Since its launch in 1993, Betaseron’s prescribing info has always included a recommendation for regular liver-function tests. However, Berlex decided to send a reminder of the drug’s noxious effect on the liver “in view of the heightened attention [over] the safety profile of MS therapies.

Other commonly reported side-effects are low blood lymphocytes, injection-site reaction, weakness, flu-like symptoms, headache and pain

The other reason that MS isn’t really a “disease” is that these symptoms can be produced by many causes, often man made. Chief among these, says MS specialist Dr Patrick Kingley, is mercury from amalgam fillings. Of the 3800 MS patients he has treated thus far, only five didn’t have evidence of mercury poisoning.Systemic candida overgrowth, allergies and food intolerences, pesticides, moulds, nutritional deficiencies, drugs the entire gambit of 20th century toxic rubbish in our environment conspires to poison us in slow motion. The more susceptible among us may experience a scrambling up of the signalling going to the muscles via the brain and begin to evidence some of the symptoms that we have up until now called MS. Others of us will just get hayfever.

Dr Kingsley is currently interested in the role of certain viruses in acting as a sort of initial trigger. In an overwhelming number of his patients with sensory problems pins and needles in the extremities and loss of sensation in other parts of the body the patient sometimes reports a bout of shingles, herpes or chickenpox before the onset of the problem. “Maybe what they then go on to develop,” muses Dr Kingsley, “is not MS but an unusual presentation of shingles.” Dr Kingsley has also seen a number of cases of patients who develop meningitis during MS. After the meningitis was treated, it led to improvement. In other patients, he discovers a spinal injury, such as whiplash, occurred before the onset of symptoms. Could that injury, also, have played a role?

This notion of overload or a viral trigger is a far cry from the idea of a “bug” invading our bodies and causing all the damage on its own. It is akin to the viral (or vaccine) trigger that often seems to precipitate ME.

Understanding all the most puzzling illnesses like MS, or ME, or even cancer and AIDS requires that we dispose of our notion of illness as having any one cause or acting similarly in all of us.

Labeling diseases is ultimately limiting, forcing very different symptoms and individual causes into a very small box. What causes what we call cancer in you is not what causes cancer in me, and my body’s individual symptom picture and response to it will ultimately be very different from yours.

In order to conquer MS, we need first to stop giving it a name. Once we do, we may stop looking for the single culprit behind it.

The deciding factor, it seems, is the condition of the membrane of our small intestine, which when working properly, is a clever sieve, with the ability to allow simple carbohydrates, amino acids and essential fatty acids “through”, while blocking toxins and substances like whole proteins from entering our bloodstream.

When this protective, selectively permeable membrane is damaged, the larger proteins and toxins it’s meant to protect us from get “leaked” into our bloodstream, leading our immune systems to attack these proteins and eventually, our own bodies as foreign matter. What Galland and a number of others believe is that this situation is behind many autoimmune conditions, from inflammatory bowel disease to arthritis.

Galland goes as far as to argue that a leaky gut is associated with AIDS and HIV infection and even conditions like autism.

One of the latest and most interesting theories comes from health writer Susie Cornell, who postulates that leaky gut probably plays a central role in the development of multiple sclerosis. In one research project of 40 MS patients, all were found to have a number of nutritional deficiencies, even among those taking supplements. The patients show particular deficiencies of magnesium, manganese, selenium, zinc and mostly all of the B vitamins.

This could mean, she said, that the patients with MS absorb food poorly, possibly due to a leaky gut.

Because different parts of the intestinal wall absorb different nutrients, damage to the wall in one area may cause poor absorption of one particular nutrient, says Cornell. This is why a patient might be show one single deficiency rather than wholesale malnutrition. The symptoms of B12 deficiency and magnesium deficiency fatigue, irritability, nervous system disorders, tingling and numbness in fingers and toes and even balance problems are the symptoms we have collectively termed “MS”.

Furthermore, she says, many of these symptoms of MS are also the symptoms of the leaky gut syndrome.

No one really knows whether these diseases are solely caused by a leaky gut; the situation is probably chicken and egg. Once your gut “leaks” and foreign proteins get through the intestinal barrier, your immune system begins to inappropriately react to them, and your liver and pancreas begins to operate faultily, the gut doesn’t receive the nutrients it needs for optimum health, leading the intestinal sieve to grow larger and larger. A leaky gut leads to an ill body, which leads to a leaky gut.

If Galland and writers like Cornell are correct, then we have to entirely rethink what we term disease as not something we catch but something mostly under our control, caused by the breakdown of digestive processes. The symptoms that we gather together into a classifiable disease may be no more than the manifestation of one or more vitamin deficiencies, caused by a faulty gut. The most important supplements we take may not be vitamins and minerals per se but all the digestive enzymes and substances which ensure that our gut properly absorbs what we eat.

