How CIRS and Lyme Destroy Lives.

09 Mar How CIRS and Lyme Destroy Lives.

Dr. Gupta

Many people have looked at SurvivingMold.com and the information that’s out there on CIRS. It can be quite complicated to understand exactly what CIRS is and how it shows up in the chemistry of health. I’ve got a slightly simpler diagram to explain this. If you start on the left-hand side of this diagram, you’ll see that biotoxins are small compounds that can be brought into the system or into the body through a water-damaged building or otherwise known as a moldy building. Other sources of biotoxins less common include a tick bite, spider bite, standing water in lakes and ponds which hold certain bacteria, virus’, and other infections.

Biotoxins are compounds that move from cell to cell inside the fatty cell membrane and disrupt the functions and communication of your cells. They are not present in the blood as they are fat soluble and get stuck in the brain, nerves and basically all of your cells membranes. We don’t actually have a blood test looking directly for mold toxins in the blood. It’s because they’re not actually there. There is tests looking at the cell membrane as as far as some of the bad fats called renegade fats but nothing with the biotoxins. These renegade fats, biotoxins, heavy metals and chemicals like pesticides all settle in your cell membranes and cause absolute havoc on your health.

So if you get exposed to one of these biotoxins such as through a water-damaged building or a tick bite and you’re among the 22% who are genetically susceptible for CIRS then these toxins will build up and cause massive inflammation through your body and central nervous system. If you are in that 22% of the population and have the HLA susceptible genes, instead of mounting a proper antibody response, what happens is we tend to develop a chaotic and ineffective inflammatory response as well as poor hormonal regulation and poor sleep.

So another way of picturing that is that there’s a silent fire going on in the body that’s actually involving almost all of the tissues and organs of the body. So as a result of the silent fire, which we call CIRS, many people become hypersensitive to mold and chemicals. If you have CIRS or if a child of yours has CIRS, they may go into a building that seems fine for other kids or for other people and they may say, “I’m not feeling well, mommy. I’m not feeling right. My head’s hurting. My tummy is hurting.”

Otherwise, those kind of symptoms may be thought to be emotional, but it’s important to know that in this case, it may be because there’s a silent fire going on in their body of inflammation and that they’re much more sensitive to mold and chemicals than other people would be. So as a result of this whole fire of inflammation that’s going on in the body, we get high levels of certain inflammatory compounds, which you can see over here on the top right of this diagram.

Now, this is a little bit of an alphabet soup, but the main ones that you need to know are called C4a, TGF-beta and MMP-9. So these are inflammatory compounds that are fueling the fire of inflammation in the body. They’re like bits of wood which are fueling that fire to be even more strong in the body. On the other hand if we track back here to the last box, we also get low levels of hormones that regulate the inflammatory response. So not only are we getting compounds that are fueling this fire of inflammation in the body, we’re also getting low levels of hormones that normally would dampen this fire. They include MSH and VIP and ACTH.

There’s a few acronyms and there’s no way you’re going to get around learning if you want to learn about CIRS. In this diagram, there’s about six of them. If you take a note of all six of those and just try to break them up. So going back to those three in the top right, they’re what we call inflammatory cytokines or inflammatory compounds and that’s C4a, TGF-b1 and MMP-9 and then MSH, VIP and ACTH are regulatory hormones. They’re hormones that regulate the inflammatory response. So they go low in patients with mold illness or CIRS.

As a result of these hormones going low, particularly MSH going low, we tend to get a special bug in many patients with CIRS that gets into the deep nasal passages and that’s called MARCoNS, which is spelled M-A-R-C-o-N-S. The problem is when you’ve got this bug, the MARCoNS, that tends to further lower MSH hormone. Therefore, that blocks you from getting better from this illness. So it’s important to know whether you’ve got MARCoNS so that you can eradicate that and then your regulatory hormones such as MSH have a chance of coming up. So I hope this gives a bit of understanding around the mechanism of CIRS or mold illness.