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Chronic pulmonary aspergillosis is a fungal lung infection, often misdiagnosed and treated unsuccessfully as tuberculosis, resulting in many unnecessary deaths.

Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis: Fungal or Bacterial?

by Dr. Mark Allan Sircus, Ac., OMD, DM (P)
Director International Medical Veritas Association
Doctor of Oriental and Pastoral Medicine 
http://publications.imva.info
http://blog.imva.info

Feb. 6, 2012. There is little hope for patients found to have a virulent strain of “totally drug-resistant tuberculosis” lung disease, doctors say, and that is because they have no idea what to use in the post-antibiotic era where drug-resistant infections rule the day. And that is because doctors are blind when faced with fungal instead of bacterial infections and have no idea how to treat fungus effectively.

Tuberculosis is an airborne disease that is mainly transmitted through close personal contact. Tuberculosis is the top single infectious killer of adults worldwide, and it lies dormant in one out of every three people, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Of those, 10 percent will develop active TB, and about two million people will die from it every year.

Over one million people worldwide are misdiagnosed with tuberculosis when in reality they have an incurable disease with a similar outlook to many cancers, says a recent report published in 2011 in the Bulletin of the WHO.[1] The disease called “chronic pulmonary aspergillosis” (CPA) is a fungal infection not a bacterial infection. Is this incurable, totally drug-resistant TB infection fungal or bacterial? It looks very much like, or is identical to, TB when doctors look at it on a chest X-ray and it has very similar symptoms initially. Doctors mistake it for TB and prescribe antibiotics as standard practice.

Because the X-ray features and symptoms are so 
similar to bacterial tuberculosis, doctors fail to
recognize it, resulting in many unnecessary fatalities.
                                                     World Health Organization

Fifty percent of all patients who develop pulmonary aspergillosis are unlikely to survive for more than five years, a similar outlook to many cancers. Deaths from fungal infections are a little like death from vaccines, invisible and off the radar from most of the medical establishment. Yet as high as 40 percent of cancers are provoked by infections, and even though in most late-stage cancers, the infection is fungal the medical profession considers it heresy to say cancer and fungus in the same breath.

“Doctors often misdiagnose CPA and prescribe the wrong treatment, which leads to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths,” researchers from University of Manchester and University of Toronto say in the report. CPA evades the immune system in the lungs and may lie undetected for years until symptoms such as weight loss, tiredness, coughing and bleeding develop. Yet, by the time these symptoms emerge, it is often too late to treat the disease successfully, according to the report.

“TB is a major scourge worldwide, and to find that over a third of a million people each year then develop an incurable and ultimately fatal fungal complication—which could be diagnosed and treated—demands action,” Professor Ian Jacobs, Director of MAHSC, a partnership between the NHS in Manchester and the University of Manchester, said in the report.

The Indian hospital that saw the initial cases tested a dozen medicines and none of them worked. “It is concerning,” said Dr. Kenneth Castro, director of the CDC’s Division of Tuberculosis Elimination. “Anytime we see something like this, we better get on top of it before it becomes a more widespread problem.” None of them worked, probably because what they were faced with was fungal, not bacterial, so obviously antibiotics would not work.

What doctors say is tuberculosis today infects or has infected one-third of the population of the world and new infections occur roughly one every second! Precisely because TB is such a common infection doctors have to cope with huge numbers of patients, particularly in the developing world. There is a well-established routine once doctors see a typical chest X-ray—give antibiotics without providing any kind of differential diagnosis to ascertain whether the infection is bacterial or fungal.

Ordinary TB is usually cured by taking antibiotics for six to nine months. However, if that treatment is interrupted or the dose is cut down, the stubborn bacteria battle back and mutate into a tougher strain that can no longer be killed by drugs. The problem is that from stubborn bacterial infections, even more “stubborn” fungal infections develop and these are not recognized or treated. The Associated Press reported on a case of a Peruvian teenager who was infected at home but diagnosed while visiting Florida. He was successfully treated for a year and a half with experimental high doses of medicines not typically used for TB, costing about $500,000.

Tuberculosis (TB - short for tubercle bacillus) has a long and terrible history as mankind has fought it for hundreds if not thousands of years. Before the advent of antibiotics it killed millions of people and animals when it was commonly referred to as “consumption.” Two hundred years ago it accounted for one in four of all deaths in England, but by the 1980s that had fallen to 5,000 deaths per year.

Antibiotics make the entire situation with the yeasts and fungi much worse. Fungal overgrowth occurs because its natural competitors have been removed, which easily becomes the case with antibiotic usage.