We must return to the notion that the most important determinant of disease is food, but this now includes whether our bodies are receiving the benefit of a plentiful table.

!ALynne McTaggart

A strong link has been made between MS and dietary fats, particularly from cow’s milk (Am J Med Sc, 1950; 220: 421-30; Lancet, 1974; ii:1061-6).

One study showed that inland rural communities in Norway, which consume high quantities of cow’s milk, had a significantly higher incidence of MS than those near the coast, with a high consumption of cold water fish (New Engl J Med, 1952; 246:721-8). The incidence of MS in Japan is also surprisingly low, where fish and foods with an abundance of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) and omega-3 essential fatty acids oils are widely consumed. Omega-3 oils are known to be essential for the formation of normal healthy myelin, which are damaged in MS. A survey of 134 people with MS over a course of 34 years showed that such a low fat diet leads to significantly less deterioration and lower death rates from the disease (The Lancet, 1990; 336:37-39).

Intestinal biopsies in MS sufferers have revealed small intestinal abnormalities, or “porous” gut, associated with an increased gut permeability and food allergies (The Lancet, 1976; ii:1319-22). So it’s also important to eliminate any foods you are allergic to from the diet.

Cocoa products, normal tea, cola and coffee may cause an MS related reaction. There is a striking correlation between high cocoa consumption and high MS incidence; whenever cocoa is introduced to an area, MS cases rise sharply (Ann Allergy, 1987, 59:76-79). MS patients should also eliminate caffeine and tannin.

Glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px) activity in the red and white blood cells should be checked at a laboratory. This determines the body’s detoxification pathway. If it is low (signifying a toxic overload), taking selenium and vitamins C and E may increase it (Eur Neurol, 1983; 22:442-6).

In Tibetan herbal medicine, Padma 28, a formulation containing 28 different herbs, has been scientifically shown to work. In a year long study of 100 MS patients, 44 per cent of those given Padma 28 reported an improvement in their general condition, increase in muscle strength, anal and bladder control and eyesight (Phytother Res, 1992; 6:133-6). Although this formulation is not commercially available in the UK or the US, a practitioner of Tibetan medicine would probably be able to get it made up.

Two extracts of ginkgo biloba ginkgolide B and some of the ginkgoflavonglycosides have been shown to counteract the inflammatory processes of MS. In one study, 8 of 10 patients treated with ginkgolide B during a relapse improved their neurological score less than a week after the start of treatment. That improvement was sustained in five patients, but faded in three. Three of the ten patients reported mild, transient side effects under the treatment (Rev Neurol (Paris), 1992; 148: 299-301) .

In my own practice, for some 22 years I have prescribed three homeopathic medications and diet, with good success in long term remission, even after paralysis or other neurological symptoms have set in:

Buthus australis 10DH: 26 drops midday on alternate (even numbered) days; Thallium metallicum 10DH: 26 drops midday on alternate (odd numbered) days; Argentum metallicum 10DH: 13 drops morning and evening, each day.

In your diet, eliminate hydrogenated oils, shortening and margarine and reduce saturated fat to less than 5g per day. Consume at least 50 g of PUFA daily, and eat fish at least every second day. All cow’s milk products should be eliminated completely from the diet and never reintroduced.

Besides allergies, anyone with MS should be tested for toxicity from mercury in amalgam fillings. Low levels of B vitamins, particularly B12 and folic acid, are also a common cause (see WDDTY Dental Handbook and WDDTY vol 1 no 3). Also have your amino acids and copper, calcium, magnesium and zinc levels checked out.

!AHarald Gaier

Harald Gaier is a registered naturopath, osteopath and homeopath.

Critics of the decision, including the National Union of Paediatricians and the World Health Organisation, argue that the decision may lead to a public loss of confidence in the vaccine and the risk of other countries following suit.

However, French Secretary of State for Health Dr Bernard Kouchner took the decision to ban the jab in light of evidence that the vaccine could cause multiple sclerosis or other forms of central nervous system demyelination. Studies in both France and Britain have shown that, in school aged children, the risk of demyelinating reactions in the central nervous system increases during the two months after vaccination (BMJ, 1998; 317: 1034).

Because it has been nearly 15 years since criteria for diagnosing lupus have been revised, it is quite likely that many individuals suffering from lupus go undetected. This not only means that there is a great deal of unnecessary suffering, but that medical science may be missing out on valuable data which could improve our understanding of this disease.Much of medicine’s time and money to date has been spent trying to find the single best method of clinical management, instead of looking at the disease from an epidemiological point of view. All evidence suggests that toxins, whether in the form of allergies, yeast, Staph a. bacteria or medicine, are causing a not so subtle self destruct in possibly one out of every 500 people. The most urgent thing is to research these diseases within the context of the bigger picture of our lives and to find out what toxins in our environment and/or in our systems are making our bodies push the self destruct button.

