Doctors puzzled over bizarre infection/Morgellons disease
Although it does cause itching all over my body I can't let this topic settle. The bite of a horsefly that I recently had did not exactly help in this matter.
Maybe, just maybe I am beginning to understand why rense is jumping on the Morgellon wagon.
To Abbey Road, I agree that the presence of a high concentration, of the Bt toxin could cause necrosis of the surrounding tissue, and that this could allow for several opportunistic infections to take hold. But your hypothesis also entails the growth of a PLANT, ie cotton, which has roots, a stem, leaves, and only by the end, on the fruits of the plant, the typical cotton fibers will emerge with which we are acquainted. You can grow plants on nutrient rich media, but in the end they will form tissues from which roots, stems etcetera will emerge. One could engineer plants so that these tissues will not form. However, still calluses will form, big clumps of cells (up to an inch) with many many cells growing side by side. Therefore, I find it hard to imagine that only small clumps of cells will form before they'd decide to start producing fibers ...
However, I DO think that plants can be involved, although a very special kind of "plants", and I will come to that later.
To Lucy, yes there are fibres. This is actually the hallmark of the disease and is precisely the reason why the disease has been referred to a very old case that was termed Morgellon. It is not important whether that old case from the 17th century is related.
With the recent cases of Morgellon, various organisms may be found on the skin of individuals with this disease. Open wounds get infected with all sort of opportunistic parasites such as Collembola, nematods, and maybe even Nematomorphs (horsehair worm). There is also a very high incidence of co-infection with the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi ("Lyme") that, if I remember well from all the searches I've been doing, goes up to 80 percent. The 20 percent that still have skin lesions from which fibres grow exclude the possibility that it is caused by Lyme. The one and only consistent symptom in Morgellon's disease are ... the fibers, and maybe also the appearance of black specks.
More pictures here:
http://www.morgellons.org/images.html
From:
http://www.ktvu.com/news/9264350/detail.html
Wymore says his tests rule out not only textile fibers, but also worms, insects, animal material and even human skin and hair. He says the filaments are not an external contamination.
Instead, they are a substance that materializes somehow inside the body, apparent artifacts of something infectious.
The unknown fibers associated with skin lesions can be described as coenocytic (aseptate), smooth-walled, branching, filamentous objects. The fibers have been analyzed by FTIR (Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy) and have
tentatively been identified as cellulose. Those fibres are strangely fluorescent (red and blue and green).
The cellulose component excludes fungi, such as candida and any kind of insects. One should be looking for something that is related to plants. In fact there just happens to be a rather exceptional class of fungi-like "plants", the pathogenic
oomycetes. If you are an American from Irish decent, the chances are high that it has been an oomycete that has brought you to the new world.
The biggest family are the Phytophtora. Pythium infestans causes devastating diseases in potatoes and tomatoes. At least one species, Pythium insidiosum, is known to infect various mammals, including humans, horses, and dogs. P. insidiosum colonizes cutaneous and subcutaneous tissues and can invade blood vessels and bones, resulting in fatal lesions.
A facultatively parasitic oomycete,
Lagenidium giganteum, infects the larval stage of many mosquito species, and spore formulations of this organism have been used for
biocontrol of mosquitoes.
To get an idea of the various shapes these critters can shift into, I have included a picture of the life cycle of Lagenidium giganteum, an oomycete with some selectivity towards mosquito larvae.
So there are biflagellate zoospores that selectively recognize chemical signals on the epicuticle (outer exoskeleton) of mosquitoes. Upon contact, the zoospores lose their flagella and a fungus-like mycelium forms. First these are made up of long hyphens. By the time the insect larva is eaten, septae will be formed in what will develop into a "sporangium". The peculiar thing in contrast with many fungi is that spores are not released from the fragmenting hyphen but that first exit tubes are formed, right through the epicuticle of mosquito larvae, which are hollow and through which the formed spores are released. As you can see in the next picture of an infected mosquito larvae,
these exit tubes can be quite long.
