http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994852
      Diet of worms can cure bowel disease


      19:00 06 April 04

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      Regular doses of worms really do rid people of inflammatory bowel
disease. The first trials of the treatment have been a success, and a
drinkable concoction containing thousands of pig whipworm eggs could soon be
launched in Europe.

      At the moment the concoction cannot be stored for long, so doctors or
hospitals would have to prepare fresh batches of the eggs for their
patients. But a new German company called BioCure, whose sister company
BioMonde sells leeches and maggots for treating wounds, hopes it will soon
solve the storage problem.

      It plans to launch a product called TSO, short for Trichuris suis ova.
Chief executive Detlev Goj says the company will apply for approval by the
European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products as soon as the
product is ready.

      The pig whipworm was chosen as it does not survive very long in
people. Patients would have to take TSO around twice a month. The human
whipworm, which infects half a billion people, can occasionally cause
problems such as anaemia.

      The latest trials, carried out in the US, involved 100 people with
ulcerative colitis and 100 with Crohn's disease, both incurable and
potentially serious diseases collectively known as inflammatory bowel
disease.


      Remission rate





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                  Joel Weinstock, University of Iowa

                  Whipworms, Ohio State University

                  Crohn's disease, MedlinePlus




      In many of the volunteers the symptoms of IBD,ý such as abdominal
pain, bleeding and diarrhoea, disappeared. The remission rate was 50 per
cent for ulcerative colitis and 70 per cent for Crohn's, says
gastroenterologist Joel Weinstock of the University of Iowa, who devised the
treatment.

      "A lot of researchers couldn't believe this treatment was effective,
but people are always sceptical when confronted with new ideas," Weinstock
says. He will announce the results in May at a conference in New Orleans,
and full details will soon be published. "With our new impressive results,
we can come out of the closet," he says.

      The trials follow the success of a pilot study, revealed by New
Scientist in 1999. Weinstock came up with the idea of using worms to treat
IBD after noticing that the sharp rise in the disease over the past 50 years
in western countries coincided with a fall in infections by parasites such
as roundworms and human whipworms. IBD is still rare in developing countries
where parasitic infections remain common.

      Weinstock's theory is that our immune systems have evolved to cope
with the presence of such parasites, and can become overactive without them.


      Frank van Kolfschooten