If you notice your dog tends to run in circles, it is a positive indication that your pet has the borna virus. It was first noticed in German horses who walked in circles until they died. The pet may want to withdraw and be fearful, even a little paranoid. And of course they pass this around to other dogs and their owners.

The Borna virus is widespread in at least 30% of the population. It affects whole families at once and is an occupational hazard for therapists and ministers. You can pick up the virus by being in the room with someone who has it because it is being passed around by a cold or flu, or by petting your dog or cat.

The latest breakthrough in schizophrenia research is that all schizophrenics have a lot of immune cells in the brain. The interpretation is that the immune cells must be causing the inflammation that is causing the schizophrenia. However, conventional medicine is blind to the fact the immune cells are trying to attack infections in the cells, including in the so-called “auto-immune” diseases where physicians assert that the immune system is attacking the cells. If they had the diagnostic tools to see what it actually going on they would find that the immune system is targeting infections in the cells. Removing the infection would eliminate the problem.

The Borna virus was first discovered in horses in Germany and the Germans have done many of the best studies on this major public health problem. They have tested for the virus in depressed patients and found it, treated the virus and determined it was eliminated in lab tests. They then showed the depression was significantly reduced in most of the patients. They can reintroduce the depression by reinfecting with the virus so it satisfies Koch’s postulates which is the gold standard for medical causality.

There are hundreds of studies on the Borna virus posted on www.pubmed.org, yet the average U.S. psychiatrist has never read any of them. Those afflicted should carry the book in this posting into the psychiatrists office so they can educate them. In general they won’t test for it, won’t treat it, and don’t want to hear about it. There are many such “cognitive gaps” in modern medicine. It took a hundred years from publication of a monogram at Johns Hopkins suggesting that ulcers were caused by H. Pylori before psychiatrists stopped sending people to therapy for them. And only an article in the National Enquirer caused enough uproar to wake up the scientific community. When is the National Enquirer going to start reporting that over half the mental problems and violent conflict are caused or aggravated by the borna virus?

Lyme disease has hundreds of viral frequencies and many of them are Borna virus strains. This is one of the reasons some clinicians accuse their Lyme patients of having nothing wrong with them. It’s all “in their head!” Borna virus always make you a little anxious, often paranoid, and sometimes causes depression, bipolar disease, and other mental illness. Getting rid of it always makes people feel better. I have found Borna virus in 100% of the people tested with Bipolar disease and eliminating the frequency signature will usually stop a Bipolar expisode in a couple of hours. People with a clinical diagnosis of Bipolar disease typically have a concurrent parasite infection of the choroid plexus of the brain.

July 9, 2001, 6:35PM
Psychiatric study connects animal disease, mental illness
By SALLY SQUIRES, Washington Post, 2001

What if mental illness is catching?

Although it sounds far-fetched and remains controversial, this theory got another boost from a study published in a recent issue of the journal Molecular Psychiatry. Using a new diagnostic tool to screen blood for a pathogen known as the Borna virus, a team of German researchers from major academic institutions found that it infects up to 30 percent of healthy people and up to 100 percent of people with severe mood disorders.

Borna disease is common in horses, where it can cause encephalitis. It’s also been known to strike birds, cows, sheep, cats and dogs, producing behavior changes that are eerily similar to depression and other neuropsychiatric disorders in humans. Named after a town in Saxony (now Germany), where an outbreak of encephalitis in horses crippled the Prussian army in the late 1800s, Borna disease has been recognized in recent years as an emerging illness among humans.

In 1996, scientists at Scripps Research Institute in California found the first evidence that the Borna disease virus can infect human brain tissue. All of those infected had a history of mental disorders involving memory loss and depression.

There are widely varying infection rates among animals and people in Europe, North America and parts of Asia. The link between neuropsychiatric disorders and infection in humans varies as well. Researchers in South Korea, for example, found no link between Borna disease infection and mental illness, while investigators in Taiwan found a high rate of infection in people with schizophrenia — and among their family members and among mental health workers.

“The fact that you find evidence of an infection in one population or another does not allow you to conclude that there is a causal relationship,” said W. Ian Lipkin, professor of neurology at the University of California, Irvine, and head of a lab that unraveled the Borna disease virus genome. In other words, Lipkin said, scientists still can’t tell which comes first: the infection or the mental disorder. (Various mental illnesses can suppress the immune system and make individuals more vulnerable to certain microbes.)

And they also don’t know how close the association is. It’s possible, for example, to have Borna disease without depression and depression without Borna disease.

How Borna disease is transmitted is also a mystery, although there’s evidence in animals that it may spread via nasal passages, Lipkin notes in an article in the July issue of Trends in Microbiology. The article, written by Lipkin and two of his Irvine colleagues, notes that the link between the Borna virus and human disease remains controversial, but warrants continued investigation.

Even so, no one suggests that Borna disease may be the only cause of depression and other mental disorders. Although researchers have discovered a link between certain types of infection and heart disease, they have not concluded that one causes the other.

See also:

Borna Disease Virus Infection in Animals and Humans

Jürgen A. Richt,* Isolde Pfeuffer,* Matthias Christ,* Knut Frese,† Karl Bechter,‡ and Sibylle Herzog*
*Institut für Virologie, Giessen, Germany; †Institut für Veterinär-Pathologie, Giessen, Germany; and ‡Universität Ulm, Günzburg, Germany

Emerging Infectious Diseases
National Center for Infectious Diseases
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Atlanta, GA
URL: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol3no3/richt.htm
Updated: Thu, 28 May 1998 18:14:33 GMT