Are we looking at the cellulose-like fibres of Morgellon's disease?
Sometimes a sexual cycle is initiated wherein two cells of fragmented hyphens fuse to form a zoospore which is bigger. Are we looking at the black pepper like specks that are seen in the wounds of Morgellon's disease?
Here you can see a picture of a zoospore that is germinating while entering the epicuticle of a larva.
Okay, so far so good. But what about the fluorescence of those fibers?
At the last page of this "Journal"
http://www.researchinformation.co.uk/ipcosamp3.pdf that deals with "pest" control, with emphasis on cleaning cities from birds :o , you can read:
Rain fed and irrigated paddy rice fields have always been prime sites for mosquito breeding and the entomopathogenic water mould Lagenidium giganteum has received much acclaim for potential use as a biological control agent. Issues involving product longevity and storage have so far prevented the active from realising commercial potential, although development of an inert emulsion formulation be VanderGheynst and Scher at the University of California Davis has measured improved shelf life to 12 weeks at ambient room temperature.
Nick Jessop a postgraduate student on the MSc Course in Integrated Pest Management at Imperial College (Silwood Park Campus) evaluated spray application of the water mould at UC Davis in California during 2005 summer for the research component of his Master of Science Degree.
His investigation into potential problems presented by spraying an invert emulsion over a rice canopy was carried out as part of a much larger study involving application of L. giganteum to rice fields in the Sacramento Valley a prime breeding site for mosquitoes.
Canopy penetration of the rice crop was determined using a range of different droplet sizes with fluorescent tracer, fluoresceine, and bioassays with mosquito larvae. Results showed that smaller droplet size of 75 micron generated by the Micron Ulva+ rotary atomiser (CDA sprayer) produced the highest levels of deposition on the surface of the water. None of the droplet sizes tested resulted in any significant loss of cells from the water mould. Despite these promising field indications L. giganteum failed to infect a significant proportion of mosquito larvae when used in a laboratory based bioassay.
Here we are confronted with the
original meaning of the term chemtrail, which was about chemicals being sprayed to control pests. As we are here dealing with a
biological control of pests, maybe we should invent the new term
biotrails. :P
In order to measure the amount of sprayed mosquito parasites taken up by the larvae, they were provided with a fluorescent tag, it is said. Would it not have been far more convenient to be able to measure the amount of potential
descendants of sprayed parasites within the larvae? To this end it would suffice to genetically engineer Lagenidium so that it would fluorescence brightly. This can be accomplished with for instance providing their genome with a gene that codes for GFP (green fluorescent protein). There's also Blue FP and Red FP.
In any case, I have found that such work has been done already on other oomycetes such as Phytophtora.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=154851
Reporter genes. Several reporter genes, including those encoding β-glucuronidase (GUS) and the green fluorescent protein (GFP), have been used successfully in Phytophthora. Phytophthora transformants expressing the GUS reporter gene have been used to monitor disease progression in planta, to evaluate disease resistance, to study promoter expression, and to visualize morphological structures during development. For example, a transgenic P. infestans strain containing a transcriptional fusion between the promoter of the plant-induced ipiO gene and GUS proved useful in determining spatial patterns of expression of the ipiO promoter during infection of potatoes.
So, there you have the
fluorescent tubes !
From same link or from:
http://ec.asm.org/cgi/content/full/2/2/191
DNA transformation.
... The standard transformation protocol is based on liposome-polyethylene glycol (PEG)-mediated transformation of protoplasts, followed by regeneration and antibiotic selection on agar medium. High frequency rates of cotransformation (up to 50%) were observed, especially if the two plasmids were linearized with restriction enzymes with compatible ends. This finding turned out to be quite useful, as the gene of interest can be rapidly cloned into convenient expression cassettes and cotransformed with the selection plasmid.
In other words, transformed ("engineered") oomycetes almost all
carry antibiotic resistances genes within their genome. I think that these could well offer resistance for certain antibiotics to other organisms, when they infect the same site, such as the bacterium Borrelia (Lyme disease).
