Durland Fish- Hilarious Courant Interview

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Subject: Durland Fish- Hilarious Courant Interview

Date: Aug 24, 2007 8:17 AM

COURANT ARTICLE BELOW


Fish is part of the original three in the Lyme cabal:
http://www.actionlyme.org/CONNOLLY_FISH_WEINSTEIN.htm

See my website. I adjusted the data on the homepage accordingly:
http://www.actionlyme.org


The whole thing would be pretty funny (especially Durland Fish's
hysterical
response as shown in the Courant interview), if not for the ALS DEATHs
(in half
the cases of ALS) and the excruciating disability part. Of course,
that was Fish's
primary role in the crime, since he was behind the fraud over
treatment on tick
bite:
http://www.actionlyme.org/TICK_BITE_CONSPIRACY.htm

It certainly *was* all about vaccines. They changed the definition of
"Lyme
Disease" to suit the false positive outcome of Yale's "vaccine"
LYMErix. It was about a monopoly on blood testing, funding and
spinning diseases.
http://www.actionlyme.org/LYME_CORRUPTICUT.htm

But it ended up to be a national security risk, since if we can't
detect naturally
occurring vector borne diseases (if you have a fake test, you can't
detect vaccine
failures- which is what happened with LYMErix), how can you detect a
stealth disabler
bioweapon deployed? Durland Fish knows this, since he works on vector-
pathogen
competence (bioweapons) studies on Plum Island:
http://www.actionlyme.org/BIOWEAPONEERS_CORIXA_YALE_TLRS.htm


Durland Fish even wanted to run around and vaccinate wild mice with a
vaccine that
Yale's Erol Fikrig *published* would make the Lyme infection EXPAND in
ticks.
I'm serious. We were joking about the vision of Eugene Shapiro
running around
in the woods with a microscopic syringe trying to capture all the wild
mice...


Now from this interview, you can see the personality behind the
criminal. I mean
the criminal behind the personality. I mean the psychopath working in
Yale's
labs...


Kathleen M. Dickson
Kids with Congenital Lyme:
http://www.actionlyme.org/Schoen.htm
[Schoen was very central to the crime since he knew all along there
was no way to
tell if LYMErix prevented Lyme, which is "A FRAUD ON THE GOVERNMENT,"
and is the racketeering element of this crime. Only Yale's L2
Diagnostics and
Imugen were to be licensed to use the RICO method to detect Lyme.
Schoen participated
in the development of the RICO method, in which the patent was applied
for before
the associated report was published:
http://www.actionlyme.org/YOUTUBEVIDEOS.htm ]

-------------------------------

http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc-durlandfish.artaug24,0,2533385,print.story


courant.com/news/local/hc-durlandfish.artaug24,0,5354694.story
Courant.com
State Joins Dispute Over Lyme
Scientists Battle Over Treatment

By MICHAEL REGAN

Courant Staff Writer

August 24, 2007

NEW HAVEN

Durland Fish, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology, leading authority on
disease-carrying
insects, is sitting in his paper-strewn office at the Yale School of
Public Health.
He is ticking down a list of physicians who disagree with him on the
matter of chronic
Lyme disease.

"This guy ..." Fish begins. "He cheated. He fabricated an article
in the New England Journal of Medicine. He provided false results. The
paper had
to be retracted. He was banned from [National Institutes of Health]
funding for
a period of time. The guy used to be the director of some penile
enlargement clinic
out on the West Coast. I mean, this guy ... There's some problems with
him."

He proceeds down the list, name by name: "Totally bogus." "He killed
one of his patients." "They tried to shut him down." Words like
"crackpot,"
"wacko," "buffoon" and "fraud" pepper his discourse.

A little later, he stops to ponder a question.

"I don't know," he says after a moment's thought. "I don't
know why they hate me so much."

"Hate" may be too strong a word, but many in the chronic Lyme
community
return Fish's evident antipathy. With varying degrees of vehemence, he
is accused
of being part of - even a leader of - what they view as a conspiracy
to deny chronic
Lyme sufferers the care they need for reasons of pride and profit.

It is a resurgence of a long and heated dispute over the nature and
treatment of
Lyme disease. On one side are mainstream physicians and researchers,
including Fish,
who believe Lyme is a relatively straightforward infection that can be
treated in
almost all cases with no more than four weeks of antibiotics, although
some effects
of the infection, such as fatigue or joint pain, can persist.

On the other is a small but extremely vociferous group of doctors and
patients who
say it is much more serious and requires much longer treatment - years
of intravenous
antibiotics in some cases.

