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Do any of you experts know why Dr Wheldon and the Vanderbilt group focused on a bacterial rather than a viral explanation for MS, and why particularly CPn rather than any other kind of bacterial infection?
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Agatha

Do any of you experts know why Dr Wheldon and the Vanderbilt group focused on a bacterial rather than a viral explanation for MS, and why particularly CPn rather than any other kind of bacterial infection?

Well, antibiotic treatments have been much more successful than antiviral treatments in MS. This doesn't mean that viruses can't be a part of the MS disease. It's just that it is usually enough to eradicate Cpn, and you'll get rid of possible chronic viral infections too.

I don't know how they got the idea that it was Cpn that we should go after, but the idea has just turned out to be very successful.

The problem with other intracellular bacteria is that they tend to be more destructive than Cpn, not creepy enough. If you have rickettsia, you can get things like Rocky Mountain Spotty Fever, and typhus, you sure notice if you have these. Same with tuberculosis, Legionella, and borrelia too has quite characteristic symptoms. In all of these infections, Cpn is still likely a big part of them, since nearly everyone has it anyway, and it weakens the immune system, so that other bacteria and viruses can easier get a foothold.

On the other hand, some co-infections appear to disable the immune system in a way that you need to treat them specially, before you can get your hands at Cpn. For example the Marshall protocol assumes that some bacteria target the VDR (vitamin D receptor), which is a part of the innate immunity, and you have to take a special drug called Olmesartan to activate the immune system in addition to antibiotics to clear away this co-infection and eventually the Cpn that goes with it. Antibiotics are still often enough alone to lead to a cure in most cases, but not in all cases. If antibiotics alone aren't leading to a cure, you'll just have to work harder, the bacteria are still there to be killed.

I don't know how why they originally locked on to CPn, but the Vanderbilt group found evidence of it in the cerebrospinal fluid of a proportion of MS patients. Maybe others know why they originally thought to test for CPn.

I'm not sure, but I think it was a process of elimination. Also, Cpn has only been known to be a pathogen since the mid eighties and even then for a long while it was only thought to cause at worst, walking pneumonia. Other pathogens have been known about for a lot longer. Then, of cours, Prof Sriram looked into it and found it in the cerebro-spinal fluid of more than eighty percent of MS patients, which is quite a number for such a hard to find pathogen.

Sarah

oh these are interesting replies - it must have been like looking for a needle in a haystack when people like Paul le Gac were trying to suss it out way back.
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Agatha

I think it begins with Sriram's article in 1999. See the begin here thread in the antibiotics forum. Ken

Thanks everyone - I just wondered - I always thought I had an infection but I assumed it was viral because it seemed to start with the flu so it was interesting to discover the bacterial theory.
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Agatha

Thanks everyone - I just wondered - I always thought I had an infection but I assumed it was viral because it seemed to start with the flu so it was interesting to discover the bacterial theory.

Like I said, in MS you have Cpn, but it doesn't mean viruses can't be part of it too. Im drawing my experience from my "own" patients, and myself too, but I'm not a doctor, however.

What I can tell is that people with depression and especially panic attacks (without MS of course) have their CNS + bone marrow infected and some quite heavily. Some can experience a surge of electricity going through their CNS, if you kill these bacteria too fast. And others appear to get so called internal tremors. Bone pain originating from the bone marrow is common too. I experienced some of these myself too.. not the internal tremor though. I have only used appropriate supplements that I have myself found to be effective. And I haven't had MS.

So yes, based on this small experience I would say MS is a multifactorial disease, which involves also e.g. viruses, and they are likely to be the triggering factor. There are some research papers about this too. But it is often enough to just kill Cpn, and the viruses will disappear too.

CNS + bone marrow infection with Cpn is much more common than thought, I would suspect, and this alone is then not enough to get MS.