Hi Inanna,
Nice to see you hop over for a question. Klebs stand for Klebsiella Pneumoniae a strand of bacteria that is much like the E-Coli. It can live in water in soil but most important in and on our bodies. It is an opportunist: it can make itself home in any kind of environment. It has the possibility to live with or without oxygen and it can fixate nitrogen from air to make its own proteins. It can live on the outside of the body and is one of the bacteria that stays present after washing with antibacterial soap. It is also present in mouth and nose. Further inside our body it is a pathogen that may cause infections of the lungs and airways (hence its name) It may also infect the urinary tract, the vagina and the intestines. In the intestines it may cause diarrhea (especially severe when it is in the upper intestine) or something that is called dysbacteriosis a severe inbalance between the good and the bad internal bacteria and thereby an altered internal microflora. These are all infections that make you feel sick but nothing very serious as long as your immune system works correctly.

In the theory of professor Ebringer it is this bacterium that causes (the start of) AS. Because we (AS patients) are HLAB27 positive we have certain identifiers on all cells of our body tissues in common with some outside groups of this bacterium. This can be shown by cross reactivity of antibodies that react both to the bacterium and to our body tissues. This is shown by several independent studies in several countries, although also studies can be found that are in contradiction with this finding. The auto immune disease is started because the bacterium in the gut (but it may also reside elsewhere, say the urinary tract) tries to pass the wall of the intestines and tries to infect the body itself. It is then noticed by our immune system that starts a recognition procedure and attacks the bacterium. Because the outside of the bacterium mimicks our own tissue our immune system can no longer discriminate between the bacterium and our own tissue and will attack our own body cells and thereby the auto immune disease is started.

Now what we try to do here in this forum is to change our diet in such a way that Klebsiella's favourite food sources are ommited: these are starch and lactose. In this way the amount of this bacteria in our gut will be diminished and we hope to get them in such low numbers that the auto immune response is no longer triggered.

That is in birds eye view the story. It is based on this site, a lot of articles in medline (If wanted I could make a version with citations) and my old microbiology book (General Microbiology from Stanier, Ingraham Wheelis and Painter)

Gerard

" Support bacteria - they're the only culture some people have."
-Stephen Wright-