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Sleeping sickness only manifests once the trypanosomes cross the blood-brain barrier. Once they do so, the trypanosomes apparently induce sleeping sickness as a consequence of their manufacture of the molecule tryptophol. There's something else in the body that can produce tryptophol, though -...

But if we were living in the Matrix, would the Matrix allow the movie "The Matrix" to be made, thus making people suspicious that they might be in the Matrix? Would I even be allowed to write this post to discuss... wait a minute - there's a knock at the door.

It's interesting that both Ron Davis and Nancy Klimas think that ME is a "metabolic trap" that should turn out to be fairly easy to "escape" once it's understood. Are they working together on this idea, or have they just come to this conclusion independently? Along the same lines, has anyone...

Well, according to this webpage "Liver disease can be a complication of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), such as ulcerative colitis (UC) or Crohn’s disease." Some of the microbiome work done so far has shown similarities in diversity between ME/CFS patients and those with IBD, though I'm not...

I've wondered if this kind of thing might be related to something called "sensory gating," which is the ability to filter out extraneous sensory input. It's illustrated by the "cocktail party effect" in which it is possible to ignore all but the desired conversation. Perhaps defects in "gating"...

I thought I would chime in on this, since disabling "vertigo" was a major feature in the first decade of the disease for me. I'm surprised that there is actually a name like "Supermarket Syndrome." Large, enclosed spaces, like supermarkets or "big box" stores like Walmart, didn't exactly trigger...

To me the interesting thing is why ME occasionally occurs in infectious clusters at all. Infections obviously play a part in triggering it, but there may be some other highly localized co-factor that accounts for it occurring in "epidemics." The "co-factor" might not be the same in every case...

I'm pretty sure that Gustavo Ceinos is a Commander in the US Public Health Service. The Public Health Service is one the seven "uniformed services of the United States," which, along with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is one of the two which are "non-combatant." The...

Probiotics may not do it, but apparently a good case of food poisoning can alter you microbiome... permanently. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2014/08/06/the-quantified-microbiome-self/ [I posted this article on another forum back in late 2016. ]

If you assume the range of values is 1 to 6 (as in the example), the odds of this happening by chance is 1 in 76.78244571, which doesn't really seem so suspect. It's the odds of rolling 10 dice and getting 5 of a kind. ETA: Corrected 1 in 66.65142857 to 1 in 76.78244571. This is for one...

Well, right about now, I'm wishing that my family had more severely questioned the "science" that said that margarine was healthier for you than butter. Based on those findings, my family dutifully switched to trans fat laden margarine in the early 1970's. Fortunately, the error was...

Wow, it's déjà vu all over again. By March 21, 2018, the SMC had a "fact sheet" out that said: By May 18th, after @Robert 1973 informed the CDC of the SMC's assertion that the CDC had bowed to pressure from patient associations, the SMC had quietly changed their fact sheet to read: Of...

I've read of lot of contemporary articles from the Los Angeles Times (and elsewhere) written during the 1934 LA epidemic. There were two types of prophylactic serum used in the outbreak - pooled serum from healthy adults and serum from convalescent polio patients. In both cases the idea was to...

According to Wikipedia... Calcium channel blockers are prescribed to treat hypertension for that reason. So, something else that interferes with the transport of calcium ions might also impair vasoconstriction - and vasoconstriction can be necessary to counteract orthostatic hypotension.

This current news article claims that there are 300,000 people in the US with Chagas and it is "spreading." However, I strongly suspect that the news article is irresponsibly leading people to believe Chagas transmission is rampant in the U.S. when it is not. This paper from 2011 says: So...

Well, for me, what you say did figure into my returning to work too quickly. I was trying to break into an industry via a job where I could easily be replaced and where being there every day was critical (it also didn't pay sick time, but that was not really the issue for me). It wasn't a...

Interesting concept of the "trigger." You could see this happening with some kind of infection coincident with a period of high stress (which pretty much describes my onset). Also, perhaps getting a bad infection during a time of stress makes it more likely that it will proceed to some kind of...

A great little bit comes near the end at 1:06:20, when they're talking about a response they got from Psychological Medicine suggesting that they should try to replicate the PACE study.