read part of calcification and disease states---fyi

[Guest guest]

Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 12, Number 5 (August -

September 2005)

PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia. editor@...

Telephone: +61 (0)7 5442 9280; Fax: +61 (0)7 5442 9381

From our web page at: www.nexusmagazine.com

by Mulhall © May–July 2005

Email: info@...

Website: http://www.calcify.com

Based on the book The Calcium Bomb

by Mulhall and Katja Hansen

(The Writers' Collective, 2005)

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Millions of seriously ill patients are unaware that heart disease is

being measurably reversed with an approach pioneered by researchers

at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and in

Finland, aided by Mayo Clinic and Washington Hospital Center

findings. This approach is now prescribed by hundreds of doctors for

thousands of patients. A similar approach has been developed with

prostate disease at the renowned Cleveland Clinic in Florida.

According to doctors, both approaches are practical options for those

whose other medicines and surgery have failed. So why aren't other

desperately ill patients whose treatments don't work being told about

it?

In July 2004, the medical journal Pathophysiology published a peer-

reviewed research paper with the innocuous title " Calcification in

coronary artery disease can be reversed by EDTA–tetracycline long-

term chemotherapy " .1 In plain terms, it meant that hardening of the

arteries was being reversed. Not only were rock-hard calcium deposits

being reduced, but chest pains were being resolved in most patients

and bad cholesterol levels were being cut beyond what other medicines

had achieved. The findings were important for patients whose other

drugs and surgery weren't working, i.e., the " cardiac cripples " ,

whose numbers are in the millions and whose doctors have told them

there is nothing more to be done. They were the ones who responded

most favourably to the new approach.

Then, in February 2005, a paper published in the prestigious Journal

of Urology by researchers from the Cleveland Clinic, one of the

leading urology hospitals in America, reported " significant

improvement " in chronic prostatitis—a growing problem for millions of

men—again, where other approaches had failed.2

The studies, although otherwise separate, had a compelling link. They

used a cocktail of well-known, inexpensive medicines that have been

around for half a century but were never before used in this

combination. Both reports urged more studies to confirm their

conclusions, and emphasised that not every patient experienced a

reversal; only a majority did. Nonetheless, the results were

encouraging. Chronic diseases that had befuddled modern medicine were

being reversed.

To put a human face on this, take the case reported by Dr Manjit

Bajwa of McLean, Virginia, who did not participate in the clinical

studies but whose experience with one patient paralleled study

results. Dr Bajwa reported in a testimonial of 5 May 2005:

" Two years ago I had a patient with severe coronary artery disease

with a 75–85% blockage in left coronary and two other arteries. Open

heart surgery was recommended as stents could not be put in. The

patient was told he would probably die within two weeks if surgery

was not performed.

" He declined surgery and instead chose chelation. [Author's note:

chelation in this case is an intravenous form of heavy metal

removal.] After twenty-five treatments of chelation, his angina

worsened [author's emphasis]. With [his] heart calcium score of 2600,

I started the nanobacteria protocol. Within two to three weeks his

angina abated. He was able to return to all his normal activities and

exercises in two months.

" Nanobacteria protocol helped this patient measurably, when other

treatments had failed. I am quite impressed with his results. With

heart calcium scores of 750 or more, nothing else seems to work. "

Bajwa and her patient are far from alone. In Santa ,

California, general practitioner Dr Hopper said he recorded

impressive results with a diabetic patient when he used the treatment

to help her recover from congestive heart failure. Hopper then put

his patient on the same treatment used in the clinical study: a

regimen of tetracycline, EDTA and nutraceuticals,3 administered by

the patient at home. Note that this was not intravenous chelation,

which has been broadly analysed and critiqued, but, instead, a mix of

oral and suppository treatments.

In Toledo, Ohio, cardiologist Dr C. , who pioneered

early patient treatment with this approach, has on his website case

histories from dozens of patients who have shown remarkable

improvement. In Tampa, Florida, cardiologist Dr Benedict Maniscalco,

who supervised the clinical study [Pathophysiology study, referenced

previous page], reports that patients who stayed on the treatment

after the study was completed showed dramatic reductions in their

heart disease symptoms. There are many more examples.

