Can Mold Allergies & Autoimmune Disease BeTreated with Hookworm?

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Can Parasites Treat Allergies and Asthma?

(July 22, '09) -- A man suffering from asthma and allergies traveled to Africa

in 2006 to infect himself with parasites in an apparently successful bid to cure

his ailments. Now, he's running a company that sells parasites to others.

Jasper Lawrence, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, said he got the idea after

seeing a documentary by a British scientist who researched why people who live

in places where hookworm is common have virtually no allergies or asthma.

A " desperate " Lawrence said he spent hours researching the idea on the Internet,

and then made his trip to Cameroon in 2006, where he walked barefoot in open-air

latrines, hoping to get infected with hookworms.

" It's perfectly normal to be freaked out by it, " Lawrence said, adding that he

" still had gray, wormy, slimy nightmares " about the unusual treatment even after

all his research.

" While I was there my feet were very itchy, so I felt very confident that I was

infected, " he told ABC News.

Lawrence said that within months, his asthma and allergy symptoms disappeared,

and he was able to stop taking the powerful drug prednisone.

Since then, he and at least one other company have gone into business selling

parasites to others as therapy for people with allergies and asthma and diseases

like Crohn's and multiple sclerosis.

But some doctors say that although parasite therapy is promising, there's not

enough research to back up the treatment, which has not been approved by the

Food and Drug Administration, ABC reported.

" It is a legitimate field, but it's been bootlegged, " said Dr. Weinstock, a

professor of medicine at Tufts University who's studied parasitic treatment and

is working to test the therapy. " The question is, what are you actually buying

[from these companies]? "

Weinstock told ABC that selling parasites online " hurts the science, and when

people do this it makes people skeptical. "

Lawrence said he thinks enough research has been done, and that the people using

parasites don't have the time to wait for more to be done.

" No one chooses parasites as their first treatment option, nobody, " he said.

" Our typical patient has been sick for 15 to 20 years and has tried everything. "

For $2,900, customers of Lawrence's Autoimmune Therapies can take a dose of

whipworm or put on a Band-aid with hookworms to penetrate their skin, and the

effect will last for about five years.

Experts warn that using parasites can cause illness itself. Dr. Henry Milgrom,

professor of pediatrics at National Jewish Health University of Colorado in

Denver, told ABC that although the idea of parasite therapy " is not completely

off the wall, " parasites " suck blood and cause pain and diarrhea and congestive

failure. "

" We're talking about a therapy option that is very safe, " Lawrence argued,

saying that hookworms can be eliminated easily if necessary.

2009 AOL LLC. .

2009-07-20 12:26:59

And here's more on the subject.

Transcript: Thom Hartmann's Worms rant, 04 March 2009

Thom Hartmann's Worms rant, 04 March 2009

Video: part 1, part 2.

As promised, I want to share with you something that on the one hand is

something that we should all be knowing about and thinking about as science at

the micro level, the level of us as individuals, and on the other hand, has

something to do with why our planet is melting down at the macro level, the big

picture. Why our planet is melting down. Why our culture is so dysfunctional.

Why we're destroying the world. And it has to do with worms.

You know, I wrote a chapter for my new book " Threshold " which is not out yet but

will be in a few months and this chapter is titled, " Unnatural selection " . And

it starts out, " I remember the German toilets " . And I just have to tell you this

story. When Louise and I first started visiting Germany in 1978 when we started

working with Kinder- und Jugendhilfswerk Salem; with Salem International, .org

is their web site. And I've done international relief work with that agency for

30 years and we created a community for abused kids based on their model and

they ran three children's villages in Germany and programs all over the world.

And in fact we'll be broadcasting our show from there, assuming that we can work

out all the details, in about 3 weeks.

But in any case, when we first started going to Germany back in the late

seventies and the early eighties, many, maybe even most, of the toilets, of the

toilets that you would see in Germany and you would find this occasionally in

other countries as well, I saw them in Belgium, I saw them in Holland, were what

are referred to, and you can Google this, this is a hoot, they were referred to

as the `lay and display' or `continental shelf' toilets. And basically what it

is the toilet was, there was a little platform about 6 or 8 inches below the

seat that you did your business on, and it just sat there, right there in the

open air for you to look at, and you could poke a stick into it if you wanted.

And then when you flushed the toilet, the water would come flushing in from the

front and it would shove it all to the back where there was about a 3 inch hole

and it would go down the drain.

And I couldn't figure it out. I thought the Germans must be poop-obsessed. You

know, they're all into scatological weirdness or something. And in fact one

time, Louise and I, the red light district in furt is just a block from the

downtown furt train station, and we were, and there's a great, there used

to be, anyway, they've closed it since then, but back in the eighties, just one

of the world's very best Thai restaurants was 2 blocks into the red light

district, 2 blocks away from the main Hauptbahnhof in furt. And we used to

love to eat there. And you walk by these shops, you know, the porno shops, and

very often they had these really weird things in the window. You know, people

peeing on each other and stuff like that. And so, I thought that the toilets

were just a symptom of the Germans having a bizarre fetish with excrement.

