Stand Up To Cancer! Really?

So September (2010) was the Stand Up To Cancer month. The money raised goes to a very good cause but how much interest is there in cancer prevention? What if half of all cancers good very easily be prevented? Why wouldn't the government want to do this - obviously the drug companies, hospitals and doctors would stand to lose a great chunk of their income and so are not actually interested in preventing cancer.
Thirty-two years ago, in 1978, an article was published in the journal, Cancer Research, "Effect of dietary undegraded carrageenan on colon carcinogenesis in F344 rats treated with azoxymethane or methylnitrosourea".
Now going from memory since within a week of reordering the article, I lost it again which makes it seem as though there is a curse on the article, I'll try to dredge up what I remember. 1 of 2 known carcingens, azoxymethane (AZM) or methylnitrosourea (MNS) was given to rats who were on a diet of carrageenan: 100% of those rats developed precancerous pinpoint ulcers in their distal colons (if the experiment had continued further, the adenomatous ulcers would have progressed to cancerous tumors).
Only half of a further group of rats just fed 1 or other of the 2 carcinogens (AZM or MNS) developed such ulcers. 2 out of 10 of another group of rats just fed carrageenan also developed these ulcers.
So carrageenan acted to boost the action of other carcinogens (a synergistic reaqction). We also drink and eat carcinogens (azo colors added to foods and drinks; nitrates in bacon and deli meats, etc), so the carrageenan that we also ingest just like the rats will also act synergestically to cause ulcers and, later, tumors in our colons too.
It's obvious that the removal of carrageenan from the human diet would reduce cancer by up to 50%. You might think that carrageenan's effects are just limited to the colon but the whole body is affected. What happens to the colon is just the first symptom of similar damage happening within the body.
Now why after all this time hasn't carrageenan been removed from the human diet? I'll let you answer that one!

Multiple sclerosis and a little-known sheep disease

J.K.Rowling of the Harry Potter books fame recently announced that she was funding a research center in Scotland primarily for multiple sclerosis (which her mother died of), but also for other degenerative neurological
diseases.
MS is a disease of northern climes: where you were born and lived for the first fifteen years of your life determines your susceptibility to MS.
Remember Dr. Sigurdsson, the medical examiner for Iceland during WWII, who came up with the concept of slow viruses, i.e., viral (and more recently, prion, diseases that take a long time to develop into a full-blown disease, e.g., AIDS, mad cow disease - BSE).
Iceland was, at the time, suffering financially from what appeared to be two new sheep diseases: one that caused pneumonia (maedi - coughing), and another (visna - wasting) which caused wasting, tremors, blindness, paralysis of the hind limbs, and ultimately, death. Dr. S. determined that the two diseases were actually caused by the same slow lentivirus (which has been found to be related to the modern slow virus disease, AIDS).
Maedi-Visna (MV) was introduced into Iceland during the 1930's by the importation of diseased sheep from Germany. Dr. S. also remarked how similar MV was to MS - similar brain and neurological damage and symptoms.
The first documented human case of MS (a young woman) appeared in Holland during the mid-1700's, which makes it obvious that MV has been around for quite some time in some Dutch/German flocks of sheep. Don't forget that people and their animals did not move around much back then. What may have began and remained for years as a small, isolated-to-one-or-two-small valleys disease, started to become a world-wide disease with the large increase of movement of animals to different countries.
Yet when I googled MV disease and came up with mainly British articles, I got the somewhat startling info that MV had 1st presented itself in two widely different places: in South Africa and Montana in the US some eighty years ago. Using simple arithmetic I worked out that these two outbreaks also began in the 1930's, just like Iceland's. And, at least in South Africa, there is a direct link to Holland (and probably Germany), as the country was settled by Dutch settlers, who, obviously, would have brought, or bought, sheep from their country with them. Now there aren't any sheep indigenous to Montana and so I am assuming that German or Dutch settlers also brought or bought sheep from their homeland too, thus introducing MV disease into the US.
The British are concerned about this disease since it is new to the UK,and we do have a lot of sheep in Wales and Scotland, where this is a major source of income in wet, difficult mountainous areas; there were only 3 recorded cases two years ago, but there were 11 cases last year, and so companies are trying to find a vaccine for this retroviral disease (which given how difficult it has been to try and find a vaccine for the related retroviral disease, AIDS, may well prove to be impossible.
But if MS is the human equivalent to MV, why aren't researchers looking for a vaccine for MS too?