Normally results such as these, when reinforced by clinical studies,

however preliminary, would be cause for loud celebration. If the

findings had been reported by a major pharmaceuticals company, they

could have easily made the front pages of medical news services

because, until then, no one had reported reversing the symptoms of

such diseases to such an extent. More encouraging still, because the

medicines have been around for many years and their side effects are

minimal and well known, the new approach is already available across

the USA and used with thousands of patients. That leaves thousands

more doctors with millions more patients who might benefit right now.

On top of that, a blood test based on the new approach has been used

to identify heart disease early in patients who show no outward

symptoms.

Why, then, has the response from government authorities, medical

associations and health experts been cavernous silence?

To understand this requires looking at a scourge that has been with

us for millennia, and which science has been at a loss to explain

until now. It is known as calcification.

CALCIFICATION

Calcification is a rock-hard mix of the most plentiful minerals in

the body: calcium and phosphorus. Normally this calcium phosphate mix

is essential for building bones and teeth. But as we age, and

sometimes when we are still young, some of it goes haywire,

stiffening arteries, roughing up skin, destroying teeth, blocking

kidneys and salting cancers.

The arithmetic is frighteningly easy. Calcification doubles in the

body about every three or four years. We can have it as teenagers and

not notice, although it mysteriously accelerates in some athletes.

Then as we age and also live longer, it becomes so endemic that most

people over seventy have it.

For decades, calcification has been growing imperceptibly in tens of

millions of baby boomers. Politicians and pundits are among the high-

profile victims of this slow-motion explosion that is ripping apart

healthcare with skyrocketing treatment costs. In December 2004,

doctors diagnosed US President W. Bush with one of the more

commonly known forms: coronary artery calcification. Former President

Clinton required emergency surgery because doctors missed much of his

calcification when they used older tests to track it. Vice President

Dick Cheney and many of his Senate colleagues are calcified. At least

three sitting US women governors have had it in breast cancer as

well. And they are not alone. Media types who cover politics or poke

fun at it haven't escaped. Larry King and Letterman are both

calcified, as are many ageing news anchors. A much younger CBS Early

Show co-host, Rene Syler, has it too.

As we learn more about it, calcification is competing to be the

leading medical disorder. Although it is nowhere on the " Leading

Causes of Death " list, it contributes to most diseases that kill us,

including heart disease, diabetes and cancer. The numbers are

staggering. For the 60 million Americans who have heart disease, most

have calcification. Of the millions of women who develop breast or

ovarian cancer or who have breast implants, calcification is a

warning. Men with prostate disease often have it, as do kidney-stone

sufferers. Athletes with stress injuries like bone spurs and

tendonitis get it frequently.

Most of us don't know the pervasiveness of calcification because it

has a different name in many diseases, and here are just a few:

dental pulp stones, hardening of the arteries, kidney stones,

pitcher's elbow, bone spurs, microcalcification in breast cancer

and " brain sand " .

Unsuspecting patients aren't the only ones in the dark. Many doctors

are unaware of new studies that show calcification is toxic, causing

acute inflammation, rapid cell division and joint destruction. Oddly,

these nasty effects are well known to specialists who study

calcification in arthritis, but awareness of them hasn't translated

very well to the cardiovascular community, with the result that

calcification is still misperceived by many as an innocent bystander

instead of an inflammatory devil.

The double-think about calcification is illustrated by how it is

treated in breast cancer. When microcalcification is detected in the

breast with routine scans, it is a warning sign for cancer and the

deposits are biopsied for malignancies. This was the case, for

example, with Connecticut Governor Jody Rell in early 2005. Doctors

found cancer in the calcium deposits in her breast before scans

detected a tumour. This let them surgically remove it before it

spread to her lymph nodes.

That typifies one perverse advantage of calcification: it helps

doctors pre-empt more serious disease. In some ways, it is a canary

in the mine of the body. And yet, if cancer is not found in calcium

deposits, these are often declared as " benign " and patients are told

there is nothing to worry about.

The same thing goes for heart disease. Coronary artery calcification

is seen as an excellent predictor of the illness. Tens of billions of

dollars are spent every year on scanning technology to identify the

telltale thin white lines that betray its presence. Yet most doctors

see calcification in the arteries as something that comes along later

once the disease takes hold, despite evidence that calcium phosphate

crystals generate the same type of inflammation that, according to

cardiologists, plays a big role in heart attacks.

