From Matt:

I have Crohn’s disease – I was diagnosed when I was 12 – in
my first year of High School. This was a pretty bad time to have to take a huge concoction of drugs, a liquid diet, put on and lose vast amounts of weight and be constantly run down, grumpy and lack continence. Those things are for uni!

Crohn’s disease (and ulcerative colitis) disproportionately
devastate young people - together they affect 1 in every 250 people in the UK. Half of those diagnosed will be in their teens or twenties. Patients are told that these are lifelong conditions for which there is no biological explanation and no cure.

About 70% of sufferers are operated on. Much like tuberculosis “treatment” in the early 1900s, where the “pneumothorax technique”
was used to collapse a lung to let it rest, surgery involves simply removing parts of the digestive system. Fans of eating and drinking will know that this system is complex, interdependent and used multiple times per day.

I am raising money for the Crohn’s disease MAP vaccine because there is a biological explanation and there is a potential cure.

I want to stop others, and especially young children with their lives ahead of them, from being told that they will suffer from this lifelong disease (clearly I also have an obvious vested interest in a cure).

The key components of the MAP test are now complete and it is in the early stages of the clinical trial. To complete the full clinical trial of the MAP test an additional £130,000 is required on top of the £270,000 raised for development. 

I will continue to raise money for this extremely valuable cause through a variety of events (check back to this page for updates). Every single penny donated will go directly to the team at King's College London who are working on the test and the vaccine. Because the funding level required is so low, anything donated will have a massive impact on millions of lives and could potentially change the way autoimmune conditions are treated in thee future as well as providing the medical establishment with evidence of T-cell technology that can be used to treat a wide range of diseases including HIV, cancer, immune deficiencies and auto-immune disease. 

Be part of this!

MAP

There is a rapidly growing body of scientific evidence,
published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, which suggests that human infection with the Mycobacterium known as Mycobacterium avium, supspecies paratuberculosis (MAP) - a recognized pathogen in animals (including primates) - may be causing some, and possibly all, cases of Crohn's disease. MAP has also been linked to various other autoimmune conditions such as type-1 diabetes, Parkinson’s and Hashimoto’s, although the research is less well advanced.

These two websites contain a wealth of information that anyone with gut issues or autoimmune conditions should read as a matter of priority: http://www.crohns.org/, http://crohnsmapvaccine.com/.

MAP belongs to the infamous class of microbes which cause tuberculosis and leprosy. As with tuberculosis, a MAP infection can lie dormant in the body for years. Transferred from cows through meat and the udder, MAP is present in at least 1% of milk bought but this rate is likely much higher and the percentage of herds infected could be as high as 93%. Pasteurisation does not kill MAP. For years, Crohn’s and colitis have been seen as autoimmune conditions and so are often treated with immune lowering drugs like Remicade (Infliximab)
or Humira or DNA altering drugs that impact the immune system. People treated in this way are at greater risk of cancer, infection and cognitive disease.

Rich people rarely die of Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis. But through our milk we are nursing an epidemic of the walking unwell.

The Blood Test/Vaccine

Historically, MAP in humans has been difficult to study as it cannot be seen under an ordinary microscope and is very difficult to grow. Testing for MAP by the presence of its DNA has found MAP in up to 92% of Crohn’s patients. Prof. Hermon-Taylor has developed a blood and tissue test which effectively tests for a MAP infection. I was tested in early February and tested positively for MAP – 4.88% of my white blood cells are infected.

The vaccine is a ‘T-cell’ vaccine. A similar T-cell manipulation based treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukaemia was in the news last week. T-cells are a type of white blood cell - an important player in the immune system- in particular, for fighting against organisms that hide INSIDE the body’s cells - like MAP does. Many people are exposed to MAP but most don’t get Crohn’s –Why? Because their T-cells can ‘see’ and destroy MAP. In those who do get Crohn’s, the immune system has a ‘blind spot’ - their T-cells cannot see MAP. The vaccine works by UN-BLINDING the immune system to MAP, reversing the immune dysregulation and programming the body’s own T-cells to seek out and destroy cells containing MAP. http://crohnsmapvaccine.com/explained-the-map-vaccine/