Return of the lost worms - Replacing lost worms to regain health

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Return of the lost worms - Replacing lost worms to regain health

Helminthic therapy is an experimental approach to the treatment of asthma, allergies and inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, which involves the administration of controlled quantities of selected, benign intestinal parasites such as hookworm and whipworm.

The treatment developed out of understanding gained from scientific studies which showed that, while these illnesses have escalated in developed countries during the past 50-100 years, they remain much less common in parts of the world where intestinal parasites are still prevalent.

The aim of the treatment is to rebalance the host's immune system by replacing one or more of the harmless organisms which have been lost in recent decades due to improved hygiene, sanitation and lifestyle changes.

The organisms used have become masters of the human immune system during millions of years of coexistence with man and are adept at regulating their host's immune response. In fact, the codependent relationship between worm and man is so close that the human genome is now arguably incomplete without the genes contributed by these organisms.

A treatment poised for success

Helminthic therapy has already been, or is currently being studied as a treatment for a number of diseases including allergies, asthma, diabetes (type 1), ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, and multiple sclerosis, and the results from the completed trials are encouraging. (For details of some of these studies, see Helminthic Therapy – Science)

There are anecdotal reports and/or theoretical reasons to suggest that a number of other conditions may also respond well to helminthic therapy, including arthritis, atherosclerosis, autism, coeliac disease, dyspepsia (non-ulcer), eczema, depression, heart disease, irritable bowel syndrome, lupus, migraine, psoriasis, psychiatric disorders and rheumatoid arthritis.

All that current medical practice can offer to those who have the above conditions is drug therapy, which, apart from offering variable and sometimes only limited success, often produces side effects ranging from unpleasant to very serious. Controlled doses of helminths, on the other hand, cause no lasting side effects.

In spite of the compelling nature of the evidence already gathered in favour of helminthic therapy, it is not yet generally available in the UK on the NHS for any condition. However, if a patient can interest their specialist in this treatment and persuade him or her to support them in trying it, that specialist might be willing to refer the patient for treatment at Nottingham, where hookworm larvae are available. In theory, all that is required in order to access this resource is a doctor who is willing to take responsibility for the treatment.

Where a specialist is reluctant to do this, it is likely to be due to the fact that the treatment is still considered to be experimental. This situation may be overcome if the patient provides a written note accepting full responsibility for any adverse outcome from the treatment, although, in fact, none is likely.

Alternatively, if a patient can afford to pay for treatment, they can join the growing number of pioneering individuals who are sourcing helminths from one of the companies that have begun to offer them for sale, and use these organisms to treat themselves.

Hygiene: a two-edged sword

Since the role of bacteria in disease was discovered 150 years ago, many of the infectious diseases which had hitherto plagued mankind, such as cholera and diphtheria, have been eradicated from the world's industrialised nations by improved hygiene and sanitation. However, around 60 years ago, chronic diseases began to take their place as the major cause of disability and death.

Isolated studies carried out during the last few decades, had pointed to a connection between a lack of exposure to infectious agents during early childhood and susceptibility to allergic diseases, but it was only in the late nineteen eighties that this theory began to be taken seriously and the 'hygiene hypothesis' was conceived.

This hypothesis focused attention on the need of infectious agents to prime the immune system, but the theory was subsequently shown to be incomplete, and a new 'old friends hypothesis' was put forward, emphasising the need for exposure not just to bacteria but to a range of organisms with which our species has coexisted throughout much of its evolutionary history, notably harmless microorganisms from soil, untreated water and fermenting vegetable matter and, critically, parasitic worms.

In our preoccupation with hygiene during the twentieth century, we inadvertently ostracised these 'old friends' and, in so doing, subverted immune regulating mechanisms which had taken millions of years to develop and refine, inviting, in their absence, the slew of chronic diseases involving inflammation and auto-immunity that are rife today.

Fortunately, we are now beginning to realise this mistake and, thanks to our long hygiene 'experiment', we now have the knowledge and expertise to encourage beneficial organisms while avoiding harmful ones. In fact, we are now very well placed to strike the ideal balance between the two, and helminthic therapy has a pivotal role to play in this process.