On top of this, it seems that oomycetes have
exceptionally high genome instability, with genome sizes that range from 20 to more than 200 Mbasepairs!
Genome instability. Many oomycetes, including P. infestans and several other Phytophthora species, are known to exhibit tremendous phenotypic variation, both in the field and in culture, even during asexual reproduction . The genetic basis of this phenomenon is not clear, but it could be due to genome instability, perhaps caused by transposable elements, gene conversion, mitotic recombination, and/or dispensable chromosomes. Sequences similar to transposable elements are abundant in Phytophthora genomes. For example, sequences with similarity to the copia and Gypsy/Ty classes of retrotransposons have been described. Gypsy-like sequences were detected in 29 species of Phytophthora and varied in abundance from 10 to 10,000 copies per genome. Sequences with similarity to DNA transposable elements of the mariner class were identified from expressed sequence tag (EST) databases of P. infestans and P. sojae and were subsequently found to be abundant in Phytophthora genomes.
Perhaps transposable elements? Make that a definite yes.
From:
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/c...a2467bc9d11ef8bee21cf9a8&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha
Retrotransposons in oomycetes:
A family of sequences resembling Gypsy retroelements was identified and shown to be widely distributed throughout the genus Phytophthora, a member of the algallike oomycete fungi. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) using specific and degenerate primers detected the family in 29 of 37 species tested. DNA hybridization also failed to detect the sequences in the eight species that were negative in PCR. The element appears to have been a major force in the shaping of Phytophthora genomes because its abundance varied drastically from about 10 to more than 10,000 copies per genome within the species containing the element. Family members diverged from each other by single-base changes, insertions, and deletions, with a mean nucleotide divergence of 16.7%.
So they've been playing with these organisms, perhaps triggering the transposons that lay dormant within the genomes, and thereby facilitating the assimilation of genes from other species such as humans, which could result in a new selectivity for certain hosts, and the acquirement of factors that can ease infection, such as factors that induce necrosis or that prevent the wounds to heal.
By the end of the 90's, it was a regular practice to spray with Laginex (hyphens of Lagenidium). Remember that to have some efficacy such entails MASSIVE amounts.
In this context it is also important to know that in 1999 it was found out that
6 dogs were severely diseased with cutaneous lesions that were caused by Lagenidium. So, while Lagenidium has a
certain selectivity for mosquitoes, it is not
entirely specific. It was even reported that it now had become
a human pathogen too. But all this was from around the year 2000.
And after that ... ssssSILENCE.
ADDENDUM
First of all, and as always caveat lector! Although it is a well-fitting hypothesis, it is still a hypothesis.
I have found one other person who came to a similar or almost identical conclusion with one difference though, this person is suffering from this disease. It was at the end of my search, so it did not influence my decision making. I do realize however, that certain data could have been planted so that at least some people would be steered in the same direction:
http://216.122.128.184/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=2&topic_id=2394&mesg_id=2419&page=53
I have wondered what the CDC thinks when they get a sample of red and blue fibers in the mail from one of us. I just bet they recognize what they are. They use these fibers for sure in mosquito spray. The CDC does the mosquito spraying. My other area of research has been Lagendium Giganteum (oomycetes) as a mosquito spray under the brand name Laginex which is sprayed by air and is not harmful to mammals according to research. OOPS-New emerging oomycetes disease report.
EXCEPT for the 6 DEAD DOGS recently found to contain skin ulcers internal ulcers and strands of hyphae from Lagenidium Giganteum.
About the dogs with this disease:
http://apt.allenpress.com/aptonline...&issn=0891-6640&volume=017&issue=05&page=0637
A certain Jackie in that same forum is still convinced that the fibres come from clothes. I think she has a different disease though. Her case became particularly horrible. Here she describes her own experience when a treatment of flagyl drives out her parasites ...
http://216.122.128.184/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=2&topic_id=2394&mesg_id=39972&page=53
