If anyone has a list of immunoligist in the U. S. please pass it on to me.

I stay sick 8 months out of a year.

I have a fantastic immunologist for my daughter...I don't know what area you are in...he is located in Long Beach and Newport Beach, California.

If interested, let me know

The diagnosis of CVID follows a set formula outlined in the World Health Organization Report on the Primary Immunodeficiencies and in the Joint Statement of Practice Parameters for the Primary Immunodeficiencies published in May, 2005 by a committee comprised of immunologists from all three U.S. immunological societies. So even if you do not find a U.S. immunologist, you and your doctor can obtain most of the evidence necessary to make the diagnosis and justify IVIG therapy. If you do not reside where test facilities are available, you can have samples drawn in your locale and sent via overnight airmail to England for testing. You can find the citations for each of these on the PubMed website and then order the documents from the journal that published them or ask the authors for reprints or find them in your local medical library. You may also be able to download one or both from the Immune Deficiency Foundation website. Just google it. The pharmacist at our local hospital keeps copies close at hand in his file cabinet.

If you are chronically ill, but don't require hospitalization, the hard part is proving you are sick because of infection. You can use conventional xrays and CT scans of lungs and sinuses, MRI of arthritic joints or swollen glands, to prove your symptoms are caused by recurrent infection even if you never get the expected pneumonias. Bacterial cultures of samples only grow identifiable pathogens about 40% of the time. Viral cultures are rarely done. You can't prove you have infection using antibody studies if you don't make antibodies, or if you do prove you have infection using antibody studies, "they" will say your antibody formation is just fine so you can't have CVID.

In my case, we happened to catch the IgG and IgM developing to a specific infection, parvovirus B19. When we quickly retested, we were able to prove my antibodies to parvovirus B19 declined in number and then vanished entirely. There are interesting articles in PubMed on parvovirus B19 and CVID. Parvovirus can persist and cause chronic illness in people who don't make certain types of antibodies to it.

Antibodies which form, but fail to endure as they normally would, permit chronic low grade or smouldering infections with a rotating series of diseases that all run together and overlap each other. EAch individual infection may be mild, but the aggregate can make you sick for months or years at a time. It is harder to get physician co-operation to diagnose this kind of condition. They don't know where to start. If you test for the opportunistic fungal diseases and find one, you will establish probable cause for immune deficiency. Then you can test for diseases that IVIG, the standard of care for IVIG, is the only treatment for, such as parvovirus B19. It resides in the keratincyte of the skin, in the bone marrow and in the red blood cells.
You can test for its DNA by PCR. It can cause a red rash on the palms of the hands and feet and also lacy blotches on the skin of the arms, legs and trunk. In adults, it doesn't cause red rash on the cheeks often like it does in children, but I could feel mine heating up.

Hope this helps.

Ankaw