to give some scientific light on what we were saying before about the correlation betwen degenerative diseases and infctuous diseases, read this article. http://www.the-scientist.com/yr2000/feb/halim_p8_000221.html some extracts from The Scientist 14[4]:8, Feb. 21, 2000 <The positive side of salmonella When the public hears about Salmonella, it is usually in a warning about food poisoning, but a group of researchers in New Haven, Conn., is using the bacteria to target cancer. It turns out that Salmonella preferentially colonize and multiply within a tumor, thereby inhibiting growth. Vion Pharmaceuticals is taking advantage of this trait by genetically altering Salmonella typhimurium to reduce the serious toxicities associated with wild-type infection and create a novel cancer treatment.> ... <The association between bacterial infection and tumor regression has existed since the turn of the century. William B. Coley, attending bone surgeon at Memorial Hospital, now Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, noticed that patients who developed severe infections after surgery for sarcoma fared much better than those who did not develop postoperative infections. Based on these observations, Coley purified a component of the bacterial cell wall for the treatment of cancer.1 "Coley's toxin" was eventually marketed by Parke-Davis until the 1950s.> ... <In the 1940s, researchers found another relationship between bacteria and cancer: Clostridia, strict anaerobic bacteria that cause gangrene and botulism, could infect tumors. Clostridia seemed to like the necrotic and anaerobic environment in large tumors. Nonpathogenic strains showed some success in mice, but only on larger tumors. Further research showed that Clostridia did not work as an antitumor agent in humans. > ... <The bacteria disseminate throughout the body, but they cannot cross the blood-brain barrier. In a tumor they reach a concentration that is 1,000 times greater than in the liver and spleen, the next-highest concentration. "Compared to other targeting mechanisms such as monoclonal antibodies, the specificity is remarkable," comments Bermudes> i did appreciate in this article the scientific obsession of singularising causes of an effect and making a potential economic use of it . i also did appreciated the insistance of the writer to make sure that the reader got the idea that this kind of salmonella is safe . ( that is sort of necessary after having scared away people with the opposite idea for so long) jean-claude