Reintroducing old friends

In order to reap the health benefits which our 'old friends' can provide, we need to overcome our tendency to view all microorganisms in a negative light. The 'gross-out', or 'yuck' factor in respect of 'bugs' is so powerful and prevalent at the present time, that, in spite of the large numbers of people suffering significant distress from Crohn's disease, it took the researchers at Nottingham University three years to recruit just 52 candidates with this condition for its hookworm study, compared with the 1,500 who volunteered during a single day to take part in a trial to assess how flavonoids, found naturally in chocolate, could fend off heart disease! And most of those who have obtained helminths for self-treatment prefer not to tell anyone about this, including, in a significant number of cases, their own spouses!

The commercial sector has spent decades encouraging us to fear and loathe bugs of all types, in order to increase sales of their antimicrobial products, and media coverage of epidemics and incidents involving 'superbugs' do little to enamour us to microorganisms, but this conditioning must be overcome if we are to regain the benefits which our 'old friends' have to offer.

Ideally, exposure to our 'old friends' should begin during infancy, when the immune system is developing, but some organisms can still bring immune/inflammatory responses back into balance when they are re-introduced later in life.

When bacteria from the intestines of healthy donors were transplanted, via enemas, into the colons of six patients with severe chronic ulcerative colitis, patients' symptoms were completely reversed in four months, in spite of ceasing all other medications for the condition, and there was no recurrence of symptoms during a thirteen year follow-up period (Treatment of ulcerative colitis using fecal bacteriotherapy). However, there is currently no convenient way to receive fecal bacteriotherapy, and this form of treatment is rarely employed.

The oral administration of particular strains of probiotic bacteria is gradually becoming an established practice, and research continues to reveal benefits from this form of therapy, but there is a daunting number of different strains of probiotic bacteria to be investigated and this branch of science is still in its infancy.

Helminthic therapy, however, offers a simple, convenient and ready-made source of relief for a number of chronic conditions, with success rates, as measured by the number of patients achieving remission, at least equal to and, in many cases, higher than those recorded for immune-modulating and anti-inflammatory drugs.

Helminthic selection

Two particular helminths which have been used, and are still being used in research, and are also available from commercial outlets, are the human hookworm Necator americanus and the pig whipworm Trichuris suis. A third organism – the human whipworm (Trichuris trichiura) – is also now available.

All three worms share a number of advantages, namely that none of them causes any disease in man at therapeutic doses, nor is able to reproduce within a host, or pass easily from one person to another. All are compatible with conventional medical treatments and are easily eradicated, if this should be required.

Hookworms survive for an average of five years, human whipworms for approximately two years and pig whipworms for 2-3 weeks, the relative longevity of hookworm and human whipworm making them much more cost-effective than the pig whipworm.

Inoculation with hookworm is achieved by a single application to the skin of 25-35 microscopic larvae. Side effects from this number of hookworms are transient, if present at all, and can include a rash at the inoculation site, possibly followed by gastrointestinal symptoms and fatigue in some individuals during the following few weeks. As hookworm feed on their host's blood, it is possible for anaemia to develop in individuals who host extremely large numbers of this organism. However, 35 hookworms only take a total of approximately one teaspoonful (5 ml) of blood per month, so the risk of anaemia at this dose is insignificant.

Pig whipworm ova (TSO), are taken orally in a drink, and patients normally start with four separate doses of 500 ova, taken every one to three weeks. If there is no reduction in symptoms on this regimen, the dose is increased to 1000 ova per dose, up to a maximum of 2500 ova per dose every two weeks, which is the dose most frequently required.

There have been occasional reports of allergic reactions to whipworm but, compared with the side effects experienced by patients taking conventional immune-modulating or anti-inflammatory drugs, these side effects are negligible.

Human whipworm ova (TTO) are similar to TSO but, because they are adapted to humans, they do not die off as quickly as pig whipworms.

The evidence suggests that whipworm and hookworm produce similar beneficial results in all conditions except ulcerative colitis, which seems to respond better to whipworm.

It is possible that hosting more than one species of worm at the same time may provide increased benefit, as multiple helminth species appear to promote stronger immunological regulation.

If purchased from Autoimmune Therapies, treatment with hookworm or human whipworm is $3,050 per species. This includes packaging and delivery and ensures treatment and ongoing support for a minimum of three years in the case of hookworm, and 18 months in the case of human whipworm, though treatment is typically effective for five and two years respectively. Combination therapy (both species together) is $4,050 including delivery, packaging and customer support. Treatment with pig whipworm from Ovamed is much more expensive, at $400.00 per fortnightly dose of 2500 ova.