Incredibly, with all the advanced detection techniques, there has

been no way to find calcium deposits where they get started in the

billions of capillaries in the human body—so, without being able to

see the starting point, doctors often conclude that what they don't

see isn't there. But make no mistake: calcification is there, and it

is a medical disorder. It was registered in 1990 as a disorder under

the International Classification of Diseases list of the World Health

Organization and was adopted by WHO member states as of 1994 (see

http://www.who.int/classifications/icd/en/).

When well established, calcification stares defiantly at radiologists

every day from X-rays as it multiplies incessantly. There has been no

proof of where it comes from, and there is no known way to prevent it

or sustainably get rid of it without removing it surgically. Due to

its gestation period of years before it triggers real trouble, it has

just begun sucking the life out of baby boomers and their healthcare

budgets.

Among its more exotic effects, it threatens space exploration when it

disables astronauts with unexpected kidney calcification and it is a

budget-breaker for pro-sport-team owners who lose athletes to its

ravages. At the more mundane level, it complicates root canals and it

disrupts the lives of otherwise healthy young people when it strikes

as kidney stones. Worst of all, it infiltrates plaque in heart

disease and stroke and it plugs bypasses and stents used to fix our

internal plumbing.

The US National Library of Medicine holds thousands of research

documents referencing calcification, and various medical journals

cover it in depth. GE Healthcare, Toshiba, Philips and Siemens sell

thousands of machines for detecting it.

TREATMENT A THREAT TO PHARMCO PROFITS

But with all this money being thrown at calcification, there has been

virtually no success at finding the cause. So when researchers such

as those at Mayo Clinic and NASA find something that seems to cause

it, and clinical studies show that a new approach seems to get rid of

it, you'd think that most of the medical establishment would be rapt

with attention, right? Wrong.

Only a few small studies have been co-financed by the National

Institutes of Health (NIH) to look into this, and neither has to do

with the treatment. The only thing the Food and Drug Administration

(FDA) seems to have done is to make rumblings about whether the

treatment is legitimate, although the active ingredients—tetracycline

and EDTA—have been FDA approved for other uses for decades. So far,

no government agency has made public note of the peer-reviewed

studies that many physicians say are so promising.

According to doctors familiar with the approach, here are a few

reasons why the treatment has not been given the attention that it

seems to merit...

• The most perturbing for patients: the treatment is relatively

inexpensive and produces poor profits compared to other drugs. It is

exponentially cheaper than open heart surgery. Because it does not

have to be taken for life at full dose—as is the case with most other

heart drugs—it does not provide the steady cash flow that other

medicines do.

• Although the treatment is initially used alongside other medicines

as a precaution to make sure patients don't switch prematurely and

suffer problems, evidence suggests that the new approach might

replace more profitable blood thinners and anti-inflammatories that

are staples of the pharmaceuticals industry.

• And if the approach continues to reverse coronary artery disease,

it will cut down on expensive surgical procedures that are the

financial mainstay of hospitals.

That's not to say surgeons don't want to get rid of calcification.

New stents that go into arteries are specially coated with time-

release drugs that seem to ward off calcification. But that only

happens where the stent is located, not in the other 99.999 per cent

of the arteries.

Also, the EDTA–tetracycline–nutraceutical combo that has demonstrated

such promise is not the only treatment shown to work. A group of

drugs known as bisphosphonates, used for example to treat

osteoporosis, has been shown to be effective in the lab against some

calcification. But bisphosphonates can have nasty side effects,

especially with the type of regular application that seems to be

necessary to reverse heart disease in seriously ill patients. Due to

these risks, the only present approach that seems to be safe and

effective in reversing heart disease is the one that uses the EDTA–

tetracycline–nutraceutical mix.

Critics claim the reason why the treatment isn't adopted more broadly

has nothing to do with money but instead with science. They say

researchers can't show how the treatment works.

NANOBACTERIA DISCOVERED IN OUR BLOOD

It all comes down to a sub-microscopic blood particle known as a

nanobacterium, discovered in 1988 by Finnish researcher Dr Olavi

Kajander at Scripps Research Institute in California.

