Jill Carnahan on “This Little-Known Bacterium Could Be The Cause of Crohn’s Disease”
Jill Carnahan, M.D., wrote a blog article called “This Little-Known Bacterium Could Be the Infectious Cause of Crohn’s Disease – And It Can Be Treated.”
From the article:
Mycobacterium avium subspecies Paratuberculosis (MAP) is a bacterium belonging to a family of bacteria called Mycobacteriaceae. Does “Paratuberculosis” make you think of any diseases you might be familiar with? If you answered tuberculosis, you’d be correct. MAP is in the same family as the bacteria that cause tuberculosis (Mycobacterium tuberculosis).
MAP is also the cause of Johne’s disease, a systemic infection and chronic inflammation in the intestine of animals, but most commonly in domestic livestock. Johne’s disease sounds a bit like Crohn’s disease, doesn’t it? They share more similarities than their names, though. Both Crohn’s disease and Johne’s disease are forms of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), and as such, they share some clinical and pathological features (although their similarity has been overstated).
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