E.coli - Uniquely Adapted Super Mutator

Because of a new EEC law about health supplements, it has been ruled that companies providing alternative health products are not allowed to tell people how to use them. We are thus going to have to remove a lot of the accumulated information about how to treat cystitis and UTIs that we have learned over the last six years. We think this is a great shame, because we know for a fact that our information has enabled a lot of people to get better. Please copy our information, publicise it on forums, websites, and newsgroups, and feel free to write to your MP and protest about the UK's interpretation of the new EEC law. More

E.coli, the cause of around 90% of bladder infections, is an acid-tolerant bacterium* that is uniquely adapted to survive in the human body, and can quickly mutate to resist antibiotics. It can travel upwards and attack your kidneys, and it can progress to cause serious kidney problems. The trick is to stop the E.coli in its tracks before it gets to the kidneys.

E.coli can survive in acidic environments [evidence] that are lethal to other pathogens, such as in fermented foods like sausage and apple cider. It also survives and even thrives in acidic urine conditions with a PH as low as 2. Drinking cranberry juice (which acidifies the urine) when you have an E.coli bladder infection or UTI is therefore pointless and will probably do more harm than good.

Before we go further with this story, it is worth telling you a little of what we have learned about E.coli, because if you are going to defeat something, you first have to know your enemy.

Escherichi coli, one of the most thoroughly studied of all bacterium, is always present in the human intestine, even in newborn babies. (It is of course also present in other animals.) E.coli as Pathogens

It plays an essential part in the processing of food, and of our waste materials into faeces that we can pass out of our bodies. E.coli is therefore useful to us, and we have also made use of it medically. For example, it is used for genetic engineering, since cultures of E.coli can be made to produce unlimited quantities of the product of an introduced gene.

E.coli - the Opportunist Bug

Unfortunately, E.coli is also one of the most dangerous bugs we could have chosen to have a symbiotic relationship with. It is a fast mutator, since it multiplies at an enormous rate given the right conditions, (doubling the colony size approximately every 20 minutes) and it is 'opportunist', being non-fussy about where it lives and breeds. It will happily live and breed on medical equipment, on your hands, in your mouth, up your nose, on any mucous membrane, in your hair, in your bladder, on your towel, on door handles, toilet seats, and in your water filter...

It is also an unusually hardy bug. In an study by Abigail F. Weliver, Heat as a Microbial Agent, she said that:

So it can thrive with or without oxygen, in almost any conditions, and other studies show that E.coli can hibernate in freezing temperatures almost indefinitely. The E.coli bug is therefore both creiophilic (can survive freezing, so watch those ice cubes when you are on holiday abroad) and thermophilic (can survive boiling, so that towel may not be as clean as you think...)

And you won't kill it by washing something in warm soapy water. In fact, it thrives in those conditions. It even lives on soap. You can, however, flush it away, and that's important to our story - more on that later...

E.coli has an amazing affinity with the bodies of warm blooded animals like us. The entire bug (the variety that can stick to the bladder) is covered with molecular hairs (fimbria or pili with lectins - the special molecules that attach to mannose) that stick like velcro to the cell walls of body tissue and anything else with the correctly oriented mannose molecules (like Waterfall D-Mannose). There is a natural antibiotic we produce called human beta-defensin-1 that helps to break the fimbria/pili that E.coli use to attach.

E.coli and D-Mannose

Now comes the interesting bit. During our research into the behaviour of E.coli, we discovered that they like most of all to attach to a sugar-type substance called d-mannose, which our body produces naturally as part of the walls of cells. This d-mannose is naturally present in the bladder and the urinary tract, providing the ideal docking ports for the E.coli. We don't have perfect bodies, and nature has really messed things up here, because if it weren't for the d-mannose in the cell walls, any E.coli that managed to get up the urethra would be flushed away in normal urination. But they are not. They get up there, and they find a docking port, and they start to multiply. And that's when the trouble begins. They burrow their way into the walls of the bladder, which somehow doesn't recognise them as enemies, and embraces them as if they were fond friends. This can make them very difficult to get rid of without Waterfall D-Mannose. And the fact that they bury themselves into the bladder wall can lead to repeat attacks of cystitis.

The cell walls of the E.coli bacterium are covered with minute fimbria (hairs) with lectins (molecular projections) that hook like velcro to the mannose in the walls of the bladder and urinary tract.	In this photo the E.coli are the 'docked' white egg-shaped cells. The E.coli love the d-mannose in the cell walls. The mannose receptors love to have lectins attached. Waterfall D-Mannose occupies the E.coli lectins, preventing attachment.

When we discovered this attraction of E.coli for the mannose receptors in cells, the thought occurred that by providing a richer supply of the mannose in the urine we could persuade the E.coli to attach to the free mannose instead of the cell wall mannose. To this end we started hunting around for a supply of d-mannose, and we discovered that in the USA some doctors had already cottoned on to this use of d-mannose, and were recommending it to patients.

We already knew that using antibiotics against bladder infections just led to more resistant E.coli, thrush, and long term antibiotic-related complications.

In the UK, though, where we live, it was impossible to get hold of, and the USA companies supplying it didn't reply to our enquiries.

We had heard small amounts of d-mannose could be found in cranberry, but cranberry just makes the infections worse. It's also present in small quantities in other foods, but uneconomical to extract. In the end, we had to do the research and search the world to find a high quality natural source of d-mannose that could meet our requirements.

We now send our wonderful product all over the world, and we have Waterfall D-Mannose distributors in a number of different countries. It's getting better known by the day, so if your local health food shop or pharmacy doesn't know about Waterfall D-Mannose yet, please spread the good word. You'll be helping others at the same time as ensuring you have a local stockist.