As Autoimmune Therapies have a policy of never refusing treatment to anyone who is genuinely unable to afford it, cost need not be a barrier to this treatment for anyone.

The future for helminthic therapy

It is likely to be some time yet before demand for this treatment picks up to any great extent, in view of the generally negative attitude towards worms of both patients and doctors. It is also unlikely to become available from medical healthcare providers until sufficient research has been completed for it to lose its experimental status.

However, reading between the lines of the press release for the latest Nottingham trial, one gets the impression that, if the study was to demonstrate the treatment's effectiveness for Multiple Sclerosis, the medics involved may then employ this treatment – described as simple, natural and controllable – for the wider benefit of MS patients generally. This may then become a precedent for the use of worms in the treatment of other conditions.

Who knows where this development may eventually lead? We might perhaps one day see children given their first dose of helminths in infancy, particularly those with the highest risk of developing allergies, and those whose genetic profiles indicate the likely development of autoimmune or inflammatory disease later in life.

It is already apparent that helminthic therapy has huge potential to improve the health of millions of people worldwide and to transform the practice of medicine, but, in order to benefit from it, we must first re-embrace the idea of coexistence with those companion organisms which have for so long shared our evolutionary journey and, without which, we are no longer complete.

Further information

For an explanation of the theoretical framework supporting helminthic therapy:

http://www.hygienehypothesis.com/

For an article detailing one patient's experience of the Hookworm in Crohn's Disease trial at Nottingham:

http://blog.autoimmunetherapies.com/gut ... for-worms/

For information on the use of helminthic therapy with specific diseases, go to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ and enter "helminth" plus the name of the disease you're interested in.

For discussion about the science and experience of helminthic therapy, visit the Yahoo helminthic therapy forum (registration required). Click on the Files link on the left of each page for a detailed helminthic therapy FAQ and an article listing dozens of good research papers:

http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/helminthictherapy/

For discussion about TSO, visit the Ovamed forum (registration not required, but does provide additional privileges):

http://ovamed.org/viewforum.php?f=2

NB. This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

http://blog.autoimmunetherapies.com/gut ... c-therapy/

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

http://www.jimmunol.org/content/173/4/2699.full.pdf
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Immune therapy based on beneficial micro organisms

Immunotherapy based on the use of helminths, helminthic therapy, was the obvious result of a theory published in the Lancet called "The Hygiene Hypothesis." Hundreds of research projects investigating this scientific hypothesis since it was published in 1986 have refined it from its relatively simple beginning. Because it works so well to describe the rise of immunological diseases in the West it is now widely accepted, and this is shown by how commonly it is referenced in articles about these diseases: news link.

As you read through all the information available on the web, and through the scientific and medical literature, you will begin to understand that some helminths really are our "old friends" and that their absence in our increasingly sterile lives has resulted in a huge increase in the number of people with diseases involving immune dysregulation or autoimmunity.

Here is the Hygiene Hypothesis in simple terms. It is now thought by many scientists that the human immune system depends upon exposure to a variety of organisms, in particular helminths, for proper development and functioning. The reason for this is believed to be that we co-evolved with these organisms, because they have almost always been present in our bodies. The sudden, in genetic terms, of the removal of these organisms from our bodies by modern hygiene is now believed by many scientists to be a major factor in the malfunction of many people's immune systems.

The result is the massive increase in conditions like allergies, Crohn's, asthma, diabetes, etc., in developed countries. In the developing world diseases like these are still very rare.

That this is true is obvious when you compare the number of people suffering from autoimmune diseases in the sterile industrialized countries with those living in so-called "Third world" countries, where there is poor sanitation, and hence high level of parasitic infection. Many countries in Africa, South America and Asia do not have high levels of diseases like Type I Diabetes, MS, Crohn's, Asthma, allergies, Lupus or Rheumatoid Arthritis, as just some examples.

As we have made our immediate surroundings increasingly sterile we have not only eliminated harmful, disease-causing bugs, but most of the beneficial organisms from our bodies. The result is that our immune systems do not develop or function properly. It is no coincidence that all of the so-called modern diseases start to become more common after the introduction of clean drinking water, sewers, antibiotics and vaccinations, as countries industrialize and become more wealthy. -- (I'd add in the addition of light bulbs as well...--CSR)

This idea may sound strange at first. To better understand it think of the human body as an ecosystem. An ecosystem only works properly when there is a variety and balance of interdependent organisms. Eliminating so many species from our bodies and from our environment has had two effects:

    Huge benefits to our health from the effective elimination of harmful organisms such as those which cause cholera, typhoid, measles, mumps, tuberculosis, etc.