CFS meetings - a waste of time

Apparently half of my blog got cut off. Well, I started going to CFS/CFIDS meetings when I first came back to the US. They took place at a meeting-room at a local hospital. After several meetings I wrote and printed up a synopsis of what causes and happens when you ingest carrageenan and ultimately get chronic fatigue syndrome. Unfortunately the concept was too difficult for the person in charge of the local chapter to understand (part of the problem is tha CFS can make even reading something very difficult; and understanding new, scientific material almost impossible. I'll never forget her look of unbelief; of incomprehension. I was not allowed to hand the leaflets out and most definitely not allowed to even speak for even five minutes at the end of a meeting. The woman had no qualifications of any kind to run such a group except the willingness to start a local chapter. It's a phenomenon I've come across before: and contrary to that old saw:- In the land of the blind, a person with one eye is king - in my experience such a person is more likely to be shunted aside and ignored. In a more uncivilized society, stoned!

CFS meetings cont'd

I got cut off the last time I wrote and so continuing the problem I had with CFIDS meetings. I remember one young man who came quite often. We often had to help him walk out; he was tremendously dizzy; his pupils would enlarge and then contract rapidly. I felt really bad that I had no chance to help him; to say do not take food with carrageenan in it.
I decided that I had had enough; that it was wasting my time and energy when the woman in charge told me as though she were imparting something of tremendous import, that chronic fatigue syndrome was "a gift from God", and I thought then that with a friend like that one didn't need enemies - that she wasn't interested in a rational basis for CFS. She was invested in keeping the status quo no matter the cost to anyone else.

Celiac disease and carrageenan

Please excuse the mistake in paragraph 6 of the last blog: "glutamate" should be glutamine. Another crucial thing that you can do to reduce symptoms is to walk for a minimum of 20 minutes every 2/3 days. This tightens loose junctions in the intestinal wall.
Which reminds me of the hidden gluten and one of its main building blocks, glutamine, which i, as a person with celiac disease, i.e., cannot eat wheat, have to avoid.
It was, as far as I can remember without checking, during the mid-1990's that I was diagnosed with celiac disease (which affects a surprisingly high number of people - an estimated 1 in 133).
At first when I went on the restricted wheat-free diet I fet wonderful - better than I had done in years, but over a period of a few years I started to feel sick again. I could barely move. I tried reducing my diet to a very few foods but still kept on drinking buttermilk.
It wasn't until I went back to England and my symptoms immediately regressed - the improvement began during my stopover at Chicago's O'Hare airport - regression of nausea, fatigue, loose bowels, headache - that I gradually realised that drinking buttermilk was the problem - and the one additive that all modern buttermilk contains is the additive, carrageenan.
When I returned to the U.S. I joined a celiac group that met once a month at a local hospital. Many people at those meetings complained that they couldn't get their symptoms under control, just like I once also thought; that they were somehow eating or drinking gluten and if they could only find and eliminate that hidden gluten then their symptoms would disappear (it can be more dangerous than you might think: one woman had just returned from a stay in hospital because of this).
I decided to speak out at the next meeting: that their problem was likely not hidden gluten (or glutamine) but that of ingesting carrageenan which damages intestines, looses junctions between cell walls, and allows large undigested food particles into the body. No-one listened; no-one made any comments showing their interest; the only response I got was the one man who saw his opportunity to declaim mercury as the cause of celiac disease. I never went back.

