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!