Archive for the ‘Activism’ Category

Who Controls the Fake Lyme Disease News?

Due to a recent report in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) Lyme patients will have a more difficult time getting IV therapy, which the CDC has dubbed “unproven.”  The report cites 5 examples…..  https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6623a3.htm?s_cid=mm6623a3_e ,

The Washington Post also just printed this:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/06/15/dangerous-unproven-treatments-for-chronic-lyme-disease-cause-are-on-the-rise/?utm_term=.de7c108522d6#comments

Let’s just say, it ain’t pretty.

The CDC came out with this video of a guy who started going blind and had a tumor.  We were never told if he went on the IV antibiotics after a Lyme diagnosis, but he mentioned being told he needed it.  The verbiage under the Youtube video claims he did long-term antibiotics. It also pushes the “FDA-cleared, fully validated tests,” that we all know are abysmal and miss over half of all cases.  Same crap different day.

http://

https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2017/04/12/comparing-lyme-testing-with-hiv-testing/

https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2016/12/07/igenex-presentation/

IGeneX and other small labs that specialize in virology and bacteriology are vilified by the CDC/IDSA and most main stream doctors.  It is a CLIA certified lab, unlike the main labs that give the standard two-tier Lyme Test that is abysmal.  Don’t fool yourself.  This is about money and power.

If you find a doctor willing to be trained properly, please give them this link:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2017/06/20/help-doctors-get-educated-on-lyme-and-tick-borne-illness/

*******

Pat Smith, President of Lyme Disease Association, has written this rebuttal:

Who Controls Fake Lyme Disease News?

14 June 2017

From the Desk of Pat Smith, LDA
The time has come when the public is entitled to know who in government or elsewhere is controlling the treatment of Lyme disease. 43 years into the disease, patients who can range from just infected to seriously debilitated with long-standing disease, are all thrown the same tired old bone, 3 weeks of doxycycline.

Scientists who are able to publish the science behind longer-term treatment have their science ignored.  The public is not told about persister cells being discovered which appear to be able to survive initial antibiotic treatment; they are not told about biofilm formation; they do not know about the Lyme bacteria hiding in different types of tissues. They are not told about the animal studies which show survival of the spirochete after treatment.

Government-funded NIH research has featured the same old studies with nothing new to offer sick patients, apparently due to the “experts” refusing to sit on peer review on studies with patients with long-tern symptoms–they do not believe in chronic Lyme.  New technology is ignored.

Advocates are blamed for incorrect information being posted on the net, for spreading junk science, for misunderstanding the science, for vaccine failure, for misleading patients, for promoting chronic Lyme, etc. etc.

Patients are categorized as hysterical, needing psychiatric care, having symptoms after treatment no different than those of the normal population– bottom line, not physically sick. These Lyme denialists offer them a pat on the head and show them the door, all the while chanting the “no chronic Lyme” mantra, clueless as ever as to what might be wrong with these patients or how to cure them.

Treating physicians are excoriated for caring about patients, spending hours of time with them to make a clinical diagnosis of Lyme disease and oftentimes, co-infections. They are forced to test with antiquated technology using restrictive band definitions, tests which should have been scrapped years ago, band restrictions that never should have been imposed. Meanwhile, they look over their shoulder to check out whether the “Lyme police” are coming after them and their medical licenses, in part due to the Draconian Infectious Diseases Society (IDSA) guidelines imposed upon them and their suffering patients: 3 weeks of doxy, nothing else, perhaps a psychiatrist, or what often happens to these patients, a “goodbye, live with it.”

CDC has only endorsed and posted the IDSA guidelines on their website, despite the fact those guidelines are stale and have long ago been removed from the National Guidelines Clearing House, set up under the auspices of the US Department of Health & Human Services.  The Lyme Guidelines from the International Lyme & Associate Diseases Society, ILADS, doctors who truly have an understanding of the disease and work in the trenches to provide real medical help versus false erudition, are posted on the National Guidelines Clearing House, which indicates they meet the Institute of Medicine Standards for Guidelines.

Why does CDC refuse to put up ILADS Guidelines? They feel IDSA guidelines are the best guidelines, nothing concrete to support that assertion, since the ILADS guidelines are supported by IOM standards.  Shouldn’t physicians be able to evaluate guidelines supported by IOM standards and accepted by the Guidelines Clearinghouse in relationship to stale guidelines not posted by HHS on its own National Guidelines Clearinghouse?