Now Fish is fighting a subpoena from state Attorney General Richard
Blumenthal,
who says Fish and 13 other experts may have improperly excluded
scientific evidence
of chronic Lyme when they issued guidelines last year for treating the
disease.

How did a guy with no formal training in medicine find himself in the
middle of
what is perhaps the most virulent medical debate going on right now?
One might say
that it started with his being a bad restaurant inspector.

Fantastic Mosquitoes

The United States was in the process of doubling its force in Vietnam,
to about
400,000 troops, when Fish graduated from Albright College in Redding,
Pa., in 1966.
He had a degree in biology and wanted to do graduate work on mammals.
But with the
draft looming, he opted instead for an occupational deferment.

"I went to work for the state health department, totally bored out of
my mind
inspecting restaurants. A terrible job, and I wasn't very good at
it,"
Fish said. He hated imposing regulations on eateries just scraping by
in the poor
county where he was assigned. "I'm not a very good cop. ... I used to
coach
them on how to get by - how to cheat."

"I was on my way out," Fish said, when he was transferred to the
regional
office in Redding and given a job nobody wanted: tromping around the
woods and swamps
checking the stations set up to monitor mosquitoes and disease-bearing
animals -
in scientific parlance, vectors. He loved it.

"I thought, `You're going to pay me to do that?'" said Fish, who
had grown up surrounded by woods in rural Berwick, Pa. "That got me
interested
in mosquitoes. I didn't know anything about mosquitoes - I thought
they were
fantastic."

Fish went back to school in 1970, but not to study mammals. He earned
a master's
degree in entomology from the University of Massachusetts and a
doctorate from the
University of Florida, and did postdoctoral work at the University of
Notre Dame.
He then set out to look for a job doing research on mosquitoes. It was
a struggle.

"It wasn't a fundable area. Nobody cared," he said. "You couldn't
get any grants on it. Nobody cared about the ecology of vectors."

So in 1980, Fish went to work teaching general biology, ecology and
medical entomology
at Fordham University. Its campus was in the Bronx, N.Y., but Fish got
to live at
the university's research station in Westchester County. It was there
he discovered
the insect that came to dominate his professional life: the deer tick.

"I was doing some field work on mosquitoes there and these little
brown ticks
started showing up. Nobody knew anything about these ticks," he said.
"I'd
never seen them before. They weren't there in '80, maybe we just
started
seeing them in '81, a rare one. By '82 they were pretty easy to find."

The tiny deer tick had already infested southeastern Connecticut by
the time Fish
started finding them in New York, and had already been associated with
what was
beginning to be called Lyme disease. But no one was sure just how the
disease was
transmitted from tick to human.

In 1982, however, a researcher found that long, spiral-shaped bacteria
called spirochetes
were responsible for the disease. Fish got the news in a phone call.

"So I gathered up a bunch of these ticks and went down to Fordham and
I was
looking through a microscope," he said. "I saw these tiny little
threads,
about the limit of visibility under a microscope."

The discovery altered Fish's professional course.

"I said, `Geez, every other tick has these spirochetes in them'" Fish
said. "Nobody knows anything about these ticks, there are a hell of a
lot of
them here, and half of them are infected. This is going to be a big,
big problem."

"So I just dropped all the mosquito stuff and started working on
ticks,"
Fish said. "It was a totally wide-open field. Anything you did was
new."

Two Camps

And, as it turned out, controversial.

Within a few years of the discovery that bacteria were responsible for
Lyme disease
- which meant it could be treated with antibiotics - two camps
developed: One saw
Lyme as a simple, easily detectable and easily cured infection; the
other believed
it was an insidious, long-term disease capable of invading the brain
and other organs
and hiding its traces.

What the latter group lacked in mainstream scientific support it soon
made up for
in organizational clout. In 1992, for instance, when several
presentations on chronic
Lyme were rejected by the program committee for an international
conference on the
disease, angry advocates contacted members of Congress and the
conference's
sponsors to complain. The presentations were allowed back in.

Organizers denied that they were caving in to pressure. Accepting the
presentations
"was the human and nice thing to do," one told a reporter for the
journal
Science.

But Fish, a member of the committee that had rejected the papers,
thought otherwise,
and said so with characteristic bluntness.

"I'm damned annoyed," he told Science. "These lay pressure groups
are interfering with research."

Even then the passions stirred by the issue were evident: Although the
Science article
quoted several researchers critical of the about-face, only Fish would
allow his
name to be used.

The debate was fueled last year when a group of 14 experts, including
Fish, published
Lyme treatment guidelines under the auspices of the Infectious Disease
Society of
America.