In Vol. 1 No 5, WDDTY presented the story thus far with respect to the amalgam debate. Chief among the architects of that debate is Dr Murray J. Vimy, clinical associate professor of the Department of Medicine, the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, who with his colleagues has spent a decade examining the effects of amalgam fillings on sheep, monkeys and, more recently, humans. Although 12,000 papers have been published to date on the dangers of amalgam, it is only with the interest of respected medical departments like Dr Vimy’s and their devastating findings that the issue is hotting up, particularly in North America.On 14 April, Dr Vimy presented a one day seminar at no less a conservative venue than the British Dental Society, to a packed audience. The seminar had been organized by WDDTY panel member Jack Levenson, president of the British Dental Society for Clinical Nutrition, who has galvanized the fight against amalgam fillings in the UK.

Those of you who have read our earlier issue may remember that Dr Vimy and his colleagues placed amalgam fillings in eight adult sheep. One month later, substantial quantities of mercury appeared in the lung, the gastrointestinal tract and the jaw tissue. Once absorbed, the mercury rapidly settled into the liver and kidneys (FASEB, the official publication of the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology, December 1989). The fillings employed radioactive amalgam, which would both guarantee that the mercury could be easily located and also eliminate the need for a control, since there wouldn’t be the same radioactivity present in water or food.

In a later study, Dr Vimy and his colleagues placed radioactive mercury in the teeth of pregnant sheep. Two weeks later, the mercury was evident in foetal blood, amniotic fluid, pituitary glands, liver, kidney and part of the placenta. Within a month, most foetal tissue had higher levels of mercury than the mothers did. And during lactation, the mothers had eight times as much mercury in the milk than in their blood serum.

WDDTY attended the April seminar and afterwards discussed the findings with Jack Levenson, our panel member, who chaired the meeting. The evidence that Dr Vimy and his colleagues have published conclusively proves that mercury from amalgam fillings migrates to tissue in the body, causing harm but the extent of the harm is still under study.

Dr Vimy stresses that he is a scientist, who sits squarely in the middle of the amalgam debate between the left, which claims amalgam is responsible for every illness there is, and the right (the dental associations), which turns a blind eye to mounting scientific evidence. “The evidence shows there is some risk, we’re not sure of the extent of the risk, but it certainly is prudent to study and consider it, ” he says.

What follows here and in the guest column on root canal fillings (p 3) is evidence that relies primarily on research conducted on animals. Although we at WDDTY do not support animal experimentation per se, virtually all the study being done on amalgams is being performed solely on animals. We present it without endorsement because it is among the most important scientific evidence of amalgam fillings to date, and Dr Vimy and his colleagues, among the most prestigious groups studying the issue. Here, then, are the highlights of a day packed with studies and statistics. Editor.

“The denser the tissue, the larger the volume.” In Dr Vimy’s initial experiments on sheep, the radioactive mercury landed in the stomachs, liver, left and right kidneys in other words, in the oral cavity, the lungs and the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. The denser the mass of tissue, the more mercury collected there.

Sheep were originally chosen for the Universary of Calgary’s original study because they are especially ruminant that is, they chew all day. Dr Vimy’s team felt that if mercury didn’t go into the tissues and organs of sheep, it wouldn’t go into the tissues or organs of any living creature. “Sheep,” he sums up, “were a worst case scenario.”

“What’s true for sheep is true for monkeys.” Dr Vimy and his colleagues were criticized ridiculed is more the operative word for using sheep because they have a higher frequency of chewing than humans and more than one stomach and so more bacteria for digestion. (Headlines in the medical press tended to disparage the findings, like one that said: “Sheep Baaad Amalgam Recipients”). So Dr Vimy’s group decided to repeat its experiment in monkeys. The researchers chose monkeys because their rate of chewing was more similar to humans, as is their teeth, their diet, feeding frequency, chewing pattern and organ physiology. They found the same pattern of mercury depositing in the oral, lung and GI tract of monkeys that they had seen in sheep. “If the information we have about the effect of amalgam fillings were presented before the Food and Drug Administration today, they would not pass it for use because it hasn’t passed the animal tests,” said Dr Vimy.

