FDA Re: Mold in Military Housing 12/4/2019

One of the concerns regarding use of VIP is how frequently the drug has been used with great success to correct the transcriptomic and proteomic changes seen in patients exposed to the interior environment of water-damaged buildings in military subsidized housing. We use the drug because it is safe and it works.

Beginning before the litigation involving Lincoln Military Housing in Norfolk, Virginia in 2012, culminating in a successful verdict for plaintiffs in 2016, there now are lawsuits pending in multiple military bases, incluing Ford Meade in Maryland, all alleging unsafe living conditions and illness caused by exposure to those moldy environments..

In testimony December 3, 2019, the Senate Armed Services Committee witnessed leaders of Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force answering demands from US senators on what would be done to clean up military housing. We saw videos of moldy conditions; we heard testimony from residents in moldy housing how poorly their health has fared and how poorly they have been treated by military contractors.

The theme underlining these complaints is the illness is not treatable! Actually, the illness is entirely diagnosable using objective parameters that have been submitted to the FDA in the last three months of testimony. Cognitive changes are shown by NeuroQuant, first brought into use in the Lincoln Military Housing case, passing a Daubert challenge, and then admitted as evidence was submitted as evidence. Microbes in water-damaged buildings do bad things to brains.

Against such bad things is what physicians use: VIP.

It is one thing to deny a few compounding pharmacists the right to use VIP but it is quite another to deny access to countless military family members to the treatment that they so desperately need.

The US GAO made a presentation to the Senate Armed Services Committee on December 2, in addition to the hearing on December 3. Led by Elizabeth Field, her subcommittee of the GAO also heard testimony from Dr. Scott McMahon, M.D. and Ritchie Shoemaker, M.D., March 20, 2019. Enclosed are the publications and handouts provided to the US GAO. The mold problem is known: it is not new and it is not going away. The illness is not going away. Removing VIP as the final pathway to correction of brain volumetric injury, transcriptomic injury and proteomic injury is illogical

Sincerely,

Ritchie Shoemaker, M.D.