coxsackie

In the 1970s we started speaking about “smouldering viruses” (I lived in the UK then, so spelled it that way!); also sometimes referred to as “slow viruses”. This meant sub-clinical virus opportunists that got under the radar of the immune system and couldn’t be dislodged. Instead, they hung on and lingered, often for the entire lifetime of infected individuals, setting up chronic, damaging inflammation throughout the body. Diseases of aging and autoimmunity (see below), such as atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and many other deadly ailments have been linked to chronic stealth infections. Once again, it was the clinical ecologists and alternative community who first spotted what was going on. We were open to think laterally and outside the box. We started to talk about “post-viral fatigue syndrome”, since the debility would not go away after the acute infectious episode. Fibromyalgia (ME in Europe) is typical of the pattern of symptoms for post-viral syndrome. Attention to allergies and intolerance often aided recovery a great deal. This pointed to a disordered immune response. But in my 1988 book The Allergy Handbook, I began asking “Is it not that we get the viruses because the immune system is poor or incompetent, rather than we get the immune dysfunction because of the virus?” I started thinking along the lines that environmental toxins debilitate the immune system, which then leads to the stealth virus. I have not been proved wrong. We just don’t know. Since those early years, so-called stealth-adapted viruses have been recovered from multiple tissues, including blood, cerebrospinal fluid, urine, throat swabs, breast milk, brain biopsies and tumor samples from patients with various neurological, psychiatric, auto-immune, allergic and cancerous diseases. So this is a serious issue. And it is not confined to viruses.

In the 1970s we started speaking about “smouldering viruses” (I lived in the UK then, so spelled it that way!); also sometimes referred to as “slow viruses”. This meant sub-clinical virus opportunists that got under the radar of the immune system and couldn’t be dislodged. Instead, they hung on and lingered, often for the entire lifetime of infected individuals, setting up chronic, damaging inflammation throughout the body. Diseases of aging and autoimmunity (see below), such as atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and many other deadly ailments have been linked to chronic stealth infections. Once again, it was the clinical ecologists and alternative community who first spotted what was going on. We were open to think laterally and outside the box. We started to talk about “post-viral fatigue syndrome”, since the debility would not go away after the acute infectious episode. Fibromyalgia (ME in Europe) is typical of the pattern of symptoms for post-viral syndrome. Attention to allergies and intolerance often aided recovery a great deal. This pointed to a disordered immune response. But in my 1988 book The Allergy Handbook, I began asking “Is it not that we get the viruses because the immune system is poor or incompetent, rather than we get the immune dysfunction because of the virus?” I started thinking along the lines that environmental toxins debilitate the immune system, which then leads to the stealth virus. I have not been proved wrong. We just don’t know. Since those early years, so-called stealth-adapted viruses have been recovered from multiple tissues, including blood, cerebrospinal fluid, urine, throat swabs, breast milk, brain biopsies and tumor samples from patients with various neurological, psychiatric, auto-immune, allergic and cancerous diseases. So this is a serious issue. And it is not confined to viruses.