Replies

“I, personally, am 99% sure it is caused by a virus. I am also fairly sure that I also carry the virus - but it will never effect me as my body managed to handle it and render it dormant. It would take me weeks of typing to explain why.”

Can you try? Any insight would help. Maybe you’ve seen something that nobody else has, and maybe that insight could help lead to something helpful for ALS sufferers. Do you have a particular virus in mind?

I’ve read that some researchers think the illness is cause by a combination of factors including viral, environmental, and genetic. “Perfect storm” kind of thing. Or maybe they are just grasping at straws. Sigh.

FWIW, my mom was in the epoxy and urethane industrial resins/coatings business for thirty years. Of the founding staff from the early 60’s, cancers and neurological problems claimed almost all of them. I worked there during school breaks. By then they had dust collectors and breathing aparatus for the plant personnel. Nasty stuff however.

It's amazing that you mentioned "the perfect storm" - as that is EXACTLY what occurred. Her grandmother had died of ALS - although they swore it was not the "genetic variety". She was working WAAAY to hard and way to long everyday - and she was obsessive about it. And, environmentally, I live in the Balto-Wash corridor - with some of the highest cancer rates anywhere in the country, next to the local landfill (where we moved the year before she got sick) and, last, I had been using "Milorganite" - an organic Nitrogen fertilizer on our lawn which, I was told by a vacationing Dentist while in Mexico, was linked to ALS.

And she was just a smaller, extremely hyper, athletic girl who - although she weighed less than half of what I did - literally ate 2-3 times as much as I did (She would usually order 2 entres when we went out to dinner!) She just burned up and out in less than a year.

The only other thing I could say is that, she tried every possible "homeopathic" remedy she could find. Unfortunately, most were aimed at rallying her immune system. In retrospect, I would have tried searching for things that would destroy her immune system - as that was what was killing her. I think ALS is like the human immune system's "Windows blue screen of death". You need to shut it down and reboot it.

I am clueless as to how to do THAT however as I've never found the Ctrl-Alt-Del button....