The particle has a special habit no other blood particle has been

known to possess: it forms a rock-hard calcium phosphate shell that

is chemically identical to the stuff found in hardening of the

arteries, prostate disease, kidney disease, periodontal disease and

breast cancer. The problem is, the particle is so small that it

apparently can't accommodate nucleic acid strings that, according to

commonly accepted wisdom, would let it replicate on its own and be

alive. So scientists are stumped over how it manages to self-

replicate.

For 15 years, microbiologist Dr Neva Ciftcioglu (pronounced " shift-

show-lew " ) has been peering with an electron microscope at this blood

particle that critics say doesn't live. But according to NASA

colleagues and Mayo Clinic researchers, the question of whether it

lives is less important than what it does. Despite or perhaps due to

its tiny size and genetic elusiveness, this speck may be the Rosetta

stone for a calcified language found in most diseases on the Leading

Causes of Death list.

Like her science, Ciftcioglu's life is full of unusual turns. Being a

woman microbiologist from Turkey speaks volumes. Throw into that her

once-fluent Finnish, a position at NASA and professorships on both

sides of the Atlantic, and you've got a determined character

struggling with a stubborn scientific cryptogram.

Ciftcioglu's work with nanobacteria began when her PhD scholarship

took her to the University of Kuopio in Finland, where alongside her

once mentor, biochemist Olavi Kajander, she developed the antibodies

necessary to find the particle in the human body. A decade later, her

work caught the eye of NASA chief scientist Dr McKay and she

ended up at the Space Center in Houston, gathering science

awards that testify to her success.

Now Ciftcioglu and long-time collaborator Kajander, who discovered

the nanoscopic artifact, stand at the eye of a growing storm. They

and their colleagues are garnering praise and scorn because they

claim to have evidence for why most of us are literally petrified by

the time we die. More profoundly, their work may influence how new

life is found on Earth and other planets.

SELF-REPLICATING NANOPARTICLES

An intense dispute has raged for years that connects how we look for

infection in the body with how we look for bio-kingdoms on Earth and

throughout the universe. Researchers have long sought terrestrial

extremophiles that tell them what might survive on Mars, while others

doubt the wisdom of looking for life on Mars at all. The mystery

remains: what is the most effective way to find novel organisms?

Until recently, every life-form was found to have a particular RNA

sequence that can be amplified using a technique known as Polymerase

Chain Reaction (PCR). Nucleic acid sub-sequences named 16S rRNA have

been universally found in life-forms. By making primers against these

sub-sequences, scientists amplify the DNA that codes for the 16S

rRNAs. Resulting PCR products, when sequenced, can characterise a

life-form.

One high-powered group persuaded NASA with a " Don't fix it if it

ain't broke " line and lobbied successfully to use the same method

employed for years: get a piece of RNA and amplify it. The group—led

by scientists such as Dr Ruvkun at the Department of Genetics in

Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, and advised by luminaries

such as Dr Norman Pace at the University of Colorado—got money from

NASA to build a " PCR machine " that would automatically seek such

clues in harsh environments such as those found on Mars.

Other scientists known as astrobiologists say the PCR machine

approach is a waste of money because such amplification shows only

part of the picture—not what nature might have done on other planets

or, for that matter, in extreme Earthly environments.

However, their argument always suffered from lack of evidence—that

is, until 2003 when scientists associated with the San Diego–based

Diversa Corporation and advised by Professor Karl Stetter, of the

University of Regensburg, Germany, published the genome of an

extremophile known as Nanoarchaeum equitans, which Stetter's team had

discovered in Icelandic volcanic vents.

N. equitans was special because it had the smallest known genome

found so far, but it also had another intriguing trait. With

Nanoarchaeae, the particular 16S rRNA sequence found in other life-

forms wasn't in the place that it was expected to be and did not

respond to conventional PCR tests. The 16S rRNA sequence was

different in areas addressed by the PCR primers and did not amplify.

Stetter noted that the so-called universal probes that work with

humans, animals, plants, eukaryotes, bacteria and archaeae did not

work in this organism.

