Prof. Alan Ebringer
,B.Sc, MD, FRCP, FRACP,
FRCPath, HonFRSHKing’s College London
Your Royal Highnesses, Mr.
Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen. I would like to thank The Royal
Society for the Promotion of Health for the great honor it has
bestowed on me in awarding the Donaldson Gold Medal to me for the
work from our group,on “Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or BSE or
more commonly known as MAD COW DISEASE. This work is a credit to the
outstanding group of research workers in our Unit, especially Dr.
Clyde WILSON , who recently was elected a Member of the “Royal
College of Pahologists” rather than to anything I may have done
personally. I graduated in Medicine from the University of Melbourne
way back in 1962, obtained a Travelling Scholarship from the “Royal
Australasian College of Physicians” to come to the U.K. and I have
been working in the University of London since 1970.Over the last
thirty years, our group has been studying the autoimmune
diseases, ANKYLOSING SPONDYLITIS, a chronic condition characterized
by backache and also another arthritic disease RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS.
We have found that ANKYLOSING SPONDYLITIS is triggered by the bowel
microbe KLEBSIELLLA and RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS is produced following a
urinary tract infection by the microbe PROTEUS. Prof. Feltkamp from
Amsterdam in the Netherlands, asked us to cooperate in a joint
study, which showed that Dutch patients with ANKYLOSING SPONDYLITIS
have antibodies to KLEBSIELLA and Dutch patients with RHEUMATOID
ARTHRITIS have antibodies to PROTEUS, as do English patients. These
results have been published. In AUTOIMMUNE DISEASES patients have
antibodies which attack their own organs and these are called
AUTOANTIBODIES. Our model for studying autoimmune diseases was
RHEUMATIC FEVER, which is caused by the microbe STREPTOCOCCUS, which
infects the tonsils and has components which resemble the human
heart. Following a STREPTOCOCCAL TONSILLITIS antibodies are produced
which attack not only the microbe itself but also the human heart
and cause RHEUMATIC FEVER.
Thus MOLECULAR MIMICRY or similarity
between a microbe and a target organ produces an AUTOIMMUNE
DISEASE. RHEUMATIC FEVER is no longer a problem in the Western world
because
STREPTOCOCCAL TONSILLITIS responds to antibiotics but in
countries of the Third World where access to such drugs is
financially prohibitive, the disease remains a serious problem.
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