Mick Hartley

An interesting article in the Times, on the possibility of a link between the chlamydia virus and schizophrenia. Remember when schizophrenia was a sort of existential scream of anguish against the hypocrisies of the bourgeois family? Ha.

Chlamydia is already known to cause considerable human misery. Not only is one strain of the micro-organism responsible for Britain’s “epidemic” of sexually transmitted disease, but another variant can cause a serious respiratory-tract infection similar to Sars.

Now comes the surprising finding by a German research team that chlamydia may be linked with schizophrenia. Dr Rudolf Wank, an immunologist at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, has reported recently that schizophrenic patients are much more likely to be infected with one or more variants of chlamydia. More importantly, he found that targeting the bug with specially treated immune cells improved the patients’ symptoms dramatically.

About 40 per cent of the 75 patients he studied were infected with chlamydia, compared with 6 per cent in the control group (ie, people who did not have schizophrenia). As Dr Wank explains: “Chlamydia comes in three varieties, two of which can cause a flu-like respiratory infection or pneumonia, while the third causes the sexually transmitted disease. The patients were much more likely to have one or more of these.” The team also found that the risk of developing schizophrenia rose dramatically for patients with a certain group of immune system genes.