A Chronic Fatigue Syndrome bestseller discusses the issue of Kaposi's Sarcoma in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients
Excerpted from The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic Cover-up, a bestseller on Amazon.
Neenyah Ostrom began one of my favorite series of articles in the same issue. Titled “The Color Purple,” Ostrom reported, “Burke Cunha, M.D. who is chief of infectious disease at Winthrop-University Hospital (Mineola, Long Island), has described what he calls ‘crimson crescents’ that appear in the throats of more than 80 percent of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) patients. Cunha describes the crescents not only as ‘crimson,’ but ‘purplish.’ The reddish-purplish regions found in CFS patients’ throats sounded quite similar to KS (Kaposi’s sarcoma) in the throat, commented an ‘AIDS’ doctor [who wished to remain anonymous] to whom they were described. Is it possible that the crimson crescents observed in the throats of CFS patients are actually a type of KS?” Ostrom raised the possibility that the lesions in the throats of CFS patients connected them to the theory that Florida researchers held about KS being the unrecognized but unifying central pathological event AIDS. As I previously reported, the Florida team, headed by Dr. George Hensley, had turned the AIDS paradigm upside down, by finding KS in nearly 100% of AIDS patients, when they explored the internal organs closely during autopsies of AIDS patients. Their fascinating work suggested that KS preceded AIDS and caused more of the immune problem in AIDS than previously thought.
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Basically, Ostrom was asking if the KS-like lesions, in the tonsils of [CFS]patients, were an indication that some kind of unrecognized indolent KS was present internally, something that physicians would not even be thinking about because of the conceptual wall that socially hostile epidemiology had built between AIDS and chronic fatigue syndrome. And the CFS patients were not particularly interested in finding out if they shared KS with AIDS patients.
Ostrom went even further, in the July 20 issue, and speculated that the dramatic digestive problems in chronic fatigue syndrome were actually the result of the unrecognized chronic or slowly progressive KS in the CFS patients’ digestive tracts. Ostrom noted that Dr. Carol Jessop, who was talking to a group of patients at a chronic fatigue syndrome conference, said, “Almost all patients would say to me, ‘I was totally well until I got this [chronic fatigue syndrome],’ and yet, when I took their past medical histories, I found it wasn’t quite true. Now these aren’t disastrous problems. In fact, if they had gone to their physicians for any of these problems such as irritable bowel, diarrhea and constipation, abdominal cramping, bloating, flatulence, chronic constipation, heartburn, etc., their physician would probably just say, ‘Oh, take this’ and that would be it. So we as physicians didn’t relate to our patients that this was a problem, so they considered themselves to be totally healthy. Yet, if you look at the numbers, 89 percent of the [chronic fatigue syndrome] patients had irritable bowel syndrome, diarrhea alternating with constipation, and abdominal cramping pain episodically. Another 80 percent complained of constant gas, bloating and flatulence. It’s amazing that we can all meet in this room together.” Ostrom wondered if “Jessop may have uncovered a fallacy in the prevailing wisdom of chronic fatigue syndrome: that it begins as a respiratory, flu-like illness. Instead, as she points out, it may be a digestive tract disturbance. Jessop’s statistic—that more than 80 percent of CFS patients complain of irritable bowel syndrome, abdominal pain, gas, bloating, etc.—corresponds to the more than 80 percent of CFS patients who exhibit a red-to-purplish crescent-shaped lesion in their throats. (Helot, Paul, in the New York Times Long Island edition, January 14, 1992) . . . What if the digestive problems described by the CFS patients are actually caused by KS in the gastrointestinal tract? According to the AIDS Treatment News, ‘The most common HIV-related causes of gastric symptoms include KS, lymphoma, and CMV [cytomegalovirus].’ And while KS is unusual in the esophagus, it
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‘may occasionally be found there.’ KS also can cause colitis and diarrhea . . . in people with AIDS.” Ostrom noted, “Gastrointestinal symptoms, it is realized in retrospect, were among the first signs of the ‘AIDS’ epidemic; and, it now seems, were also among the first symptoms seen in the CFS epidemic. That observation raises what should be a relatively simple question to answer: Are the gastrointestinal symptoms in both patient populations caused, in part, by undetected KS?”
Excerpted from The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic Cover-up, a bestseller on Amazon.