How, then, was the discovery made if the organism couldn't be

sequenced in that way? Stetter had found that the organism's sequence

where the traditional " universal " primers are located was abnormal.

This finding let him use other means to sequence the gene. In

reporting their discovery in the Proceedings of the National Academy

of Sciences,4 the Stetter team observed that the information-

processing systems and simplicity of Nanoarchaeum's metabolism

suggests " an unanticipated world of organisms to be discovered " . In

other words, it might be the tip of a nano-lifeberg.

Stetter's finding gave ammunition to scientists such as Neva

Ciftcioglu who say they have found other extremophiles, including

human nanobacteria, that cannot have their nucleic acids detected

with standard PCR amplification.

One of the differences between Stetter's N. equitans and the

nanobacteria found by Ciftcioglu and Kajander's team is that

Nanoarchaeae need another organism to replicate, whereas at least

some nanobacteria seem to replicate by themselves. Another difference

is that Nanoarchaeae are slightly wider: 400 nanometres compared to

100–250 for nanobacteria. The greater size allows for what

conventional wisdom says is the smallest allowable space for life-

replicating ribosomes.

Which leads to the question: how do nanobacteria copy themselves?

Evidence for self-replicating nanoparticles has been around for years

in everything from oil wells to heart disease, but failure to

sequence them using regular PCR led some to dismiss them as

contamination or mistakes. However, researchers have found

characteristics that make the particles hard to explain away. They

replicate on their own, so are not viruses. They resist high-level

radiation, which suggests they are not bacteria. They respond well to

light, where non-living crystals don't. So if they aren't viruses,

regular bacteria or crystals, what are they?

Some supporters of standardised 16S rRNA tests are quick to discount

nanobacteria. That's not surprising. If a novel nucleic sequence

holds true with other extremophiles as with N. equitans, then a

machine that searches for life using standard PCR tests might miss

them and be obsolete. Conscious of this, the PCR machine team has

said that as part of their work, they plan to " search for the

boundaries " of the 16S sequences, but what exactly that means and how

they plan to overcome the problem hasn't been set out yet.

Reputations, money and perhaps the foundations of life ride on the

16S rRNA dispute. Resolving it may determine who gets money to find

the next great biological kingdom.

NANOBACTERIAL INFECTION

How relevant is the outcome for human welfare? In 2004, researchers

reported finding nanobacteria in everything from heart disease to

cancer and kidney stones. Medical researchers reported to the

American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2004 that a test for

nanobacteria is an accurate predictor of heart disease risk. But the

work that these researchers say may already have saved lives has been

ridiculed by critics who claim that such nanobes don't exist, which

in turn has made funding for basic research hard to get.

Who is right? One well-respected astrobiologist observer qualified

the struggle this way: " Unless we declare [the nano-organism

scientists] incompetent, then the info they have gathered is rather

compelling that something interesting is going on. "

That's why a few intrepid investors have plopped US$7 million and

counting into a Tampa biotech start-up devoted exclusively to

Ciftcioglu and Kajander's discoveries about the calcifying particle.

For the big pharmaceuticals companies that's pocket change, but for

these entrepreneurs it's a pocketful of faith that's been keeping

them on edge for years. And it's starting to show some results, as

published research from NASA, Mayo and various universities

indicates. Moreover, despite its relative financial insignificance,

this venture may end up wagging the dog due to a long-overdue

paradigm shift in, of all things, the space program.

After decades of resistance, NASA—provoked by successful upstart

private projects such as the X Prize, which led to the first private

foray into space—is now collaborating with fledgling companies,

instead of just corporate behemoths, on intractable problems: in this

case, why perfectly healthy astronauts come down with kidney and

other calcifying disorders. The result: in March 2005, NASA's

Space Center put the finishing touches on a tightly secured lab aimed

at decoding nanobacteria found at the core of kidney stones. After

some serious growing pains, the lab is finally beginning to look into

what Ciftcioglu and Kajander began examining so many years ago: the

genetic content of nanobacteria. Meanwhile, Ciftcioglu and others

have published results showing that nanobacteria multiply five times

faster in weightlessness than in Earth gravity,5 which may explain

why calcification shows up so suddenly in space.

But while researchers argue over what this nanobacterium is and how

it multiplies, doctors are finding that, when they treat it with a

medical cocktail, their patients improve.