Overactive Bladder is the result of intestinal damage

Recently at work I met someon who had to go to the bathroom a lot. Since I suffer from the same issue, although it's under control, I thought I'd discuss this here.
You could ask what is this to do with CFS (M.E)? Well, Overactive Bladder (OB) is a direct result of intestinal damage, therefore, carrageenan damage. And instead of taking Pfizer's Detrol LA, or Toviaz, or Vesinex, which makes a very pretty profit for companies which know all about the kind of damage that carrageenan causes, you can take control of OB into your own hands for a much cheaper price.
Initially, for a very quick resolution of symptoms, take Mucinex (sold to reduce the amount of mucus in the lungs); cheaper is a brand such as Krogers Mucus Relief which contains the identical product, guafenesin, at about $6 for 30 tablets.
Drink 1 to 2 glasses of milk each day. If lactose intolerant, there is lactose-free milk such as Lactaid (and there are also cheaper equivalents). Milk solids contain 10% of a very short carbon acid that is essential for the health of intestinal cells: butyric acid - found usually in the form of a salt and then known as butyrate.
After a couple of days of drinking milk, you can then reduce or stop the Mucinex - only using it as a backup when symptoms show up again.
One more thing you can do is to eat nuts (but definitely not almonds - too much glutamate). A couple of walnuts now and then, preferably ground up and cooked as in a banana and walnut teabread or coffeecake, are good for your intestines. Too many and every day is not so good, probably because they contain some glutamate which can create gluten in your intestines, which negates the good they do.
These simple steps will control your Overactive Bladder, getting rid of that intensely irritating urge to empty your bladder every half-hour or so. You will still get up a couple of times in the middle of the night but it's nothing compared with how it is with no treatment.

Is the polio virus to blame for CFS?

Dr. Bjorn Sigurdsson, the chief medical examiner for Iceland during WWII, who was actually a vetinarian, also puzzling about the epidemic in the far northern town of Akureyri, said that the disease simulated poliomyelitis (there were 3 actual cases of polio prior to this outbreak).
The 3inch thick tome published in 1992 by the Florence Nightingale Foundation in Canada, The Clinical and Scientific Basis of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, also brought up the by-now-fading-but-lingering poliomyelitis theory. One contributor stated that CFS was subclinical poliomyelitis; another that it was delayed acute onset poliomyelitis-like illness.
Yet the very same book has a couple of different contributors noting that during the acute febrile phase of the illness, people do not get colds. Now colds are caused by an adenovirus, so it seems obvious to me that the disease is not caused by a virus; that there is a virus suppressing mechanism at work here.
The acute phase has often been called as feeling as though the sufferer has "a dose of flu"; this is actually carrageenan (a seaweed additive common in many foods) reaching a certain point, a point of no return, where it overloads the intestinal system causing lysosomes (containing caustic digestive enzymes) to break open spilling their contents thus damaging and ulcerating the intestinal wall. Carrageenan then floods into the body - this is the part that people say feels like the flu.

Past presumed virus causes of CFS

I recently picked up a book at my local library called: The Virus Within, by Nicholas Regush (an ABC science journalist) printed in 2001, which states that the Human Herpes Virus - 6 is the cause of CFS. During the late 1980's and early 1990's, several teams of American researchers said that they had found a particular herpes virus in people with CFS. The first such researcher was Robert Gallo, the head of the National Cancer Institute. Interestingly, Gallo had first tested CFS patients for the Epstein Barr Virus (EBV), before deciding on HHV-6.
Then Donald Carrigan at the Medical College at the Children's Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was also testing CFS patients for a viral cause to their illness. He first looked at the cytomegalovirus (CMV) but later decided that HHV-6 was the responsible party.
Other researchers also jumped on the HHV-6 bandwagon, but, ultimately, all have failed to establish that this virus was to blame. Before HHV-6, from the late 1940's through to the early 1960's, it was stated as a fact that the polio virus was to blame. So much so that in Iceland, during the 1st modern mass outbreak, CFS was often labeled as Benign Myalgic Poliomyelitis, so what are the odds that the latest jumping-on-the-bandwagon virus label - XMRV - will also will soon fade away as no real evidence will be found to link CFS with the XMRV virus!

