Madison Area Lyme Support Group

“B. miyamotoi is a prime candidate to be the major chronic infection underlying ME/CFS”

The fifth in a series of blogs reporting on the 2022 IACFS/ME Conference focuses on an intriguing possibility: that heretofore unknown infection is present in most people with chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS).

Talk about a jaw-dropping statement. With the exception of Dr. Chia’s work on enteroviruses and Ariza’s work on the Epstein-Barr virus, most researchers have pretty much given up on finding “the chronic infection” underlying ME/CFS. Repeated failures to find evidence of a pathogen have led to the conclusion that while ME/CFS can be triggered by a variety of infection, the pathogen is likely long gone. With the emergence of long COVID, though, the idea of viral persistence has caught hold and the question is back – could a persistent pathogen or bits of a pathogen be causing ME/CFS?

It got a bit more interesting when De Meirleir looked where no one has looked before –  at tick-borne pathogens and at ones other than the Lyme disease-causing bug (Borrelia) at that. Plus, he used a new testing approach using bacteriophages to find them.

My numbers may not be correct, but the gist is that in this rather large study, a very large percentage of ME/CFS patients tested positive for B. miyamotoi while few of the healthy controls did. My jumbled notes stated that 81% of people with ME/CFS tested positive while 20% of the healthy controls did.  (See link for article)

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**Comment**

Very interesting article.  Important gold nugget:

…he focused on the ileocecal valve that separates the small intestine from the large intestine. I didn’t write down the possible connection between B. miyamotoi and the ileocecal valve, but the last time I remember hearing about it was decades ago from Dr. Cheney who pointed to a spot on my lower right abdomen which he said was almost always painful in ME/CFS. (Mine is).