Those guidelines called for the use of antibiotics for no more than
four weeks,
disputed the existence of chronic Lyme and rejected treatments favored
by the chronic
Lyme community, including long-term antibiotic use.

That brought Blumenthal into the fray. Shortly after the guidelines
were published,
Blumenthal - long associated with Lyme patient advocate groups - began
an antitrust
investigation to determine whether the panel ignored scientific
evidence that conflicted
with its guidelines.

That investigation is still going on, Blumenthal said last week. His
office has
subpoenaed documents from IDSA and from members of the panel, he said;
so far, the
society has complied, but the members have not.

Blumenthal would not discuss details of the investigation. "I can tell
you,"
he said, "that the information we've received so far has created very
significant
concerns about the process and about potential conflicts of interest."

Dr. Henry Masur, president of IDSA, disputed the notion that any
society member
could benefit from the guidelines.

"In fact, it would be better financially for IDSA members if our
guidelines
recommended the broadest possible diagnostic criteria (which would
mean more patients,
more people needing antibiotic treatment, more research dollars, etc.)
and the longest
possible course of treatment (which would mean more doctor visits, and
more drugs
and diagnostic tests being sold)," he said in a statement.

But Blumenthal's investigation heartened chronic Lyme believers, who
have long
claimed that the mainstream consensus is driven by conflicts of
interest.

"There's a group represented by the IDSA that has staked out this
position
that Lyme disease is hard to catch and easy to cure, and they don't
want to
admit they're wrong," said Raphael Stricker, a San Francisco
physician,
the former penis enhancement doctor and current president of the
International Lyme
and Associated Diseases Society.

He and other chronic Lyme advocates say IDSA members stand to benefit
financially
from their position. Some, they say, have relationships with insurance
companies
that don't want to pay for extended courses of antibiotics or other
long-term
Lyme treatments. Others have interests in drugs or vaccines. Fish,
Stricker contends,
is in the latter group.

"He's really into supporting the party line and developing vaccines
that
can make him a lot of money," Stricker said. "He has a lot of patent
interest."

Fish scoffs at such allegations. Yale had an interest in a vaccine
that has been
taken off the market, he said, but none of the Yale researchers who
helped develop
the guidelines stands to gain from them.

Besides, he says, it's the doctors treating chronic Lyme cases for
months and
years who have a financial interest in their position.

"If anyone has ... conflicts it's this group. I mean, they're making
millions on this scam," he said. "This cast of characters here has
some
gall to challenge the Infectious Disease Society of America."

Stricker said pharmaceutical companies may make a lot of money on long-
term Lyme
therapy, but physicians don't. To Fish's remark on his previous work
in
penis enhancement, he said, "I wish I was still doing that. I could
make a
lot more money doing that than doing what I'm doing now."

Both his previous employment and a 20-year-old determination by the
National Institutes
of Health that he had falsified a paper - a finding he disputes - are
"irrelevant"
to his Lyme work, Stricker said. And he's dismissive of Fish's
background
as well.

"He and others in the IDSA camp make these kinds of statements: that
this is
all motivated by greed, that there's no chronic Lyme disease, that
there's
no reason to treat these people who are sick with these symptoms,"
Stricker
said. "That isn't what patients want to hear. And they don't want to
hear it from an entomologist."

But Gary Wormser, a physician and researcher at New York Medical
College, says telling
patients what they want to hear isn't necessarily good for them. The
long-term
antibiotic treatment advocated by many doctors who diagnose chronic
Lyme disease
can be harmful or even fatal, he said, but patients are convinced that
it's
the only way to cure their ailments.

"Many feel abandoned by conventional medicine and are desperately
seeking help
from somewhere. They are especially vulnerable to those who profess to
have the
answer, even if they do not," Wormser said. "We are very, very
concerned
about these patients."

Wormser, who headed the IDSA panel that drew up the 2006 guidelines,
said they were
based on repeated studies that showed that a brief course of
antibiotics is effective
in preventing or treating Lyme disease. Most people treated for
"chronic Lyme"
never had the disease at all, he said, and among those who did, no
sign of the infection
remained after standard antibiotic treatment.

As for Fish, he said his role on the IDSA panel and in the Lyme
controversy generally
relates only to his expertise about ticks, not to medical matters.

"I'm not an M.D. I don't have the training to be making
recommendations
on therapy or even to some extent diagnosis," he said. "But I
understand
science, and what's good science and what's bad science."

"This is a matter of good science vs. junk science."

Contact Michael Regan at mre...@courant.com.

Copyright © 2007, The Hartford Courant

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