Transmission of Lyme disease – Lida Mattman, PhD

April 2, 2019

Approx. 3 Min.

Dr. Lida Mattman at the 2005 Chicago Autoimmunity Research Foundation conference. Full presentation found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=119&v=WozrCFW0mRM

Transmission of Lyme Disease

Transcript:

This is a colony in urine. (spirochetes in pleomorphic colony in Lyme patient’s urine stain with acridine orange)

We get to the ways that burgdorferi is transmitted. I laugh at all this stuff about looking for the Woodtick. That’s so ridiculous because most of the people who get Lyme disease have never heard or seen a tick. We know now it’s in tears and people wipe their eyes and then you shake hands with them. Or we don’t laugh so hard about the physician we had in the hospital who wouldn’t touch the doorknobs in the hospital without taking his white coat and handling the doorknob through a coat. Maybe he wasn’t so insane after all.

So we think this is spread by what is called fomites (an inanimate object or substance that is capable of transmitting infectious organisms from one individual to another) which is the pencil in the bag as you pick up a pen to write a check or anything you handle. So it’s in urine and in tears and it’s also spread by mosquitoes and who hasn’t had a mosquito bite?  We’ve tested the mosquitoes in Michigan and sure enough they can carry the Lyme spirochete.  

Oh, this is very interesting, I thought. This is a culture of that dreadful spirochete of Lou Gehrig’s and it’s stained with acridine orange and it’s staining red showing it’s still full of pep and multiplying and it’s a 10 day culture. We repeat this with the spirochete of Lyme or MS and at 10 days they are only green so if you have your choice you’re not going to take this one are you? Lou Gehrig’s is the last thing you’d want.

And this is something else where the ordinary lab that doesn’t have florescent antibody – this is a simple stain  – Sudan black B. Sudan Black only stains a few things. It stains pseudomonas, you don’t run into pseudomonas in the average patient. Sudan black B. is something you can purchase and doesn’t cost very money like a florescent antibody does – that is very useful.  (slide says “membrane *& outgrowth of L-body in blood culture of Lyme patient. Stained with Sudan Black B.)  That’s probably my last slide.  (Slide says:  “To me they’re not just a bunch of microbes – they’re personalities!”)

Together with her collegue JoAnne Whittacker, Mattman did groundbreaking work on Lyme testing. Her Gold Standard Culture Method has disappeared thanks to the concerted suppression on microscopy. In 2004 she already claimed that she could not find any uninfected blood in the USA anymore.  

Dr. Lida Mattman studied borrelia for decades and was nominated for the Nobel Prize. She is recognized for her work with diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, scleroderma and Parkinson’s. She described the etiology of interstitial cystitis and worked to discern the causes of rheumatoid arthritis and anterior uveitis, the most common cause of blindness. She also taught and used a new method to diagnose tuberculosis in 48 hours. 

Having earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in microbiology and virology respectively from the University of Kansas and a doctorate in immunology from Yale University in 1940, she was professor of microbiology at Wayne State University since 1949 and is credited with ushering thousands of would-be doctors and nurses into the medical profession. She was awarded the university’s President’s Award for Outstanding Teaching and Research in 1977, retired in 1982, and was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 2005. Her book, “Cell Wall Deficient Forms,” written in 1974, is regarded as an invaluable education tool among researchers, students and physicians in the field of microbiology.

In addition to doing research at the universities of Iowa and Pennsylvania, she served as director of clinical laboratories for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Commission and was an instructor at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Mattman died in 2008 at 96 due to liver failure.  https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/29190964/lida-mattman

Mattman isolated living Borrelia spirochetes in mosquitoes, fleas, mites, semen, urine, blood, plasma and Cerebral Spinal Fluid. She discovered that this bacteria is dangerous because it can survive and spread without cell wall (L shape). Because L-forms do not possess cell wall, they are resistant to antibiotics that act upon the cell wall.

Others have found various ways Bb is transmitted as well:

The CDC/IDSA/NIH are on vacation and still haven’t received the memo

 

 

 

 

 

Category:

Lyme, research, Testing, Transmission

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