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So many new, non-native diseases to choose between...

I wonder why we’re seeing so many now, as if our previous ways to control infectious diseases suddenly stopped working...

This stuff cuts really close to home. The past 9 months have been a living hell for my family; my 14-year-old daughter has been through 3 rounds of flagyl and a round of vancomicin and can’t get rid of her c-dif infection. Nobody else in the family has it, but it’s been a nightmare dealing with her symptoms and with the questions of whether she will ever get rid of this. There is a 1-2-month wait time to see specialists, which led to a colonoscopy/endoscopy while she still had the c-dif but we didn’t know it. She can’t see Infectious Diseases until the end of this month but it doesn’t sound like they’re interested in doing anything to help her. No doctor has told us what our options are. She went 2 months before even being initially tested for c-dif because the gal at the clinic here in town said they couldn’t test anything unless the feces was totally liquid. Now that would be no problem because it’s always liquid but at the beginning it wasn’t as bad. She was finally tested because I said they were going to test whether they thought they could or not.

She was also diagnosed with scoliosis (so far fairly mild, thank God) this year and has had a lot of pain from that which led us through an ultrasound of her gallbladder, test for gluten tolerance, a couple months of physical therapy for a popping hip, and tests for arthritis, lupus, MS, etc

I was up most of the night discussing with my nurse sister whether she should go to the ER because of an episode she had yesterday where she nearly passed out and sweated profusely while having diarrhea and nausea. She’s doing better now though her skin is clammy, and we’re staying home from church so I can watch her. She’s still sleeping so she’s OK but as soon as she sits up to drink some Gatorade she’ll be running to the bathroom.

Just looking on the web, it seems like maybe our options will be to try the final last-ditch antibiotic (I don’t know why we’re not doing that already), remove her colon, or try to transplant healthy flora from a donor. For the past month she’s been taking the maximum amount of probiotics that she’s allowed. She would really like to know how many yearly cases of antibiotic-resistant c-dif there are and how many of the 14,000 yearly deaths from c-dif are because of antibiotic-resistant strains, because she’d like to know what the prognosis is. She’s losing hope.

Anybody who says I don’t have a vested interest in the disease-spreading policies of this foreign enemy combatant in our White House is crazy. EVERY ONE OF US has a vested interest, because any one of us could lose our lives or our children because of these policies. Yet the courts would say that as long as we’re all screwed, none of us has “particularized injury”. We’re not losing enough; not enough is at stake. That reasoning is crazy and it WILL be the death of this once-great nation.

> ... 3 rounds of flagyl and a round of vancomicin
> and can’t get rid of her c-dif infection.

If you haven’t been told about FMT, look into it. People wouldn’t even consider it, except that it works.

Entirely apart from the problem of eliminating the c-dif, the antibiotics to date will have nuked all the beneficial gut bacteria (and this is a huge problem for modern societies generally). The importance of the gut biome is only beginning to be appreciated (and pretty much ignored by consensus medicine, as is the case for almost anything to do with nutrition - they get less than 20 classroom hours on the topic, reinforced by zero questions on their Boards).

If the child is not taking probiotics (active gut bacteria), it’s worth a try. But be sure the diet includes lots of prebiotics (aka resistant starches) to feed the new bugs. Ignore room-temp store shelf probiotics - they usually have CFU counts that were way too low at packaging, and mostly dead at the register. Get a PB from the pharmacy fridge (or mail order VSL#3, which is shipped with ice packs in insulation).

Also, avoid foods that feed c-diff and aggravate intestinal problems. Switch to a low net carb, low inflammatory, higher RS fiber diet: increase n3 fats, zero grains, zero added simple sugars, zero grain oils ... the new book “Wheat Belly Total Health” (Davis) seems to be the state of the art on how to eat (and is about vastly more than just the hazards of the novel grass seed sold to us as “wheat”).