    An unexpected and unwelcome increase in the so called modern diseases, such as allergies, asthma, autism, Crohn's, MS, Ulcerative Colitis, Coeliac Disease, Sjogren's Syndrome, Grave's Disease, etc.

We have thrown out the baby with the bath water.

Helminthic therapy is just one step in restoring the natural environment in our bodies. The growing probiotic industry and the availability of natural yoghurts touting the health benefits of deliberately infecting yourself with trillions of the micro organisms that they contain is an indication of the possibilities.

http://autoimmunetherapies.com/helminth ... about.html


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Gut instinct: the miracle of the parasitic hookworm

When Jasper Lawrence heard of a radical cure for his allergies, he decided to give it a go: he went to Africa and infected himself with a blood-sucking parasite. Now he's cured, and he believes hookworm can help people with asthma, diabetes and MS. Only one problem – he's on the run from the law

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        The Observer, Sunday 23 May 2010
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There are hard sells and there are hard sells. "If I were a charlatan," Jasper Lawrence tells me, "I would be flogging flower essences or herbal supplements." He would not, I guess it is fair to say, be trying to market over the internet "blood-sucking parasitic worms that live in your gut for five years". And neither, he argues, would he have lately left behind his home in California, his children and his friends, and gone on the run from the American authorities in order to stay out of prison and in business (for the 180 clients who rely on him). If Jasper Lawrence is not a charlatan, then, he is at least a man on a high-risk mission.

As one of the proofs of that mission, Lawrence – an intensely articulate and bright-eyed 46-year-old – has only to point to the location of our interview. We are sitting in a cottage garden on the southern edge of Dartmoor, and in the afternoon sun the air is thick with spring pollen. In previous years, Lawrence says, he would not have been able to talk out here for five minutes without succumbing to the chronic hay fever and seasonal asthma that have afflicted him nearly all his life. The only reason he can now, he suggests, is that out here on the patio we are not alone. Also in attendance, in Lawrence's small intestine, are 50 hookworm (Necator americanus), which are, he believes, not only his livelihood but also his saviours.

Jasper Lawrence's journey to this curious belief began in this house – which belongs to his aunt – nearly six years ago. He was living at the time in Santa Cruz, California, his marriage was on the rocks, and he had come here on holiday with two of his five children. It had been a while since he had seen his Aunt Mary – who had informally adopted him as a teenager – and when she opened the door to him, she could not hide her shock.

Lawrence, a wiry man, had gained nearly four stone. The weight gain was a symptom of his reliance on the oral steroid Prednisone, which, at the time, he says, was his only defence against the asthma that left him constantly breathless. His inhalers did not work, he had to rest halfway up a flight of stairs, he could no longer play with his kids. By chance, his aunt had recently heard a BBC radio documentary about the possibilities of parasitic hookworm as a treatment for allergies, and she mentioned the programme to Lawrence. He subsequently spent all night trawling the internet, reading research, following links, and by the morning was convinced that there was only one way he could cure himself: he needed parasites.

The research that so excited Lawrence was a development of the so-called "hygiene hypothesis". This theory, first developed by David P Strachan in the British Medical Journal in 1989, suggests that many of the "modern" illnesses that have grown exponentially in industrialised western countries – allergies, asthma, type 1 diabetes, Crohn's disease, irritable bowel syndrome, multiple sclerosis and possibly rheumatoid arthritis and autism, and others – are the result of inappropriate autoimmune responses. The development of chlorinated drinking water, vaccines, antibiotics, and the sterile environment of early childhood have, the argument goes, as well as preventing infection also upset the balance of the body's internal ecology. Inflammatory responses that evolved through millions of years in the certain presence of "old friends" – parasites and bacteria – have been thrown wildly out of kilter in their absence, causing autoimmune illnesses, in which the body's immune system turns on itself, and oversensitivity to harmless antigens such as pollen, or dust, or cats, or particular food groups.