Nor is it unusual that doctors are succeeding before science figures

out why. Antibiotics were used successfully against bacteria long

before scientists deciphered DNA. Doctors stopped infecting patients

by washing their hands long before they were able to identify all the

viruses and bacteria that they inadvertently transported from patient

to patient.

Most recently, a vaccine that prevents cervical cancer has been put

on the market. It apparently works by targeting the human papilloma

virus. Problem is, researchers can't show exactly how the virus

causes cancer; they can only show that when it is stopped, the cancer

doesn't occur. But that hasn't prevented the drug from being patented

and put on the market. The history of medicine is full of such

examples where patients improve with treatments whose mechanisms

aren't fully understood at the start.

The idea that infection could be at the heart of chronic illness is

intriguing because it has been around for more than a century but

only now is regaining favour due to discoveries of, for example, a

vaccine that prevents cervical cancer (as mentioned above). The

resulting debates over infection in chronic disease have a novel

twist because they are driven by new diagnostic technologies that

give researchers the molecular accuracy required to confirm older

theories about infection. On one hand, clinical results suggest

antibiotics alone do not prevent the rate of heart attacks among

coronary patients. On the other, discoveries that infection is

responsible for most stomach ulcers and some cancers support the long-

held idea that the same might be true in heart disease, if only

science could find the right infection and get rid of it.

Some say that nanobacteria may be one such infection. Yet scientists'

inability to fully explain the genetics of nanobacteria is being used

by high-ranking medical authorities as an excuse to ignore the

pathogen and its treatment. This is especially perplexing because

scientists involved in the discoveries work at some of the highest

level institutions in America, including NASA, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland

Clinic, Washington Hospital Center and many others, and are not only

respected in their field but are also award winners. Other centres of

excellence internationally, such as University Hospital in Vienna,

have also isolated the pathogen and observed it in diseases such as

ovarian cancer.

For decades, scientists have shown that disease can be caused by

contaminants that are not " alive " and cannot replicate on their own.

Environmental toxins, many viruses and, most recently, particles

known as prions have all been shown as players in disease processes,

although they cannot self-replicate.

So it seems unusual that nanobacteria would be discounted just

because no one has yet shown how they multiply. Which takes us to the

question of where nanobacteria might come from.

NANOBACTERIA-CONTAMINATED VACCINES

When Dr Olavi Kajander discovered nanobacteria in 1988, he was not

looking for disease at all. He was looking for what was killing the

cells that are used to develop vaccines. Labs everywhere have a

vexing and expensive problem with these widely used cell cultures:

they stop reproducing or die after a few generations and have to be

thrown out.

Kajander surmised that something invisible was killing them; and when

he incubated supposedly sterile samples for more than a month under

special conditions, he got a milky biofilm. That biofilm contained

particles that he later named nanobacteria, unaware at the time that

some of their characteristics made them quite distinct from bacteria.

The serum that Kajander used to grow the nanobacteria came from the

blood of cow foetuses. Serum from the UK especially was full of

nanobacteria, but a much later study also concluded they were present

in some cow herds in the eastern US. In other words, nanobacteria are

in cows, and cow blood is used to develop many vaccines. Kajander

emphasises that this should not stop people from using vaccines,

because the immediate risk from diseases that the vaccines are

intended to prevent is relatively higher than the calcification risk

in the short term. Nonetheless, the potentially explosive

implications of contaminated vaccines and cow by-products would be

clear to everyone at government agencies who has examined the issue.

In that context, a series of hotly disputed discussions went back and

forth between Kajander and Ciftcioglu and disease prevention

agencies. And it certainly wasn't a secret because the Medical Letter

on the CDC & FDA (10 June 2001) published an article

entitled " Nanobacteria Are Present In Vaccines; But Any Health Risks

Remain Unknown " , explaining that nanobacteria had been discovered in

some polio vaccines.

The minutes of a subsequent meeting of the FDA Center for Biologics

Evaluation and Research (CBER) advisory committee in November 2002

reveal an extraordinary decision by the committee members: they

elected not to investigate the potential contamination. According to

the minutes they based their decision on a lone experiment,

suggesting that what Kajander had found was a contaminant often found

in lab experiments and nothing new. In other words, they maintained

that Kajander had made a mistake.

