Feel free to discuss any topic of general interest, so long as nothing you post here is likely to be interpreted as insulting, and/or inflammatory, nor clearly designed to provoke any individual or group. Please be considerate of others feelings, and they will be considerate of yours.
Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis, or MAP for short, is the organism responsible for a chronic, intestinal inflammatory disease found mainly in domestic livestock, including cattle, deer, sheep and goats.
MAP was first described in 1895 by Dr H. A. Johne and Dr L. Frothingham after they observed the bacteria throughout the inflamed intestinal-tissues of a cow that failed to gain weight or produce milk. And the disease has since become known as Johne’s disease (JD) or paratuberculosis.
Even though a herd of cattle may become infected with Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP), usually only a small percentage develop clinical signs of the disease, which is often characterized by profuse diarrhoea and severe weight loss. And, as the disease advances, animal death inevitably follows.
Paratuberculosis was long considered a disease of domestic ruminants only. But significant research over the last decade or so has seen MAP isolated from many different animals and numerous species. However, observation and study data suggests MAP primarily expresses clinical disease in domestic livestock (especially dairy cattle).
What is most interesting are some of the things that we've noticed among us. For exmple, that some folks after cipro felt better but weren't cured, that we feel better on lower carbohydrate diets, the idea that IBD is a reaction to good bacteria, that this bacteria promotes thickening of the mucosa, that this bacteria is food borne, that this bacteria takes advantage of lowered immunity and perhaps some genetic factors, the bacteria also promotes inflamation. And I'm sure there's more.
There was an article published in the New Yorker Magazine this past Sunday about the guts bacteria and how a virus changes the ratios in the gut and can lead to obesity. The virus that they found was located in poultry and they found the same virus antibodies in obese people. They call it Microbesity. The reason I bring it up is that there are a lot of obese people and it would be profitable to the lovely drug companies to develope a treatment for that group of people...in the process they may figure out the virus/bacteria for us.
where we discussed it back in February. There's nothing wrong with discussing it some more, however, if the topic interests you.
Tex
It is suspected that some of the hardest material known to science can be found in the skulls of GI specialists who insist that diet has nothing to do with the treatment of microscopic colitis.