The story that most interested Lawrence was the ongoing research of Professor David Pritchard, an immunologist at Nottingham University. While in the field in Papua New Guinea in the late 1980s, Pritchard noted that patients infected with the Necator americanus hookworm were rarely subject to the whole range of autoimmune-related illnesses, including hay fever and asthma. In the years since, Pritchard had developed a thesis to support this observation through painstaking clinical trials (which began after he infected himself with 50 hookworm). The thesis proved that hookworm, in small numbers, seemed able to regulate inflammatory immune responses in their hosts. (Dr Rick Maizels, at Edinburgh University, has subsequently identified the process – involving the white T-cells in the blood that regulate immunity – that allowed this to happen.)

"When I read that stuff," Lawrence recalls, "everything immediately made sense to me. In our obsession with cleansing and sterility, with the eradication of parasites, we had thrown the baby out with the bath water. The central idea is that our bodies have an internal ecosystem. One of the ironies of this, to me, is that everyone is concerned about biodiversity in the outside world, and saving the rainforest, but we've also screwed up the biodiversity inside us."

And so Jasper Lawrence set out on what became a compulsive and somewhat desperate quest. Despite the fact that perhaps one billion people in the world still live with hookworm, getting infected in the developed western world is not an easy thing. The drift of our culture has long been to eradicate parasites – or "symbions", as Lawrence prefers. To begin with, he tried to get accepted as a participant on one of the various studies investigating the phenomenon. But when that proved fruitless he determined to go to Africa and become infected.

Prior to this trip, he recalls, he contacted "all the clever people I knew who worked in medicine. I sent them all the research and asked them their opinion. They all said the same thing: 'Yes, it appears safe, but I would not advise you to do this; you need to wait 20 or 30 years for all the studies to come in. For a molecule to be identified and a drug to be tested...'"

You don't have to talk to Lawrence for long to realise he is not a man who might be prepared to wait 20 or 30 years for anything. Instead, he took a plane to Cameroon.

The life cycle of Necator americanus is not an attractive one. Hookworm infiltrate a new human host when larvae, hatched in human excrement, penetrate the soles of the feet, enter the bloodstream, travel through the heart and lungs and are swallowed when they are coughed up from the pharynx. Only in the small intestine do they mature into adults (just under 1cm long), where they can live an average of five years latching on to the intestinal wall, siphoning off tiny amounts of blood, and – this is the crucial part – "regulating the volume" of immune responses. They mate inside the host, with females laying up to 30,000 eggs per day, up to 50m eggs during a lifetime, which pass out in faeces. In the tropics, in places where there is an absence of both toilets and shoes, extreme cases of hookworm kill 70,000 people a year, and afflict many others with anaemia; they exacerbate malnutrition and stunted growth in children. There are crucial caveats to these scare stories, however. Hookworm cannot and do not replicate in the gut. They are not infectious. In small numbers they are considered harmless, and very easily eradicated. And their life cycle is fatally interrupted by the introduction of either shoes or plumbing.

Lawrence is a practical man, and he weighed up the risks. In Cameroon he spent a couple of weeks travelling to remote villages, discovering where the local latrines were and wandering around the area without shoes.

What did the people make of this behaviour? "Typical reactions would range from being laughed at – what's that idiot doing walking round where I take a shit? – to anger: a lot of them were convinced I was there to steal some aspect of their essence. I got shaken down a lot."

He did have doubts. When he had told friends what he was going to do, they freaked out. Because his journey coincided with him having left his wife, people thought he was having a crisis or a breakdown. "You can't help but be a bit scared," he says. "The big fear was that I'd come back with the wrong disease, river blindness or elephantiasis, or Dengue fever, or whatever. On the other hand I had seen exactly how my life had declined in the last five years with asthma. Modern medicine seemed to have nothing to offer me except palliative drugs. So really, I felt there wasn't a choice for me." Disgust was hard to overcome. "I was only able to take my shoes off the first time because I couldn't face going back and telling people I hadn't been able to do it."

When he returned to Santa Cruz from Africa, Lawrence did not know if he had come back alone. "I hadn't seen any benefits after a few weeks, though I had some symptoms," he says. "After six or eight weeks you will have embryos in your faeces, so I packaged up my samples and sent them off to the lab, and I got a negative. What I didn't realise was that because American labs never see parasites, they don't know what they are looking for."

Then, he recalls, one day in the spring he was out driving and he made what for him would ordinarily have been a huge error. "I had the window of my car rolled down," he says. "Normally if I did that at the start of spring I would spend the rest of the day blowing snot, swollen red eyes, the works. But it didn't happen."

