Just over a century ago, an emerging disease plagued almost a million frontline troops during World War I, rendering them unfit for duty for months at a time.
The disease became known as “trench fever,” and it was subsequently shown to be caused by the louse-borne bacterium now known as Bartonella quintana
Interestingly, at that time many soldiers affected by trench fever were also reported to have cardiac involvement, and a complication called “’disordered action of the heart’ ” [ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK562259/]
Cardiac Involvement in Trench Fever
- Endocarditis: B. quintana can infect heart valves, leading to subacute endocarditis, often characterized by negative blood cultures, which complicates diagnosis.
- Clinical Presentation: Patients with B. quintana endocarditis frequently present with fever, weight loss, and fatigue, accompanied by signs of heart failure (exertional dyspnea, 50-70% of cases) and cardiac murmurs.
- Valve Damage: The aortic valve is most frequently affected, either alone or in combination with other valves.
- Rare Complications: Cases of myocarditis, a serious inflammation of the heart muscle, have also been associated with B. quintana.
**A million soldiers were highly impaired and top science nations could not find the cause.
Trench Fever was rarely, if ever fatal. [We do not know its actual fatality rate since 99.9% of doctors are decades out of date or know nothing about this infection taught for 45 seconds in nine years of medical training].
Infected soldiers were too sick to fight and,
because the disease was apt to remiss and recur over a period of weeks,
three months away from the front was the average for a sufferer. That is not a cold. “Average” was not a cold but a crippling illness making men unable to function.
WAS IT EASY TO TREAT?
Every pharmaceutical thought to have promise was tried without positive effect. Thus, quinine because it worked against malaria, Salvarsan (arsphenamine) because it seemed to work against syphilis, collargol a silver containing product, and a variety of other substances: acriflavine, antimony, galyl, intramine, kharsivan, methylene blue, and trypan red.
https://www.kumc.edu/school-of-medicine/academics/departments/history-and-philosophy-of-medicine/archives/wwi/essays/medicine/trench-fever.htm
Why?
Bartonella is a Super Stealth infection that turns off TNF-alpha, the infection alerting substance, so it turns down immune detection.
It raised IL-10 like water on the campfire.
**A disorder of the heart had no discernible cause. Quite amazing.
2. AIDS allowed it to be discovered in 1990 and 1991.
**So it took an immunity disaster with AIDS to detect it.
**And most physicians learning about Bartonella are told it is something a toddler could diagnose. Just go to a large commercial lab, using dated blood testing, and POOF a positive.
NO.
They poorly test for two species, when in 2007 I published nine and recently posted 23 human species. Easy to detect?
Nope. Elsewhere on this blog, a boy with Bartonella was not diagnosed by about eight lab companies.
Dr. Edward Breischwerdt only diagnosed him with a tiny brain biopsy tissue sample!