Down the Hatch: Human Whipworm

The eggs arrived yesterday and I drank them.  

There were fortune cookies laying around at work yesterday, so I ate one.  The fortune:  Your plans will be a success!  Here's to that.

It's far too soon to see any results, but I'll continue to update.

Good luck with it. It will be interesting to know how things progress for you with this treatment.

Eva Lou said...
What are they supposed to do? And so they hatch & theoretically live in your intestines? Now if you see no changes at all, good or bad, & stop taking these eggs, do the worms or whatever die off, or do they just stay alive in there? How do you get rid of them if you want to? And these are human worm eggs as opposed to those pig eggs everyone's talking about? Huh.... right now I feel like I'm 100 years old, cause what's going thru my head is "Oh my word, the things people do!".. haha! well good luck, I guess they can't hurt. Can they?

I'm still learning, so I some of the information may change or be inaccurate.

Yes, they develop and live in the large intestine.  The whipworms will modulate the immune system to escape detection and destruction.  Apparently they work on the interaction between Th-1 and Th-2 receptors. 

The idea is that humans and their parasites have co-evolved for millions of year and need each other, and there is a correlation between increased sanitation and increase auto-immune disorders, IBD included. 

They live for a couple of years.  Some sources say about two years and some say up to five years.  If I want to get rid of them I can take a pill to kill them off.  The CDC does not recommend treating low-grade infections like the one I am trying to cultivate.

I guess these are cousins to the pig whip worm.  The pig whip worm cannot live forever in the human gut, so people who use that method have to continually re-ingest the eggs.  These parasites have evolved to live in the human gut. 

I'm told there may be an initial reaction as my body gets used to the whip worms, but it should be mild and transient fever, nausea, etc -- nothing I'm not used to at this point.  If it works -- and there's reason to believe it will work -- remission is the goal.

I don't think you need to feel 100 years old.  Even six months ago, if you had told me I'd be doing this, I'd have thought you were crazy.

 

Best of luck to you!!  I'd try them too if nothing else was working.

Where did you get them and how much were they?

Eva Lou said...
very interesting! I hope it does help- imagine the look on your GI's face! Definitely keep us posted. PS- is this like a last resort for you? I forget the meds you're on, and have been on, but I know you've been posting awhile. Will you consider surgery if the worms don't help? So have you tried the typical biologic route, & immune suppressants?

I don't know if I'd call it the last resort.  I've been in a flare for over two years now, and switched from Asacol to sulphasalzine about a year ago.  Big improvement overall.  This fall/ winter, the flare became awful and I bowed to pressure and took Imuran.  Liver panel went wonky and my GP got nervous.  GI was less concerned.  I stopped the Imuran.  Life was unbearable and I wanted surgery at that point. 

The surgeon my GI recommended was a bit hesitant to perform surgery because I wasn't hospitalized at that point -- a real masochist -- and he and the GI conferred and the GI absolutely refused to recommend surgery unless I tried Remicade.  Remicade is a complete nonstarter for me.  It's not going to happen.

I had a window for May surgery, and back and forth between the two docs messed up my timeline.  (Nevermind that I had started the surgery process in January. . . .)  The flare has subsided on its own, but I still need to get through the year.

I dumped the GI and my new GI is more surgery friendly, but after spending four or so months negotiating with the previous two jokers, I'm not sure I even have the energy to go through the rigamarole.  Enter whipworms.

If the whipworms don't work, I'll probably go back to smoking.  I've really had enough of doctors, am no healthier because of them, and I'm ready to walk off the reservation (obviously).  I was much healthier when I smoked three or four cigarettes a day and kept the uc under control.

I got them from Autoimmune Therapies.  No, they're not cheap, but the upfront costs are mitigated by the length of the treatment.

That is awesome seconder. I really wish the FDA wouldn't ban them anymore. Where did you get them from?

Please keep us posted...hope it has excellent results for you : )

Good luck, but I don't believe that IBD is caused by too much sanitation. (Had relatives who died of cholera in Hungary in 19th century + one who survived typhoid fever-- all caused by lack of sanitation in the water supply.) I do agree that the existing IBD meds are woefully inadequate, if not harmful over time. / Old Hat (30 yrs with left-sided UC ... [etc.])

Old Hat- the theory behind certain helminths (parasitic worms) and other parasites playing a role in immune modulation is no longer controversial (the mountain of literature available through a simple pubmed search is growing exponentially), even if their value as IBD therapy still is debated. And the theory goes far beyond the idea of sanitation being bad. In any case, the hygiene hypothesis does not throw germ theory out the window- clearly pathogens can and do result in many bad things. Hygiene theory merely updates germ theory with a more nuanced view- just as we now know that antibiotics can wipe out health-promoting probiotic bacteria that keep our guts functioning well and allow the overgrowth of pathogens, we now know that our guts have similarly evolved side by side with many other parasites such as intestinal worms and consequently learned to have symbiotic relations with them as well. See for example this recent analysis of the relationship between ancestral parasite exposure and auto-immune-related genes:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19468064?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

Drug companies are aggressively seeking to derive compounds produced by such worms in order to patent new drugs. However, there are hundreds, possibly even thousands of immune-modulating compounds excreted by the worms to allow them to survive in the gut without its mounting a destructive immune response, and my sense is that isolating one or two compounds will either be less effective and/or have unintended consequences / side effects (as seems the case with every IBD drug out there to date) compared with the worm itself.

I don't think worms are the magic bullet for auto-immunity but I do think they or more likely, their derived compounds (mainly since worms can't be patented) will gradually become key therapies a few decades from now.

Good luck! I'm interested in hearing how things work for you!

I didn't notice mumbles's post.  The human whipworms aren't banned.  I think the pig ones may be.  They are all classified as pests.

Helminths seem to be very effective for Crohns and allergies, less so for uc.  Then again, a lot of the FDA approved medications for uc aren't all that effective, either. 

A number of the studies, reports, papers I've read say that various helminths are something like 50-60% effective for uc.  By comparision, Imuran has a 60-70% effectiveness.  As far as I'm concerned, that's close enough to give the whipworms a shot since they have few to no known side effects.  At any rate they shouldn't trash my liver the way Imuran wanted to.

Correlation between "too much sanitation" & increased autoimmune disorders can be interpreted many ways. The "too much sanitation" that I would suspect as causative are modern chemical compounds used in popular cleansers + pesticides sprayed on crops. You could never convince me that being infested with intestinal (or other) parasites thru use of an outhouse is a beneficial experience for humans. / Old Hat (30 yrs with left-sided UC ... [etc.])

the thing that confuses me is that ingesting these eggs can/will cause trichuriasis- is this the intended outcome? The disease conflicts with the existing disease? I don't see how they help IBD. Apparently females can lay up to 20,000 eggs per day- so while a light infestation of the eggs shouldn't cause any problems, how do you know that the intial eggs ingested aren't laying billions more, & then causing problems? How would you differentiate between your "normal" UC symptoms & trichuriasis symptoms? I get the idea in the quote you posted, but you could also say that in the far Northern climates, where these types of parasites are basically unheard of, there is also little to no incidence of IBD. So you won't know what's going on for 5-6 months though?