“That’s like walking around with one kidney.” In 1990 Dr Vimy and his researchers conducted another sheep experiment, the results of which were published in the American Journal of Physiology (261:R1010). Because mercury tends to migrate primarily to organs like the kidneys, they wished to find out its effect. After placing regular (rather than radioactive) fillings into the mouths of several sheep, Vimy’s group measured the flow rate of inulin, a starch, through the sheep’s kidneys. This is a standard index of kidney function, since inulin is neither secreted or absorbed. “Basically, we found that 30 days after the placement of amalgam fillings, kidney function and its filtration capacity was reduced by 50 per cent,” Dr Vimy said. “We had placed glass ionomer (white plastic) fillings into control animals, who showed no change in kidney function.

“We also found a rapid rise in sodium in the urea, even though we had restricted the sodium diets of the animals by 300 per cent. So that showed us that sodium was lost. And we found a rapid decline in albumin excretion by 68 per cent.

“What this means,” Dr Vimy added, “is that the reabsorption of urea was impaired. The albumin levels meant that kidney blood flow was reduced.”

“We also noticed problems with gut bacteria and an association between resistance to antibiotics and high mercury content.” The University of Calgary team combined forces with Dr Ann Summers and her colleagues in the Microbiology Department of the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, who are expert in matters concerning the gut. Calgary sent their raw statistics on the six monkeys for Summers et al to analyze in terms of the effect of mercury on intestinal flora.

The University of Georgia found increased mercury resistant bacteria in monkey gum and intestinal bacterial flora after the placement of dental fillings. In the past, Dr Summers has shown that when there is a high mercury resistance in the bacteria in the gut there is also a high multiple antibiotic resistance.

To greatly simplify, what happens is that the presence of mercury creates a change in the chemical makeup of the some two and a half pounds of “friendly” bacteria living in the intestine, making it resistant to antibiotics. This means that the bacteria, which are essential for the smooth operation of the immune system, are, in Jack Levenson’s words, “otherwise engaged” and no longer able to keep fungi like candida albicans in check. It also enhances the reabsorption of mercury vapour, says Dr Vimy, as it migrates from the teeth. This sets up a basic dysfunction in the gut, adds Levenson, which could be responsible for candida and the proclivity of allergies suddenly developing in people in their middle years.

“There is increasing evidence that mercury, rather than aluminium, is the highest trace element found in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease victims.” W. R. Markesbery et al, a medical research team at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky, has been investigating Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and its association with mercury for several years. In their most recent study (published in Brain Research 553, 1990) they studied the brains from 10 autopsied AD patients for concentrations of trace elements. The highest trace element was consistently mercury, with diminished zinc and selenium levels. They concluded: “The present study suggests that the elevation of mercury in AD is the most important of the imbalances we have observed.” They considered the lower zinc levels significant since zinc and selenium are known to have a protective role against heavy metal toxicity in tissue.

Their results were supported by the work of B. Haley et al, published in FASEB in April 1991. Tubulin is a protein which is needed for the healthy formation of neurofibrils, or connective nerve tissue. AD patients have impaired tubulin, which causes what is known as a “neurofibril tangle”, meaning that messages in the brain don’t connect properly. In one of their studies, the researchers fed rats aluminium, usually considered the causative factor of AD, but observed no change in tubulin levels, whereas mercury fed rats displayed a similarly diminished tubulin level as AD patients. “These results suggest that certain complex forms of mercury must be considered as a potential source of the etiology of AD,” the authors concluded.

Aluminium may well be a red herring in the quest to find the cause of AD. It could be, as some suggest, that a brain depleted of zinc and overwhelmed by mercury is susceptible to the depositing of aluminium, but that particular heavy metal doesn’t cause the problem. Or it could be that both aluminium and mercury contribute to the condition.

“Mercury is associated with the sclerosing diseases.” The Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (32:155: 1978) and the Swedish Journal of Biological Medicine in January 1989 both have showed an association between high mercury levels in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS).

In the latter study, the mercury level in MS patients were on average 7.5 times higher than in the control group. In many of the cases, treatment with antioxidation therapy (ie, vitamins, selenium and or removal of amalgam fillings) helped patients to improve sometimes completely.

A number of patients have either killed themselves, or attempted to, while taking the drug, reports Nigel O’Connor from the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital.

Most impartial doctors also consider beta interferon’s benefits to be unproven.

!AThe Lancet, May 18, 1996.

An Australian oncology department reported five such children born between l985 and l987 developing brain tumours.Although three of the cases were in vitro fertilization, and two through artificial insemination, the common link, says the research team, is clomiphene (Clomid) used to stimulate ovulation.

The letter published in the Lancet urged all doctors keep records of methods of fertilization. That goes for patients, too.

It seems that the vaccine can increase risk by more than three times, although it’s not clear if it causes MS in those prone to it, or just speeds its progress.

Suspicions were first raised 10 years ago when 200 people in France developed MS shortly after having the hepatitis B jab. But, an earlier Harvard study, published in 2001, could find no link (Neurology, 2004; 63: 838-42).