infection?
Dr. Nicolson
Oh, yes, it's documented not only in the medical
literature, but we've been in contact with people that
tested their blood that were severely ill that were on,
for example, coronary care units waiting for transplants
and we found that their hearts were severely compromised
because of these illnesses. I even had an occurrence in
my own family where the heart valve was attacked by one
of these micro-organisms. So, this is a very serious
problem and you can't let these illnesses progress to the
extent where they involve major organ systems like the
heart.
Dr. Mazlen
Well, we're going to make a date right now to have you
back on the show later in the year and we're certainly
going to want to talk in more detail about many of these
things that you are doing. I'll give your website again,
www.immed.org. I want to mention one more time that Dr.
Garth Nicolson is the Chief Scientific Officer of the
Institute for Molecular Medicine. His phone number in
California is 714-903-2900. This is a major, extremely
important issue. We'll be back commenting on it again. I
want to thank you, Dr. Nicolson for taking time out from
your day to be with us today. We look forward to having
you back on the show as a guest.
Transcribed by
Carolyn Viviani
carolynv@inx.net
Permission is given to copy, distribute and repost this transcript provided that my name not be removed from it.
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