Well, it turns out it wasn't that at all. And now, by the way, most German

toilets are just like American toilets. You know, you do your business and it

drops into a pool of water. The reason why they were the way that they were, and

they were that way all over Europe and much of the world, was because back then,

back before the 1960s, '70s basically, most people had worms. And it wasn't, you

know, a terrible problem. It didn't cause people to die from worm infestations,

but it was kind of creepy. And so people would take a look at their business,

and if they saw something moving around in it then they'd know that next day

they would do what was called a purge. You take bitters, and the Germans were

really big on bitters, you'd drink down some of these bitters and you'd have the

worms come in and the worms go out. This is the thing. You drink the bitters and

you take senna leaf or some other kind of violent laxative and it would cause

the worms that were attached to your gut to go, " aaah! " and they'd let go and

then, whoosh, everything goes out and you do a purge and it gets rid of the

worms for a few months.

But what happened in the '50s and '60s, particularly in the 1960s, was that new

generations of antibiotics were developed that didn't just kill bacteria; they

killed worms as well. And so now, 40 years later, pretty much nobody has worms

any more. Now, why am I going off about worms?

Well, because of some really, really interesting research that has been done.

Three generations ago, three generations ago, this reading from my book

" Threshold. Three generations ago, only one in ten thousand people in the United

States had inflammatory bowel disease; IBD, or sometimes referred to as IBS,

where people have, you know, they get diarrhea, they get constipation, it goes

back and forth, things like that. Crohn's disease was rare. Multiple sclerosis

was virtually unknown to most people. Very few people knew anybody who had MS.

Today, this is 40 years later, today 1 in 250 people has IBS. 1 out of every 250

instead of 1 out of every 10,000. Crohn's disease is widespread; yes, there is a

genetic weakness that makes you more vulnerable to it; it particularly hits

people who are Jewish, but it is widespread, it is not because of the gene. The

gene just makes people vulnerable. And pretty much everybody knows somebody who

has MS. Why?

You see similar numbers with asthma, lupus and a whole host of auto immune

disorders. So this back in the 1990s sort of fascinating, this

gastroenterologist by the name of Dr. Weinstock and he started looking into

this and saying, you know, `what's the deal here?' He noticed that pig handlers,

pig farmers, people who worked on pig farms didn't get asthma, didn't get

multiple sclerosis, didn't get lupus, didn't get hay fever, weren't allergic to

cats; they didn't have all this whole range of what we refer to broadly as auto

immune disorders. There's even speculation about things like arthritis. They

didn't have it. They were also almost always infected by a worm that is very

common with pigs that infects people but is easily fought off by the human

immune system so that typically the infection only lasts a few weeks. But if you

work with the pigs you continuously are re-infecting yourself. It's called

Trichuris suis. It's called pig worm, the common name. And that all these people

were infected with Trichuris and they had none of these diseases. And he

thought, `that's pretty amazing'.

So, he took a bunch of Crohn's disease patients, and this is from research that

was actually done following on his work. No, this is his work. It was reported

Moises Velasquez-Manoff in the New York Times: " After ingesting 2,500

microscopic T. suis eggs at 3-week intervals " , this is eating the eggs of the

worms, right? 2500 of them, " for 24 weeks, 23 of 29 Crohn's " disease, Crohn's

disease is this disease that just basically the large intestine just starts to

disintegrate and it has to be cut out. I mean, people die from Crohn's disease.

" 23 of 29 Crohn's patients responded positively. … Twenty-one went into complete

remission. In the second study, 13 of 30 ulcerative colitis patients improved

compared with 4 in the 24-person placebo group. "

" Trials using T. " , I'm reading from the New York Times, science section. " Trials

using T. suis eggs on patients with multiple sclerosis, Crohn's and hay fever

are beginning in the United States, Australia and Denmark, respectively. In

Germany, scientists are planning studies on asthma and food allergies. Other

European scientists, meanwhile, plan to replicate many of these experiments with

Necator americanus " , which is the common American hookworm, the worm that, when

I was a kid back in the 50s, everybody got from their pets. And kids used to be

wormed just like dogs and cats used to be wormed. And back then, nobody had hay

fever, nobody had asthma, lupus was rare as hen's teeth, or whatever the phrase

is, and MS was really rare.

Another scientist, Dr. Pritchard of the University of Nottingham. He was

working in Papua New Guinea in the 1980s and he saw that these people who were

infected with hook worms never got any of these auto immune disorders.

Here's another study. This was done by the British National Health Service and

this, from an article in the New York Times that I reprinted or quoted in my

article in my book Threshold, trial participants, they were given worms, right.

People with god-awful allergies; cat allergies, house allergies, mold allergies,

dust allergies.

" Trial participants raved about their allergy symptoms disappearing. Word about

the study soon appeared online among chronic allergy sufferers, and a

group on " helminthic therapy " " Helminths is the, what, category, class, phylum,

order, whatever, for worms? " sprung up.

" Many of the people who were given a placebo have requested worms, and many of

the people with worms have elected to keep them, " Dr. Pritchard said.