Introduction to Chlamydia Pneumoniae (Cpn)
Chlamydia Pneumoniae (Cpn) is a tiny bacterium which is most often noted for causing a form of pneumonia. Up until the 1970's it was not even isolated and was mistaken for a virus (its discovery is an interesting story and can be found here: http://www.washington.edu/research/pathbreakers/1989a.html).
It was not until 1989 that J. Thomas Grayston and his associates named it as a separate species of the Chlamydiae. Cpn is very difficult to culture and so, without modern lab techniques, also to study. It is an intracellular bacterium, which means that it invades the body cells, and it is an obligate parasite, which means that it cannot supply it's own energy source and so takes over the energy machinery of the body cells it invades, depleting them and leaving the host cell less functional.
Cpn has been implicated in a wide variety of diseases and is seen by some researchers as a causal factor in particular disease such as Multiple sclerosis , Chronic fatigue , Asthma , Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) , Fibromyalgia , Chronic refractory sinusitis , Cardiac disease , Interstitial cystitis , Prostatitis, Alzheimer's disease Crohn's disease , Inflammatory bowel disease and others
Below: a diagram of the Cpn life cycle from http://herkules.oulu.fi/isbn9514269853/html/x467.html (which is also an excellent text on Cpn biology and treatment).
What makes Chlamydia Pneumoniae (Cpn) especially troublesome?
* While it may start as a respiratory infection, Cpn can be carried to other parts of the body and infect many other tissues, including nerve tissue, the brain, muscles, kidneys, liver, prostate, the lining of blood vessels and even your immune cells (macrophages and monocytes). Thus a wide array of problems can be caused by this single bug.
* The standard single antibiotic courses (two weeks monotherapy) which doctors typically used only kill Cpn in one of its three life phases, leaving other live forms of Cpn bacteria which are in other stages to renew infection. This is what creates persistence and relapse in Cpn and it's related diseases.
* Cpn contains at least two endotoxins (toxic chemicals) which cause tissue damage and inflammation, chronic immune activation and toxic load in your body. Killing the Cpn releases large amounts of these endotoxins, called a die-off reaction, making treatment uncomfortable.
* Cpn infects inside your cells and parasitically steals energy from your own body cells in order to replicate. The cells and organs it effects become less and less functional over time as Cpn load increases in them.
* The only way to cure it is to take a combination of antibiotics (see Combination Antibiotic Protocols), to kill it in all of its life phases so nothing is left behind to re-infect. This can take a long time depending on the load of Cpn in your system, the organs infected and other variables. Typical courses of 1-3 years are not unusual.
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The Basics Page provides answers your basic questions about Cpn and the Combined Antibiotic Protocols used to treat it.
Cpn Simple the simplest summary of we could think of, and might be a good beginning for those of us a bit brain fogged or just plain overwhelmed by the whole thing?