Mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis (MAP)

[Aldous]

What Tuberculosis did for Modernism: The Influence of a Curative Environment on Modernist Design and Architecture
MARGARET CAMPBELL, MPhil*
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1251640/

How Tuberculosis Shaped Victorian Fashion
The deadly disease—and later efforts to control it—influenced trends for decades
Emily Mullin
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scien...ion-180959029/

https://lawrencebroxmeyermd.wordpress.com/

[Aldous]

This is strange. TB is often associated with the vampire superstition.

Simon Whipple Aldrich
Birth 1814
Death 6 May 1841 (aged 26–27)

Inscription
Though Consumption's vampire grasp had seized thy mortal frame, Thy ardent and inspiring mind, untouched, remained the same.

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg...&GRid=49630850


The Great New England Vampire Panic
Smithonian Magazine October 2012
http://sciliterature.50webs.com/VampirePanic.htm

https://sciliterature.50webs.com/TB.htm

[Traveler]

A couple of years ago we had a really bad time with fleas and before I was able to get the fleas out of the house, my cat Leo got sick with a Mycoplasma haemofelis bacteria that infects the hemoglobin. He started losing weight and lost his appetite. I took him in for bloodwork and it showed he was anemic as well. And this was like 2 or 3 months of being flea free that his symptoms appeared. Fortunately it was treatable but there are only certain antibiotics that are effective against this mycoplasma and the bloodwork didn't really confirm but only indicated that a mycoplasma infection might be possible given the anemia. I got him on the antibiotics and started giving him an iron supplement and within a couple of weeks Sir Fluffernutter was feeling frisky enough to have WWE worthy throw down wrestling matches with his sister, lol. Now everytime I see one of the beasts scratching, I panic and I pull out the flea drops.

I remember reading several years back that scientists are now suspecting a bacteria as a cause for Crohn's after trial runs of doxycycline (If I remember correctly) caused improvement in the disease. I'm guessing it's both a bacterial infection as well as dysbiosis of the gut flora.

[Aldous]

So people who were first infected as children back in the 1940s and 50s — and who have shown no sign of TB for over 50 years — are succumbing to the disease as their immune systems weaken.

https://www.nature.com/articles/502S14a

1 out of 3 Koreans diagnosed with latent tuberculosis
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nat...19_264265.html

[Aldous]

I found this article years ago and was looking for it and couldn't find it online recently. I found a print out I printed out years ago and found the link and used archive dot org to find the article.

https://web.archive.org/web/20131227...ealth-disease/

It discusses research on autism, Asperger’s syndrome, Down's syndrome, schizophrenia and epilepsy being caused by TB, apparently cell-wall-deficient (CWD) forms of tuberculosis that can cross the placenta and infect the fetus.

It is not generally appreciated that the development of small rounded nodules caused by tuberculosis, sometimes cheesy or “caseous” in the brain is a relatively common occurrence in children and childhood tuberculosis. It is usually symptomless. Such small nodules often then become arrested and encapsulated by the body’s immune system. They are, to this day, called “Rich’s Foci”. Many of us unknowingly have them.

It wasn’t only Welch that Rich put himself at odds with. German investigator Baumgarten who saw infection of the fetus by the spores of TB coming from the maternal placenta as a common occurrence.[2] In fact, to Baumgarten , all tuberculosis, including neurotuberculosis, was most commonly acquired in the womb, in utero, in most cases, though there remained a lesser possibility, that it could occur through infected sperm.Ophuls mentioned that it was a well established fact that the semen of tuberculous individuals contains tubercle bacilli, even in the absence of genital TB.

Psychiatric Asylums on the European and American continent, late Nineteenth Century
When Johns Hopkins pathologist William Henry Welch studied under psychiatrist Maynert, it was in the late nineteenth century, a time during which there was fear that tuberculosis would destroy the entire civilization of Europe. It was also the time that the first massive increase in psychiatric illness and confinement to mental asylums occurred.[1]

There's something related here about Much's granules on page 18 about TB that has lost its acid fast characteristics.
https://archive.org/details/pulmonar...p?view=theater

[Traveler]

I was listening to the radio a few nights ago and the commentator was mentioning that the people who survived the plague identified the gene that gave them that ability and today people with that gene are more likely to have autoimmune diseases.

Summary: People with selected variants of the ERAP2 and TICAM2 genes were 40% more likely to survive the Black Death, researchers discovered. However, in modern humans, those with the ERAP2 gene are more likely to suffer autoimmune disorders such as Crohn's disease.

https://neurosciencenews.com/genetic-plague-autoimmune-22039/#:~:text=Summary%3A%20People%20with%20selected%20v ariants,disorders%20such%20as%20Crohn's%20disease.

