A discussion on Immunity

subsea

Member
Montezuma’s Revenge is not a new horror movie. It is the lack of proper immune system response to a new bacteria entering the body. Living in an environment with diverse bacteria enhances body immune system.
 

Paul B

Well-Known Member
That is correct and both myself and my wife got Montezuma's Revenge in Mexico. The Mexican people didn't get it, just the Americans. Odd, isn't it.
 

subsea

Member
Brazil was an adventure. I worked 28 days on and 28 days off. We spent a day on each end in country. I watched kite surfing on Ipanema Beach. I worked offshore there for one year.

I have used water wells for the last 25 yrs. When I moved on this property, the well pulled from Glenmora Aquifer at 500’. During my fourth year here in Austin, my well went dry. For $20K, I could have hooked up to municipal supply. Instead, we drilled into the Trinity Aquifer at 900’. I had my water sent off to LCRA main lab in Austin. They called me up and told me not to drink the water because it had bacteria in it. When I asked which bacteria were in the water, he told me that the test did not differentiate between bacteria. I told him that the air I breathed had bacteria. Since I had been drinking this water for a year, I thanked him for his time and asked for a written report.
 

Pat24601

Well-Known Member
I had a very interesting situation at my LFS today. I was talking to them about setting up a hospital tank for Marine Ich and they strongly discouraged it favoring the immunity path through quality feeding instead citing all of the reasons @Paul B typically does.

I didn’t even ask them about immunity. They volunteered it.

They were perfectly willing to support a hospital tank idea, of course, but they feel like the odds of success pursuing immunity are way higher than the odds of success with a hospital tank.

Now they copper treat all of their incoming livestock, so it’s not about being allergic to copper. They just really believe in the immunity angle (at least relative to other options).

I’ve actually always had a lot of respect for them. It’s a very high quality store. But, I was very surprised seeing them go against standard practice on this for the reasons @Paul B supports.
 

subsea

Member
Paul,
I seem to remember a post you made about the symptoms for MS going away when your wife was pregnant. I found that very interesting that symptoms would go away during pregnancy, yet return after baby is born.

I think that is in the realm of “Intelligent Design”.
 

Paul B

Well-Known Member
Patrick, That wasn't my wife as she didn't have MS when our Daughter was born 38 years ago. But that is a known fact that MS gets much better during pregnancy. They have been studying that but so far have not come up with much of an explanation yet.
 

Paul B

Well-Known Member
I posted this someplace else. I think on the White House wall near the bathroom on the first floor.
I take probiotics myself but there is no need to give them to "my" fish or anyone's fish that are fed correctly. It's like vitamins and minerals. If those things have to be added to food like you see in the ingredients of dry foods, freeze dried foods and white bread, it is because those natural things were removed from the original foods because it is either cheaper to do that and add them later or the drying process eliminated those things so after processing those things are artificially added later to make the product seem better. And sometimes they are. But foods with those things naturally in there are best.

White bread is interesting because you will notice that it is always "enhanced" with vitamins and minerals. Look on a package of it. The makers of white bread don't add those things because they want to make you healthy. They add them or they would not be able to sell it as food because white flour has no nutrition and can not be called food. Whole wheat flour is fairly nutritious but whole wheat requires refrigeration which is expensive so they remove everything including the wheat germ and the bran and what you are left with is starch which is good for making glue but it won't keep anything alive. Even bugs don't eat it, guess why?
But white flour needs no refrigeration so it will last forever and can be stored in the same place they store Oldsmobile parts or tennis rackets.

Pro Biotics are great but they won't get your fish immune because Probiotics are good bacteria that help with digestion. They are not designed to do anything else and if we ate like we were designed to, we would not need them either. We are basically hunter gatherers who are supposed to eat a little bit of almost anything many times a day, including insects. I don't much like bugs and my wife frowns on gathering so we "hunt" in a supermarket like most people. Supermarket stuff is fine, but much of that stuff is processed so we no longer get a lot of dirt in our diet. Animals, including fish get a bit of dirt in their diet and some animals like grazers such as horses, cows and manatees get a lot of dirt in their diet. They don't care. Elephants even eat clay dirt for their well being.

We aquarists think that is a terrible thought and wouldn't think of putting dirt in our tanks or feeding our fish food that is not hermetically sealed. pasteurized, sterilized, UV Radiated and put in a nice package with a beautiful angelfish on the front.

