McSweegan is a player

McSweegan is a player

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Subject: McSweegan is a player

Date: May 20, 2008 9:30 AM

Jeepers,
If you stupid Lyme crooks would stop playing the Primers Shell Game,
more people
would be aware of how to detect what illness people have:
http :// www .actionlyme.org/PRIMERSHELLGAME.htm
That's very famous and intuitive of you, Ed.
Now tell us again about how we can have a vaccine for Relapsing Fever,
since it
was your idea in the first place to libel and defraud the United
States with your
US Navy-Outing Letter to Senator Goldwater: http :// www .actionlyme.org/GOLDWATER LETTER.htm
so you could divert all the funding to your crooked, profiteering
friends, who know
well, the Shell Game.
Kathleen M. Dickson
Former Pfizer Analytical Chemist

http :// www .hometownannapolis,com /cgi-bin/read/2008/04 27-28/LIF
Lengthy treatment needed to treat Whipple's disease
Published April 27, 2008
The actor who played George Whipple the fretful grocer died last fall,
and I was
reminded not of his Charmin toilet paper commercials, but of Whipple's
disease.
The disease is not named for George Whipple, television icon, but for
Dr. George
Whipple, professor at Johns Hopkins University.

In 1907, Dr. Whipple described a chronic illness characterized by
diarrhea, anemia,
malnutrition, weight loss and arthritis. He thought the mysterious
illness might
be an unusual metabolic disorder.

He was wrong, but that did not prevent him from later winning a Nobel
Prize for
his work on pernicious anemia.

Decades later, Dr. Whipple's disease was found to be an infection. It
wasn't
until 2000, however, that the causative agent of the infection finally
was identified
and grown in the laboratory. That agent is a bacterium called
Tropheryma whipplei.
Its DNA was sequenced five years ago, but many questions still remain
about this
elusive bacterium, the mysterious illness it causes, and how best to
treat it.

A hundred years after Dr. Whipple described his original case - which
was fatal
- patients with Dr. Whipple's disease continue to be scarce. There are
no accurate
estimates of its prevalence in the general population or the overall
death rate
from the infection. Usually, deaths are due to a failure to diagnose
and treat the
disease. Men seem to get the disease eight times as often as women,
and most of
those men are middle-aged and white. There also may be a genetic
susceptibility
to Dr. Whipple's disease.

Although Dr. Whipple's disease typically presents with major
gastrointestinal
symptoms, the infection also may spread from the intestines to affect
the heart,
liver, eyes and the central nervous system. Heart murmurs may result
in some cases,
and symptoms of CNS infection may include headaches, meningitis,
seizures and dementia.

Dr. Whipple's disease and its grab-bag of crippling symptoms are
caused by a
crippled bacterium that needs to be carried from the intestines to
other organs
by the patient's own white cells (macrophages and monocytes). T.
whipplei seems
to live out its pathogenic life within the safety and comfort of
patient's cells
because it lacks so many necessary genes for an independent lifestyle.
In fact,
T. whipplei can only be grown in human cell cultures in the lab. It
seems to be
a true parasite in constant need of a reluctant, but protective host.

So where does T. whipplei come from and how does it infect people? No
one is certain,
but there are some clues.

It has been found in sewage treatment plants. Farmers and other rural
workers are
more likely to contract Dr. Whipple's disease than people in other
occupations.
This suggests T. whipplei may lurk in soil or rural water supplies.
How it gets
from the environment to the intestines is still unclear.

Once Dr. Whipple's disease was understood to be an infection,
antibiotics became
the gold standard of treatment. A few years ago, treatment would be
two weeks of
penicillin and streptomycin, followed by an oral course of
trimethoprim-sulphamethoxazole
for one year! The lengthy treatment is necessary because the slow-
growing bacteria
are safely tucked away inside cells in the intestine. It's hard to
build up
killing concentrations of antibiotics in such places so disease
relapse is common.

Relapse is serious because Dr. Whipple's disease has a potentially
fatal outcome
due to cardiac failure, CNS damage, physical wasting or septic shock.

Because Dr. Whipple's disease is rare, hard to diagnose and harder
still to
treat, the most effective treatments and appropriate patient follow-
ups have been
a matter of guesswork. The man who first grew T. whipplei in the lab
and sequenced
its DNA (Didier Raoult at the Universite de la Mediterrantee, France)
made some
new recommendations based on recent laboratory research and clinical
trials. His
treatment suggestions still call for a yearlong ordeal of antibiotic
therapy, but
some ineffective drug combinations could be replaced with a better
drug (sulfadiazine)
for CNS symptoms.

Dr. George Whipple died in 1976 at age 97, having lived long enough to
witness the
growing suspicion that the illness he described in 1907 was actually
an infection.
He would certainly be surprised to know his "Whipple's bacillus" now
has been analyzed down to its last DNA nucleotide, yet the bug and the
disease still
retain many mysteries.

---

Dr. Edward McSweegan has a Ph.D. in microbiology and lives in Crofton.
He works
on and writes about infectious disease issues. He may be contacted at
emcsweegan@nasw.org