Autoimmunity & Molecular Mimicry

So what exactly do you think an autoimmune disease is?  You may think it's an abnormal response of the immune system to a particular body part that is perfectly normal.  You couldn't be further from the truth and this is why conventional medicine fails to provide healing options for autoimmune disease.

The Truth About Autoimmunity

Autoimmunity is a condition where the immune system response is overwhelmed leading to dysregulation of signals, failure of cells to respond, weakness of immune tissue and glands and suppression of facets of immunity which regulate the body's response. 

That is a general description, but why does this happen and how does it resolve?  Autoimmunity occurs where the body's immunity is already dysregulated or compromised often by chronic illness, chronic antibiotic use or unresolved infection.  These is known as the danger response.  Then the body is exposed to an antigen which can be viruses, bacteria, fungus, parasite or even injury.  One of the most "missed" underlying causes of autoimmune dysregulation is the presence of "stealth pathogens" which are adapted viruses which are able to hide within other pathogenic illnesses, hijack the body's normal function for their own replication and evade typical immune responses due to genetic mutation.

These seem to be able to mutate and adapt to the host environment and so do not evoke typical immune responses.  In this way they can go undetected for years, gradually filling in their fragmented DNA with some host remnants, bacterial remnants and characteristics of infected host cells. 

Once treated for "stealth adapted virus" many autoimmune conditions and chronic illnesses not known to be autoimmune in origin begin to improve and even resolve:

  • Lyme Disease
  • Myocoplasma infection
  • MRSA
  • Epstein-Barr Virus
  • Guillain-Barre Syndrome
  • Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
  • Fibromyalgia
  • SCMV
  • Multiple Sclerosis
  • Gulf War Syndrome
  • Alzheimer's Disease
  • Parkinson's Disease
  • ALS
  • Autism
  • Systemic Lupus Erythematosus
  • Hashimoto's Thyroiditis
  • Type 1 Diabetes
  • Celiac Sprue Disease
  • Sjögren's Synrome
  • Graves' Disease
  • Scleroderma
  • Hepatitis
  • Myasthenia Gravis
  • Addison's Disease
  • Vitiligo

What Is Molecular Mimicry?

One of the key ways in which pathogens evade the immune system is through molecular mimicry.  This is where a microbe that is foreign to the human body produce proteins that resemble the proteins of the infected host.  This allows them to camouflage themselves and evade triggering the immune system. 

This creates a "crossover" response to the host's normal tissue.  Since the pathogen has mimicked a type of host tissue, it is evident where the pathogen is located based on damage and symptoms that appear in a host's tissue.

 

Complex Infectious Disease:
The New Face of Autoimmiune Disorders

An atypical cytomegalovirus (SCMV) was isolated from a patient with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.  It caused no inflammatory reaction within the patient, but did cause widespread signs of cellular damage.

Since then, evidence for stealth virus infection has been found in numerous patients with a wide spectrum of neuropsychiatric and immunological diseases.  The more it adapts within the host environment, the more insidious it becomes, the more symptoms develop and the more difficult it is to isolate.

An intriguing theory proposed by John Martin, M.D., Ph. D. is that many autistic children have acquired a stealth virus infection through vaccination.  According to Dr. Martin, any condition that does better on antibiotics than off is demonstrating stealth pathogen presence because the antibiotics are not producing an effect on negative bacteria, they are reducing the production of cytokines and chemokines that the virus needs to reproduce. 

How many cases of Autism are actually active stealth adapted viruses causing chronic injury to brain cells?

Proven Examples of Molecular Mimicry:

Guillaine-Barre syndrome (GBS) is an autoimmune paralysis that sometimes appears follwing a Campylobacter enteritis infection.  Auto antibodies to Campylobacter are present in patients with GBS that cross-react with nerve cells displaying the same outer membrane characteristics that are found on the Campylobacter membranes.

Patients with recent onset of Narcolepsy have an elevated anti-streptococcal antibody level.

Arterial disease has been shown to be driven by molecular mimicry between bacteria such as Chlamydia pneumoniae and human molecules found on the surface of damaged endothelial cells.