It's the lack of "dirt" as well as the lack of bad bacteria and parasites that is the reason for all the disease threads, not the other way around. The natural diet for almost all fish is live fish. All fish have a gut and that gut is filled with whatever their last meal was which was another fish along with the parasites and disease causing organisms that go along with it. If we eliminate that diet of disease causing pathogens we also eliminate any chance that the fishes immune system will recognize those things so we must keep fish away from those things which also means we have to keep them away from their normal, natural diet that contains disease organisms.

I don't feed anything sterile so my fish have the same immunity that they had all their life which is the reason I never had to post on a disease forum. There has never been a disease in my tank since probably the late 70s or 80s and none of my fish have ever been sick and they never will.

Only quarantined fish or fish not on what I consider a correct diet which is natural food like they get in the sea with all the diseases that are naturally in the sea.
I feed live blackworms and whiteworms as well as clams. The whiteworms live in soil and it is sometimes difficult to seperate them from the soil so I add the soil right along with the worms. That soil is loaded with bacteria.
I also add mud from a muddy harbor or my back yard. These are things many of the people posting on the disease forum would never do and that is why their fish are sick.

This "out of the box" thinking does not make me a lot of friends but I already have plenty of friends. One less since Soupy Sales died. :eek:
 

subsea

Member
For certain the article validates what you say about gut cavity bacteria enhancing fish immune system.

Ever since I followed your advice and started going to the HEB live seafood counter for mussels & oysters, my reef tanks have come alive. Of recent, since I have learned some of the technology, I show them videos of the tank. The videos are a very big hit at the fish market. I thought about you growing up at the “big fish market”.

Aside from fish immune systems, my filter feeders and sponges are busting out. These results were on a twenty five year old 75G Jaubert Plenum. For the last 6 months, I turned out the lights on a 25 year old EcoSystems mud/macro refugium and have been running it as a cryptic refugium. I do like what what cryptic sponges do with DOC & DIC, however, in tank live food production is what I seek.
 

Paul B

Well-Known Member
My wife and I just came back from a talk on MS by my wife's Neurologist who is touted as the best MS specialist on Long Island. Anyway the talk was about the immune system and the MS treatments, especially the new ones. There is a lot of interest now in gut bacteria and how it can change the immune system and how it can alter our immune system. They can now take gut bacteria from a thin person and transfer it to an overweight person and the overweight person will lost some weight and if the bacteria stay viable by introducing new foods, that person can stay thin. They have also had some success curing diabetes using the same procedure.
I was discussing with him (he is also a friend of ours) how my fish are immune seemingly from everything and he agrees it could be from the live bacteria and pathogens in the clams and live worms guts that gets transferred to the fish. This theory of changing gut bacteria is fairly new and even he said that that is the future of medicine. I said, the main reason they are not doing to much of it is because it is not a big money maker for any drug company. I mean Poop doesn't cost to much. :confused:
I am going to ask him if he will help me write an article because he specializes in the immune system and is very knowledgeable about T cells, white cells, macrophages etc.
 

Pat24601

Well-Known Member
My wife and I just came back from a talk on MS by my wife's Neurologist who is touted as the best MS specialist on Long Island. Anyway the talk was about the immune system and the MS treatments, especially the new ones. There is a lot of interest now in gut bacteria and how it can change the immune system and how it can alter our immune system. They can now take gut bacteria from a thin person and transfer it to an overweight person and the overweight person will lost some weight and if the bacteria stay viable by introducing new foods, that person can stay thin. They have also had some success curing diabetes using the same procedure.
I was discussing with him (he is also a friend of ours) how my fish are immune seemingly from everything and he agrees it could be from the live bacteria and pathogens in the clams and live worms guts that gets transferred to the fish. This theory of changing gut bacteria is fairly new and even he said that that is the future of medicine. I said, the main reason they are not doing to much of it is because it is not a big money maker for any drug company. I mean Poop doesn't cost to much. :confused:
I am going to ask him if he will help me write an article because he specializes in the immune system and is very knowledgeable about T cells, white cells, macrophages etc.

I’m seeing a lot of recent research on how important the stomach in general is to overall health...both physical and mental. It sounds strange at first, but there is good scientific reading behind it,

Gut bacteria is part of that.
 

Paul B

Well-Known Member
Pat, Gut bacteria (I feel) is the key and the reason why so many people have so much trouble is that feed only commercially available food and no live bacteria. This will change in the future, but for now it is to far fetched a concept so we will have disease threads for quite a while to come. People will have to alter their ideas on how to keep fish healthy
 
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