It may be some time before we really enter the
predicted “post antibiotic era” in which
common infections are frequently untreatable. 
                                                           Dr. Marc Lipsitch 
                                                 Harvard School of Public Health

Many of the unstoppable infections and deaths are not caused by the pathogens but by the drugs doctors prescribe. Antibiotics and antiviral medications are dangerous and compromise body physiology in predictable ways. Likewise the increasing numbers of allergic and adverse reactions to medications arise directly as a result of the toxic shock not only from the medicines themselves but from a long list of other compromising agents like food preservatives, residue pesticides, artificial sweeteners, MSG, impure water compromised with fluoride and chlorine, and the list goes on and on.

Extremely drug-resistant (XXDR) TB according to Dr. David Ashkin, one of the nation’s leading experts on tuberculosis is in humanities future. “This is the new class that people are not really talking too much about. These are the ones we really fear because I'm not sure how we treat them.”

Today, all the leading killer infectious diseases on the planet—TB, malaria and HIV among them—are mutating at an alarming rate because of the overuse and misuse of the very drugs that were supposed to save us. “Drug-resistant TB is a ‘time bomb,’ a manmade problem that is costly, deadly, debilitating, and the biggest threat to our current TB control strategies,” said Dr. Masae Kawamura, who heads the Francis J. Curry National Tuberculosis Center in San Francisco.

Medical scientists at Arizona State University say that antibiotic use is known to almost completely inhibit excretion of mercury in rats due to alteration of gut flora.[2] Once established, sub-clinical colonization with yeast in the body may persist unrecognized for many years. Antibiotics such as tetracycline can greatly increase yeast in the colon after only a few days.

Dr. Elmer Cranton says that, “Yeast overgrowth is partly iatrogenic (caused by the medical profession) and can be caused by antibiotics.”

Fungi (e.g. Aspergillus fumigatus) are not affected by antibiotics and neither are viruses. If not given correct treatment (antifungal medication) the prognosis is that 50% of those infected will die inside five years. In fact the overuse of antibiotics leads to fungal infections. Allopathic doctors practicing pharmaceutical medicine are a lost cause now that the world of pathogens is rebelling against what they have been doing with antibiotics these past decades.

When fungi become systemic from gut inflammation and the 
overuse of antibiotics, you can see how the whole body—again,
the eyes, liver, gallbladder, muscles and joints, kidneys,
and skin—becomes involved in inflammatory bowel disease.
                                                                        Dr. Dave Holland

“Are you ready for a world without antibiotics?” runs the headline in the British Guardian. “Antibiotics are the bedrock of modern medicine. But in the very near future, we’re going to have to learn to live without them once again. And it’s going to get nasty. The era ofantibiotics is coming to a close. In just a couple of generations, what once appeared to be miracle medicines have been beaten into ineffectiveness by the bacteria they were designed to knock out. Once, scientists hailed the end of infectious diseases. Now, the post-antibiotic apocalypse is within sight.”

According to several studies, obstetricians and gynecologists write 2,645,000 antibiotic prescriptions every week. Internists prescribe 1,416,000 per week. This works out to 211,172,000 prescriptions annually in the United States, just for these two specialties. Pediatricians prescribe over $500 million worth of antibiotics annually just for one condition, ear infections. Yet topical povidone iodine (PVP-I) is as effective as topical ciprofloxacin, with a superior advantage of having no in vitro drug resistance and the added benefit of reduced cost of treatment.[3]

Natural Allopathic Medicine

One must wonder here why they have not tried nebulized sodium bicarbonate, which, when combined with glutathione, offers one of the finest, safest and least expensive ways of treating the lungs. And iodine, that nutritional mineral medicine used for over 150 years, also when nebulized, offers anti-pathogen firepower without equal because it has the ability to take down viruses, bacteria and stubborn fungi.

Though it kills 90 percent of bacteria on the skin within 90 seconds, the use of iodine as an antibiotic has been tragically ignored. Iodine exhibits activity against bacteria, molds, yeasts, protozoa, and many viruses; indeed, of all antiseptic preparations suitable for direct use on humans and animals and upon tissues, only iodine is capable of killing all classes of pathogens: gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, mycobacteria, yeasts, and protozoa. Most bacteria are killed within 15 to 30 seconds of contact.

Iodine is by far the best antibiotic, 
antiviral and antiseptic of all time.
                                          Dr. David Derry

No doubt these doctors have no idea that treatments with high oral dosages of iodine, and even the nebulization of magnesium chloride, will also have a strong effect against pathogens while tuning up the entire system, including stimulating immune function. For 500,000 dollars, using these three emergency room and intensive care medicines: magnesium chloride, transdermally applied and/or nebulized, sodium bicarbonate nebulized with glutathione or orally taken, and iodine used orally and/or nebulized (nascent only for nebulization), they could treat a thousand people!