sals -- submitted both in the U.S. and Great Britain -- to study Mp and its possible connection to Crohn's have been rejected.
Chiodini lost count of the rejected grant proposals he submitted to the National Institutes of Health, the USDA and the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America between 1984 and 1994. He estimates having submitted over two dozen, and not a one was funded. In 1994, he lost his job at Rhode Island Hospital due to a lack of funding and was later thrown out of the building for smoking in a nonsmoking area. On March 25, 1994, the hospital packed up the entire contents of his laboratory and shipped it to an unheated storage space, effectively destroying 10 years worth of research. He has not worked in a laboratory since.
Alan Kennedy was on a family vacation at the age of 12 when he fell ill. His symptoms looked like appendicitis. In the course of surgery, the doctor discovered it was not appendicitis he suffered from, but Crohn's disease.
It wasn't until after his second surgery in 1996, almost 20 years later, that Kennedy heard about Hermon-Taylor's work. He traveled from his home in Ireland to Hermon-Taylor's office in London to visit the professor and learn about the possible connection between Mp and Crohn's.
A computer scientist, Kennedy immediately recognized the impact a Web site could have in getting the word out about this theory and the underfunded but important research supporting it. After conducting a six-month exhaustive investigation of the available literature with the help of Hermon-Taylor, Kennedy launched a Web site on March 16, 1997.
Karen Meyer of Temple Terrace, Fla., stumbled onto Kennedy's Web site shortly after it went up. Her son had Crohn's, and she took the information contained there to his doctor, who agreed to prescribed Hermon-Taylor's antibiotic regimen for him.
"About a year after he began the [antibiotic] treatment in May 1997," says Meyer, referring to her son, now 24, who was diagnosed with Crohn's at age 17, "he had to have another surgery, and his surgeon observed substantial healing and said he had never seen anything like it. Since then, my son has experienced rapid weight gain and is doing well.
"It was just so unbelievable to me that nobody was addressing the problem," continues Meyer. "So I began, out of frustration, calling the Department of Agriculture in Florida. I got referred up the line, and I kept getting closed doors, passing the buck, getting bounced from FDA [Food and Drug Administration] to USDA to the Center for Veterinary Medicine. And I never came up with a good answer. There was just no concern whether people are being infected every day. When I heard that this was something that for 15 years could have been dealt with, it seemed too unbelievable to be true."
A situation that seemed unbelievable to Meyer is, in fact, not without precedent. Stomach ulcers had long been thought to be caused by excess stomach acid. In the 1983, an Australian researcher named Barry Marshall proposed that ulcers were caused by a bacterium known as Helicobacter pylori. The theory and Marshall were ridiculed until it was slowly but surely proven true over the next decade. This situation is now cited quite often by researchers who suspect Mp causes or contributes to Crohn's.
But as difficult as it was to convince the medical establishment that a bacterium, not stress, causes ulcers, it was not nearly as controversial as suggesting that contaminated milk might possibly contribute to a debilitating gastrointestinal disease, especially when that disease is thought by a vast majority of the medical community to be an immunological malfunction.
"Once I realized how big this was, I was reluctant to really decide how committed I wanted to be with this," Meyer says. "We had the drugs for my son, I could have stopped there. But I realized, for whatever reason, this dropped into my lap, and I had to have the courage to do what needed to be done. ...A researcher at CDC [Centers for Disease Control] said to me, and I don't want to use his name, 'What I suggest to you, Ms. Meyer,