The acid test was cats. Lawrence was so allergic to cats that if he touched one and touched his face he would get a red mark. His eyes would swell shut. "So I deliberately exposed myself to a cat, which wasn't difficult because my ex-wife had decided to favour cats over my health. So I went to her house and petted the cat. And nothing happened." In that moment, Lawrence's fate was sealed. "I had known," he says, "that if it worked the way the science suggested it would, I would have to try to get that knowledge out to the world."

Lawrence does not have a conventional background as a medical pioneer. His childhood was characterised by insecurity. His father was a "brilliant and disturbed" systems analyst in the early days of computing and his parents moved to New York from England in 1968, in search of the summer of love. They split up and Lawrence roved around the States with his hippy mother and her sometimes violent boyfriend until, at 14, he persuaded her to let him escape to the stability of England and be taken in by his aunt. He was identified as a gifted child but he never fulfilled that potential, dropping out of his Oxbridge group in hard sciences, dabbling in drugs. At 19 he took himself back to America, got a job digging irrigation ditches, sold second-hand cars for a while, and eventually, having married, set up his own advertising agency serving Silicon Valley clients: "I was in the right place at the right time for the dotcom thing – so I made a ton of money, hired 30 people, and then lost all the money and fired them again." The experience served him well. Before he set up his business selling worms (Autoimmune Therapies) the salesman in Lawrence recognised there might be challenges. "You have to bear in mind that buying a blood-sucking intestinal parasite off a stranger without a college deg-ree over the internet is not most people's first choice of remedy. People come to us when they are desperate."

Several of the people who came originally had been involved in clinical trials with hookworm or whipworm (Lawrence prefers to call them "helminths") and were among those who had seen their symptoms – of Crohn's or hay fever or multiple sclerosis – go into lasting remission. Lawrence makes startling claims about his cohort of clients: that all 15 of the people he "treats" for multiple sclerosis are in remission, for example. The claims are impossible to verify, though there is an open and extensive online forum for users of the therapy, and the people I later speak to – a former headmaster from Nottingham, John Scott, for example, whose allergies were so bad that he was living on powdered food supplements and now reports a near normal diet – certainly support a degree of both Lawrence's evangelism and his frustration that the findings are not more widely known and studied.

"You have all this and no one is making a move on it?" he asks from time to time. "I mean, am I the only fucker on the planet reading this science? I'm not. All the drug companies know about it. But there is a huge disincentive for them to do anything about it. You can't patent a hookworm."

Lawrence is, of course, his own factory farm. "All I have to do," he says, "is recreate the tropics in a container, give the helminth something clean to migrate through, so you don't have to come anywhere near human excrement, then pick them off the surface of that, wash them repeatedly in various antimicrobials and antibiotics, and then package them up in sterile liquid and they are ready to go. They will live about a month like that. They are delivered to clients as a patch, and they go from there." He sells five years of treatment – with extensive support services – for $3,900, a figure he justifies with the comparative cost of MS drugs for example, which might be closer to $150,000.

For three years Lawrence's business was growing slowly and, to judge from the thousands of postings on the internet forums, with an almost universally positive response. Then, last November, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) knocked on his door in California. Lawrence's helminths could variously have been classified as a vaccine or a medical device (into which category fall increasingly widely used maggots and leeches) or a pharmaceutical. "To our misfortune," he says, "an unknown bureaucrat decided to classify it as a pharmaceutical."

To begin with, because there had been no complaint about Lawrence's service from any of his clients, the FDA agent suggested he only needed to bring his website into compliance. The mood, however, changed on a second visit. "The agent was clearly uncomfortable being there because he knew what was going to happen to us," Lawrence says, running through a list of possible outcomes that included, he believes, in comparable cases, "Swat teams in the morning, detention before trial, million-dollar fines, prison sentences, blacklisting. This is the first week of November. I decided on the spot we had no option but to leave."

He and his new partner Michelle, who he had known since teenage days in Devon, made this decision in part because they feared for their liberty, but also because he felt he had a duty to his mission. "For three years I had been listening to a tiny trickle form this great torrent of human misery that is brought about by autoimmune disorders. And I believe we had a solution."