Too many people are getting sick, too many people are developing chronic disease, so now CDC has published in MMWR, an article titled “Serious Bacterial Infections Acquired During Treatment of Patients Given a Diagnosis of Chronic Lyme Disease — United States”Natalie S. Marzec, MD; Christina Nelson, MD; Paul Ravi Waldron, MD; et al.
Sharing horror stories a few patients experienced with IV treatments for Lyme, the CDC has shut down all long term treatments with antibiotics and with immunoglobulin. The CDC informed the Lyme Disease Association this morning that CDC felt this article was for the good of the patients, who don’t understand the dangers of IV treatments.

For the good of the patients, we need to know who ultimately controls Lyme. Why are “they” refusing to allow cutting edge testing, refusing to provide resources to improve poorly performing tests equivalent to underperforming tests with a Federal imprimatur, or refusing to allow broader band inclusion in existent testing?

Why won’t they permit long-term antibiotic treatment for humans when 70+ % of antibiotics in the US are used to fatten animals and are known to be causing antibiotic resistance; why stress the dangers of IV treatment for Lyme when other diseases such as cancer and HIV use IV and have not been singled out to warn patients of dangers; why do they refuse sick patients treatment that is based on physician judgement grounded in their assessment of the best science?

Why don’t they encourage further clinical trials to supplement flawed, underpowered trials; why do they acquiesce to dangerous policy pronouncements to assume–totally indifferent to patient health costs/benefits–that tests are false positive? Why don’t they fund research looking at chronic symptoms yet they do ignore the good science supporting post-treatment persistent infection.

43 years into the disease, with almost 400,000 cases in 2015 using CDC’s own 90% not reported calculations, we have no accurate test, no cure, and more questions than answers. To shape good public health policy for the good of patients, in place of fake news, let’s have real answers really soon.

Click here: Pat Smith in NJ.com article on CDC limiting Lyme treatment

 

 

 

 

 

Category:

Activism, Lyme, Testing, Treatment

Michigan Study Finds Anti-Zika Chemicals Impact Infant Motor Skills

http://www.ns.umich.edu/new/releases/24890-chemicals-used-to-combat-zika-agricultural-pests-impact-motor-skills-in-infants

June 8, 2017  Laurel Thomas Gnagey:  Michigan News

Researchers at the U-M School of Public Health and U-M Center for Human Growth and Development tested children in China and found exposure to the chemical naled via their mothers during pregnancy was associated with 3-4 percent lower fine motor skills scores at age 9 months for those in the top 25 percent of naled exposure, compared to those in the lowest 25 percent of exposure. Infants exposed to chlorpyrifos scored 2-7 percent lower on a range of key gross and fine motor skills.

Girls appeared to be more sensitive to the negative effects of the chemicals than boys.

Naled is one of the chemicals being used in several U.S. states to combat the mosquito that transmits Zika. Chlorpyrifos, around since the 1960s, is used on vegetables, fruit and other crops to control pests.

Both are insecticides called organophosphates, a class of chemicals that includes nerve agents like sarin gas. They inhibit an enzyme involved in the nerve signaling process, paralyzing insects and triggering respiratory failure. However, they may adversely impact health through other mechanisms at lower exposure levels that are commonly encountered in the environment.

“Motor delays in infancy may be predictive of developmental problems later in childhood,” said first author Monica Silver, graduate student research assistant and research fellow in the School of Public Health Department of Environmental Health Sciences. “The findings may help inform policy as the debate over use of these chemicals continues.”

The only studies to date on naled health impacts have taken place in occupational settings, not with exposure in the general population, Silver says. Previous chlorpyrifos research has found ties to delayed motor development in children and a host of health issues for those who handle the chemical, including nausea, dizziness and convulsions.

**Comment**

This is another great example of a myopic view on a problem to the detriment of public health.  Much like the Lyme vaccine which uses OspA and causes chronic Lyme symptoms in many people, many pesticides are wrecking havoc on public health as noted by the University of Michigan. and many, many other sources.

Why?

http://www.naturalnews.com/055293_Zika_virus_birth_defects_profits.html  Scott Adams, author of Natural News, has come up with five industries with agendas that stand to gain from a Zika scare including: chemical companies, vaccine makers, biotech industry (GMO mosquitoes), and Planned Parenthood and the condom industry since the disease is believed to be spread sexually.