March is national colorectal month

March is the U.S. National Colorectal Month - designed to bring awareness to, and hopefully, get people tested, for cancer in the colon and the rectum. Such cancer is the 3rd most common cancer in the U.S., with over 130,000 new diagnoses in 2000 (more recently, up to 150,000). (This pattern holds for the western, European 1st world countries.)
Yet earlier this week I saw a news segment on, I think, Nicaragua in Central America about a volunteer group (Doctors Without Borders) testing, and removing if found, cervical cancer in women in remote rural areas with very little access to health care. Why this particular cancer, one might think? Well, cervical cancer is the most common form of cancer in this area and is also easily treated when small. Yet in the U. S., cervical cancer is way down the list as the 9th most common form of cancer.
So what is the difference between the two populations? One lives in a highly industrial society, eating lots of processed foods; the other lives much as their forebears did hundreds of years ago, subsisting on a beans and corn diet. So their diet is the difference between the two incidences of cancer, and the fact that colorectal cancer seems not to be important in Nicaragua.
Two North of England doctors, beginning in the late 1960's and continuing into the 1980's ran a series of experiments feeding a seaweed often added to food as an extender or emulsifier, carrageenan, to various lab animals such as rabbits. One such experiment I have before me:"Hyperplastic Mucosal Changes in the Rabbit Colon Produced by Degraded Carrageenin". Hyperplastic means that the cells and tissues have changed shape - the first requirement to ulcerative colitis and then cancer. A photo of a dissected rabbit's colon - the owner of which had been fed carrageenan for only three months - shows lots of ulcers (think of them as raw sores) on a thickened tissue base, which denotes inflammation and edema. Small abcesses are within the tissue (mucosa); Polypoidal formations, looking like small bubbled-up blobs of tissue, have formed in some of the animal's colons, and these are what doctors are looking for if you go in for a colorectal exam, because these are the most obvious and first signs of cancer.
Carrageenan is known to do this so regularly that pharmaceutical companies and medical researchers use this as a "model for human ulcerative colitis" when testing new drugs against ulcerative colitis, etc. Isn't it equally likely that carrageenan also causes ulcerative colitis and colorectal cancer in humans also, yet carrageenan has been given GRAS status by the FDA meaning Generally Regarded As Safe. And one can go to any site or read any publication about ulcerative colitis, etc., and there is no mention of carrageenan: Sites say that there is no known cause of ulcerative colitis, and so over one hundred thousand will develop cancer in this area and, what is it? half will die.

CFS is caused by the food additive, carrageenan

Carrageenan is a particular, low-growing and clumping type of seaweed first described as being from the SW corner of Ireland, although nowadays the same or similar compound is derived from various seaweeds (which are actually more dangerous than the original).
Iceland, where the first modern researched outbreak of chronic fatigue syndrome - called Akureyri or Iceland disease - occurred during the immediate WWII post-war years had a long history of Icelanders eating seaweed when times were hard. As indeed all the far northern islands in this area also did. There is also a history of famines, starvation, of sickness, of sailors or other islanders washed up on the shores of various islands having no other option but to eat seaweed. It takes about seven years of eating seaweed before the acute phase of CFS to establish itself. Icelanders also used to regularly make a milk pudding just like a blancmange from a seaweed called dulse (dulse pudding) until recent times when Iceland got a lot richer. During the four to five WWII years, Akureyri as the furthest northern town in Iceland was almost completely cut off from the richer capital, Reykavik, and the American/British base which brought supplies in by plane and ship. The only road was mainly unmetalled; the distance between the two towns was about the same as the distance between London and Glasgow; fishing was severely curtailed as the Germans used this far northern route to get into the Atlantic from the northern German-controlled ports in Norway. So the Akureyrians started to eat seaweed in greater quantities than ever before. A year after the ending of WWII the first cases of Akureyri disease started to show up; it affected mainly children over six years of age; it affected the Akuryrians who lived in the town and who didn't have any land on which to grow food; Akuryrians who lived on farms hardly got this disease; 10% of the population became ill, some died; some developed Parkinson's disease and became permanently confined to wheelchairs. Again researchers looked for a viral cause but failed to find one. The only explanation is the eating of seaweed.