[Aldous]

Mycobacterium vaccae is a nonpathogenic[1] species of the Mycobacteriaceae family of bacteria that lives naturally in soil.
Research areas being pursued with regard to killed Mycobacterium vaccae vaccine include immunotherapy for allergic asthma, cancer, depression,[4][5] leprosy,[6] psoriasis, dermatitis, eczema and tuberculosis.[6]

A research group at Henry Wellcome Laboratories for Integrative Neuroscience and Endocrinology, University of Bristol, Bristol, England, UK has shown that Mycobacterium vaccae stimulated a newly discovered group of neurons, increased levels of serotonin and decreased levels of anxiety in mice.[1] Other researchers fed live Mycobacterium vaccae to mice, then measured their ability to navigate a maze compared to control mice not fed the bacteria. "Mice that were fed live M. vaccae navigated the maze twice as fast and with less demonstrated anxiety behaviors as control mice", according to Dorothy Matthews, who conducted the research with Susan Jenks at the Sage Colleges, Troy, New York, USA.[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycobacterium_vaccae

[Aldous]

I remember seeing this in the news a couple years ago. Journalists are usually very alarmist when it comes to TB. Maybe the sensationalism helps sell their news.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/20...oll-nr-vpx.cnn

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ins/762534002/

--------------------------------------------
With all the panic and alarmism seen with TB, I thought it was strange to see pictures like this from a Sanatarium in the 1960s. Note the patients smiling and the nurses aren't wearing masks.
http://www.feltondesignanddata.com/c...red/id273.html
They were using streptomycin back then, so most survived.

[Aldous]

99% of tuberculosis in humans is caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis which is often refered to as human TB in the older medical literature from what I've seen. Human TB reproduces slowly, the infection and disease progresses slowly, and infection and TB disease spreads slowly through a population. Its preventable. Some believe that more education can help with the prevention. The macrophages in the lung have trouble destroying it because the TB has defense mechanisms against destruction from the immune system. 90% of the people with latent TB infection never develop active TB which is the disease form. Latent TB isn't contagious and generally has no symptoms. Active TB is contagious and the person with active TB will develop symptoms, such as cough, fever, night sweats, losing weight, etc.

Human TB is an obligate aerobe, meaning it needs oxygen. When the infection is latent, the bacteria gets little or no oxygen and the bacteria tend to become dormant. You can have latent TB for years or decades and it can become active if your immune system can't keep it in check. When it becomes active the granulomas or tubercles containing the bacteria tend to break down and release the TB which allows the TB to be exposed to the oxygen in the air, which results in the TB becoming more metabolically active and reproduces faster. Lung cavities are often seen in active TB. At this stage a lot of the TB change from being an intracellular parasite to becoming an extracellular parasite.


Here's some interesting videos that show the progression of TB infection and what the immune system does to control it. In the first video, human TB is refered to as Mycobacterium tuberculosis hominis, and bovine TB is refered to as Mycobacterium tuberculosis bovis.

Primary Tuberculosis (part 1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-XzWeATJ0s

Tuberculosis Primary (Part 2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzPnrPt2qAM

Primary Tuberculosis (Part 3/3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwpesvgn3d0

[Aldous]

While continuing my own research on tuberculosis over the years and in spite of some people encouraging me to neglect the problem because of their shoot the messenger attitude, I was surprised to find some articles and books published 70 to 100 years ago that claim that almost 100% of the population become infected with TB sometime in their lifetimes.
Some references can be found here:
http://sciliterature.50webs.com/TB2.htm

Also, a long time ago, I noticed that in TB reports, white people would usually be at the bottom of the list on race and ethnic groups (lower rates among whites). I found some articles that claim that tuberculosis began to increase in Europe starting in the 1400s, reached a peak in the 1700s and gradually declined after this. Tuberculosis was relatively rare outside of Europe prior to the 1800s. This resulted in European decendants developing a higher resistance to TB because of natural selection.

Its also known that genetics is a big factor in your resistance to TB. Before the bacteria was discovered that caused tuberculosis, some people thought it was inherited. Active tuberculosis tends to run in some families because of their lower resistance to TB. What's inherited is your ability to resist the disease from the TB.

I think this is useful information. If most of us had recent ancestors that were infected with TB (tubercle bacillus), and you don't have any family history of active tuberculosis then you probably inherited a high resistance to TB and there's a good chance you will never get any disease from it if you get infected with it as long as your immune system can keep it in check.

I also found some references that say that 10-15 million people in the US have latent tuberculosis right now. Some TB reports from the CDC say that up to 13 million people in the US have latent tuberculosis. This is about 4% of the population. I figured that if this group of people are spread throughout the US more or less evenly (more would be in more crowded areas), then most likely we all come into contact with people who have tuberculosis now and then, in spite of the wrong assumption that wherever you go there is no TB there. I use to assume this and I think most people assume this, too. Latent TB isn't contagious and even if you had brief contact with someone who had active TB in public, chances are you won't become infeccted with it. To become infected with TB, you need close contact with someone who has active TB for a long period of time, typically every day.