But one of the glaring problems with the NIH-funded experiment

performed around late 1999 or early 2000, as shown in the published

paper about the results,6 is that it did not use a control sample

that could have been provided by Kajander. In other words, the

experiment never examined the particle that Kajander had discovered,

but instead relied on growing the particle independently without

knowing if it was the same one Kajander was referring to. Moreover,

the experiment was never repeated after the preliminary finding. On

that very slim basis, according to the CBER committee minutes, the

whole issue of nanobacteria was dismissed as a potential

contamination issue for the time being. Since then, papers have been

published showing that nanobacteria have been grown in labs around

the world and that patients began to improve when the pathogen was

targeted in disease. Nonetheless, neither the FDA nor NIH has

indicated much readiness to re-investigate the vaccine contamination

issue or the nanobacteria treatment.

What might be the price for this delay in researching nanobacteria?

Annually, millions of heart disease patients go through agony or die

because drugs and surgery prescribed for them haven't worked. For

this last-ditch group, the choices are simple: try something new or

die.

The question that the NIH and FDA may one day face is: when such

promising early evidence was being reported and so many patients had

exhausted their other options, why were doctors not advised of this

new possibility so that they could at least tell patients and make

some informed decisions?

Researchers like Ciftcioglu and Kajander, along with cardiologists

like Benedict Maniscalco plus experienced general practitioners such

as Hopper, profess frustration that so many patients and

their doctors are not being given the information that could help

them, especially in last-ditch situations. Meanwhile, calcification

continues its relentless march in millions, and the human and

financial costs are mounting.

POSTSCRIPT

In May 2005, Dr Olavi Kajander delivered a sobering message to a

joint meeting of the US FDA and the European Medicines Agency on

viral safety when he presented new evidence to support something

first published in 1997: that vaccines are contaminated with

nanobacteria.

Since 1999, government agencies have done virtually nothing to

investigate the claim, due largely to that NIH experiment which

failed to use particles discovered by Kajander as control samples; so

now that the vaccine contamination has been officially reported to

authorities, the question is: what will be done?

Then on 24 June 2005, a " smoking gun " was announced about calcium

deposits in heart disease. British researchers published proof in the

leading medical journal Circulation Research7 that calcium phosphate

crystals cause inflammation in the arteries. Inflammation is a

leading cause of heart attacks, but until now most cardiologists have

believed calcification to be an innocent bystander in the

inflammatory process. Because of that, calcium deposits were never

targeted with treatment. If true, the British discovery would force a

re-evaluation of the whole medical approach, not only to inflammation

but also to the foundations of heart disease, looking at

calcification as a prime culprit.

About the Author:

Mulhall is a leading nanotechnology journalist who appears

often on nationally syndicated talk shows in the US. As managing

director of the Hamburg Environmental Institute, he co-developed

methods now used by government agencies to measure environmental

impacts. His book Our Molecular Future (Prometheus Books, 2002)

describes how to use nanotechnology as a defence against tsunamis and

other natural disaster risks. His disease prevention experience comes

from pioneering water purification technologies in China and South

America.

Mr Mulhall's communications background began with a Bachelor of

Journalism (Hons.), progressed to (award-winning) documentary film

making, then diversified into management when he co-founded the first

commercial TV network in the Republic of Ukraine. He has written

articles for US media such as News Day, The Futurist and The National

Post as well as for publications in Germany and Brazil. He

contributed to the first Financial Times (UK) book on green business

opportunities and has also written and edited a range of technology

training books. Mulhall sits on the advisory boards of the

Center for Responsible Nanotechnology and the Acceleration Studies

Foundation. He has given invited lectures to organisations such as

the National Research Council, the US EPA and the Institute of

Medicine.

Editor's Note:

This article is based on material in the book The Calcium Bomb: The

Nanobacteria Link to Heart Disease & Cancer, by Mulhall and

Katja Hansen (The Writers' Collective, 2005; see review this issue),

which was selected as a Finalist for the 2004 Book of the Year Award

for Health by Foreword Magazine. For more information, visit

http://www.calcify.com.

Endnotes: