Intestinal Parasites May Be Responsible for Chronic Illness

The following information comes from various USA sources, resulting from recent developments in diagnosing and treating intestinal parasites.

Dr Leo Galland, a physician from the USA recently stated “every patient with disorders of immune function, including multiple allergies (as well as) patients with unexplained fatigue or with chronic bowel symptoms, should be evaluated for the presence of intestinal parasites.”

Over recent years, according to Dr Galland, the technology for diagnosis and treatment of intestinal parasites has improved markedly. This fact has helped to provide evidence for the view that intestinal parasites are responsible for a higher proportion of chronic illnesses than was previously thought.

Two intestinal parasites are of particular importance. They are Giardia lamblia and Entamoeba histolytica. It is important to realise that both these organisms have a cosmopolitan distribution.

G. lamblia can produce symptoms that include nausea, bloating, weight loss, vomiting, loss of appetite, epigastric pain, abdominal cramps, food intolerance, chronic fatigue, chemical intolerance, immunological dysfunction, diarrhoea and others. Irritable bowel syndrome can sometimes actually be caused by G. lamblia.

E. histolytica can produce diarrhoea, food intolerance, fatigue, dysentry and other symptoms. Not all patients infected with intestinal parasites display gastrointestinal problems, but can have other symptoms which improve once their infection is treated. It has been shown recently that some non-pathogenic parasites can cause disease in immuno-compromised patients. How relevant this is to CFS, I am not sure. Ulcerative colitis can sometimes be a mis-diagnosed E. histolytica infection.

As you can see, many of these symptoms may be confused with those exhibited by CFS patients. It should be understood that only a proportion of patients diagnosed with CFS may actually be suffering from intestinal parasites and improve once their infection is treated. The chronic illness produced by intestinal parasites may in fact be CFS in some cases; it is just that the trigger in these cases was an intestinal parasite. In other cases, parasites may produce illnesses that cannot be classified as CFS.

Dr Galland, who has been involved in some of the pioneering work in this area, estimates that 20% of patients in the New York area who had been diagnosed as having CFS, actually had intestinal parasitic infections and improved once these infections were treated. The figure for Australia is unknown, but would be interesting. Patients diagnosed with CFS who were actually suffering from intestinal parasitic infections, tended to have more night sweats, fever, and muscle aches and pains. These symptoms can sometimes be clues that intestinal parasites may be present.

According to Dr Galland, current diagnostic techniques have a poor success rate in picking up these parasites. Newly developed immunofluorescent stains are now available, and when coupled with specific specimen collection methods, reportedly provide a much higher rate of detecting these organisms. Some laboratories in the USA are now using the new techniques.

It has been shown that current prescription drugs are often only effective with acute infections. Chronic infections can cause severe disability lasting months or even years, and often need to be treated for a much longer period of time. Most prescription drugs are too toxic for such long term treatment. Some doctors in the USA are using non-prescription drugs to treat intestinal parasites, and these are claimed to be safer than the prescription drugs.

Unfortunately the new diagnostic techniques are only available in the USA and UK as far as I am aware. One such laboratory claims to have examined over 40,000 specimens over the past 3 years.