Is the XMRV virus really the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome?

The recent, October 2009, news that the retrovirus, XMRV, found in men with prostate cancer, has also been found in over 90% of Americans with CFS by the Whittemore Peterson Institute (funded by the NIH, the Nat'l Cancer Institute and the US Dept. of Defense) and thus posited as also being the cause of CFS, has me really concerned because (a) this correlation between the virus and the disease, CFS, has not been found in German and British labs; (b) the idea that a virus is to blame goes against previous findings by many reputable doctors that CFS patients never seem to get any viral infections and that they always have the antibodies to whatever particular virus is prevalent in the community (noticed first during the first well-documented CFS outbreak in the far northern town of Akureyri in Iceland in 1947-49. None of the people with CFS got polio - indeed they had antibodies to polio showing that they had encountered the virus and had developed immunity - which is surprising given that there was an outbreak of polio going around Scandinavia at the time. Remember that this was before the Salk vaccine for polio), (c) this could potentially be disastrous as already it has been posited that only the same highly dangerous drugs that treat AIDS will work against this virus, and (d), I have researched CFS for years and it is not caused by a virus. Indeed, research institutions such as the NIH, universities and hospitals working with a particular food additive derived from seaweed, carrageenan - have described and published most of the symptoms identical with CFS that this additive causes.

Is the XMRV virus really the cause of CFS?

The recent, October 2009, news that a retrovirus, XMRV, found in men with prostate cancer, was also found in over 90% of people with CFS by the Whittemore Peterson Institute, and funded by the NIH, the Nat'l Cancer Institute and the US Dept. of Defense, etc., has me really concerned because I totally disagree.
Before this recent discovery, quite a few people thought that having CFS was all to do with the psychological makeup of the person involved. One study in England thought that CFS was the result of childhood or marital abuse; a French doctor said that CFS was the result of the "terroir" (the backgound, the environment and the genes - taken from how wine differs depending on where the grapes are grown) of the person; but easier access to high-powered electron microscopes showed huge damage to certain cells such as macrophages (WBC scavengers which monitor the body for damaged and cancerous cells), mitochondria (the cells' powerhouses), and the brain in the form of small white dots, UBO's (Ultra Bright Objects), which all shows that there is physical damage in people with CFS.
If the XMRV virus is reponsible for CFS, then why don't the men with prostate cancer have CFS? Are we to suppose that we have another new disease? Why has CFS rapidly increased from 1984 onwards? How does the XMRV virus reduce the amount of serotonin and dopamine being made so that people with CFS feel depressed; some have gone on to get Parkinson's? Why do people with CFS rarely get a viral disease and yet have the antibodies to any virus that's going aound - just like having the XMRV virus without actully having a disease caused by this virus; and yet are prone to bacterial infections?
How does the XMRV virus reduce tha numbers of "good" gut bacteria, while increasing the numbers of "bad" bacteria? How does the XMRV virus reduce the amount of certain fatty acids which the intestines and colon are dependent upon?
How does the XMRV virus cause edema and pain? How does the virus cause immune system depression?
What if CFS is really caused by a certain well-researched food additive? One that the NIH, etc., knows all about? I'll leave you to think about this. Leave a reply. More next week!