The FDA left at 5.30pm on a Friday, promising to return on the Monday. By 1am on Saturday Lawrence and Michelle were walking across the border into Mexico at Tijuana – where he knew there was no passport control – holding hands. "I had scraped $6,000 together largely by running out on our rent, got a couple of backpacks, some sleeping bags, sensible shoes and a mosquito net. We went two days without food. Took a 36-hour bus to Guadalajara, stayed in a hotel which turned out to be a whorehouse. We eventually calmed down enough to get a plane to Cancun, and a bus to Belize, and made our way back to Britain."

He still does not know if his paranoia was justified. The FDA is continuing its investigation but will only inform him of the charge if he appears in person. He continues to move around Britain and won't disclose his address; he talks eventually of hiding out in Central America, directing his anger against the "system" which mitigates against his kind of therapy. "You know," he says, "if you watched late-night television in America and you were at all credulous you would believe that baldness, obesity and small penises could be cured with a pill. But as soon as you come up with something that does work, you are in an environment that is set up to deal with vast billion-dollar corporations with phalanxes of lawyers and researchers. Helminthic therapy could have been accommodated into the category of probiotic or supplement, like a live yogurt – it's the same principle. The organism is larger, but the numbers are way smaller."

The pioneer of this potential therapy, Professor David Pritchard, at Nottingham University, is of course more circumspect about the possibilities. After a terse exchange of emails with Lawrence a couple of years ago he cut off correspondence. Having conducted positive trials with Crohn's disease and hay fever, however, and with an NHS-funded study under way to look at MS, Pritchard has suggested he understood the motivations of Lawrence's unregulated efforts and the demand out there for the therapy. But he does not appear to approve of Lawrence's business, and did not respond to interview requests for this article. He places his faith in the conventional means of identifying – and patenting – the molecular mechanisms that produce the response and has admitted he cannot envisage patients lining up at clinics to receive patches of parasites alongside vaccinations. "The worst-case scenario would be to cause damage," he has said. "I'm nervous about deliberate infection, but I feel the hypothesis should certainly be tested."

Dr Rick Maizels at Edinburgh University is also at work on research into finding the "drugs from bugs" that will replicate the helminth effect, and other studies are ongoing across the world, in Brisbane, Denmark, Buenos Aires and elsewhere. Maizels sees no harm in Lawrence's efforts to short-circuit that lengthy and slightly unfocused process – "There seems little risk," he says, "in that we know low levels of hookworm are relatively harmless, but neither is it an open-and-shut case that the parasites will work in every or any patient." Maizels believes the hygiene hypothesis behind this effect is gaining wider credence, and is certain that helminths have the ability to "calibrate the autoimmune response" but says that "how much they turn it up and down, and how precisely they do it, is still to be discovered. There may yet be adverse response. The fact is we do not know." That knowledge will only begin to be revealed "in a decade or more of trials".

Creating another drug, however, will not, to Jasper Lawrence's fertile mind, represent a solution. It is the live aspect of the therapy that he believes gives it its efficacy. If scientists really believe the hygiene hypothesis he argues, then what they need to be investigating is not the lucrative possibility of a patented formula, but the ways in which the public might be educated in the idea of co-evolution, our symbiotic relationship with our internal fellow travellers. Lawrence is nothing if not an idealist. "When I was 17 I read The Selfish Gene," he says. "I needed a framework, a philosophy to describe the universe to me. I considered religion for a while, but The Selfish Gene delivered. Once you realise we are vessels for our genes, then all sort of things follow." The logic of his therapy, he argues, is one of them. "If it is allowed to develop, the use of benign organisms could be as big as antibiotics. Well-baby checkups, if I succeed, will include deliberate infection with a variety of protozoa and bacteria and helminths starting at age two, because the effect of these things in a child seems profound..."

He veers quickly from that hope to the reality of his situation, however. The imagined education process will, he knows, always be dogged by the fact that our cultural norms are very anti-parasite and worm, and that is partly because in their most extreme forms they make for great television. "I understand how the world works, but I am still angry. An enlightened country could easily do a crash programme to test this, and the benefits and savings would be immense... The truth is, though, I think I am going to be discredited by the media or marginalised by the law, and the idea will be snuffed out."

It won't be for the want of trying. The previous weekend Lawrence and Michelle had been to a wedding at which the bride had recently been diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis. Inevitably, Lawrence took on the role of the Ancient Mariner, telling his story to anyone who would listen. Their wedding present was 50 hookworm. Surprisingly or not, the bride returned it unopened.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/ ... -tim-adams