Let us not forget governmental agencies and researchers as they typically obtain grant money for their research that is highly dependent upon what I call “curb appeal.”  In other words, the best way to get money in the 21st century is to whoop something up using the media to obtain funding as well as career advancement, prestige, and essentially power.  http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/02/15/how-scientists-engage-public/  Even though nearly 80% of scientists acknowledge that science news coverage doesn’t distinguish between well-founded and not well-founded findings.

For a refresher of how it all went down with Zika:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2016/12/21/how-zika-got-the-blame/ Despite the CDC initially denying a causal link between Zika and microcephally, CDC authors then plopped one paper into a formula of which the paper only met 3 of 7 criteria and they did an about face.  

For more on Zika: https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2016/03/08/fixation-on-zikapolio/
https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2016/07/17/zika-in-the-land-of-oz/
https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2016/10/26/zika-puzzling-scientists/
https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2016/03/04/health-policy-recap/
https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2016/04/08/zika-ebola-zombies-and-the-cdc/

What can really cause microcephally, not to mention cancer?

https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2016/11/14/naled-causes-microcephaly/  

Naled’s breakdown product DICHLORVOS (another organophosphate insecticide) interferes with prenatal brain development. In laboratory animals, exposure for just 3 days during pregnancy when the brain is growing quickly reduced brain size 15 percent. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8065512

DICHLORVOS also causes cancer, according to the International Agency for Research on Carcinogens. In laboratory tests, it caused leukemia and pancreatic cancer. Two independent studies have shown that children exposed to household “no-pest” strips containing dichlorvos have a higher incidence of brain cancer than unexposed children.

Aerial applications of naled can drift up to one-half mile. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, naled is moderately to highly toxic to birds and fish. It also reduced egg production and hatching success in tests with birds and reduced growth in tests with juvenile fish. convulsions, paralysis, and death.”

Category:

Activism, Lyme Vaccine, research, Zika

The Coming Pandemic of Lyme Dementia

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/iage/201705/the-coming-pandemic-lyme-dementia  by Mario D Garrett Ph.D.  May 29,2017

The Coming Pandemic of Lyme Dementia:  The increasing threat from Lyme disease

There are many known causes of dementia. One of these causes are bacteria. Bacteria are usually ignored despite its historical and current significance in dementia research.  A hundred years ago it was well known that syphilis—a bacterium—was the only known cause of dementia. The bacteria interferes with the nerves until it reaches the brain where it destroys the brain from the inside. In the end, the expression of long-term syphilis is dementia—Neurosyphilis. Alois Alzheimer wrote his post-doctoral thesis (Habilitationsschrift) entitled “Histological studies on the differential diagnosis of progressive paralysis.” on neurosyphilis before his supervisor Emil Kraepelin propelled him into the history books by defining Alzheimer’s disease as a new disease in 1911. [1]

Neurosyphilis was very common in the 1900s. Between one in four to one in ten people in mental institutions were there because of neurosyphilis. Eventually syphilis kills its victims. Before the introduction of penicillin in 1943, syphilis was a common killer. In 1929, among men, the death rate from syphilis was 28.3 per 100,000 for Whites and 97.9 per 100,000 for Blacks [2]. The similarities between syphilis and dementia were addressed repeatedly in the early literature in Alzheimer’s disease [1]. Because syphilis can now be treated easily and cheaply, it has nearly been eradicated. But there is a new bacterium threat emerging—one that can also cause dementia.

Today, the main bacterial threat to acquiring dementia comes from Lyme disease—a bacterium borrelia burgdorferi. Lyme disease is transmitted to humans mainly through the bite of infected blacklegged tick. These ticks are themselves infected by feeding off mainly diseased birds, which bring the infection from across the globe. Worldwide there are 23 different species of ticks that can carry Lyme disease or diseases that are similair to Lyme disease (e.g.  Borrelia bissettii.)

Lyme disease is the most common disease carried by animals in the northern hemisphere and it is becoming an increasingly public health concern [3]. Not only because Lyme disease is a debilitating disease, but because eventually Lyme disease has been shown to cause dementia—Lyme dementia [4]. Science has not identified the mechanism for the development of Lyme dementia. The American psychiatrist  Robert Bransfield has been documenting some of its neurological expressions, but so far there is a lack of emphasis in the research community on exploring these clinical features. 

Ernie Murakami, a retired physician, has been monitoring the spread of Lyme disease across the world. With more than 65 countries that have the blacklegged ticks which transmit Lyme disease, this is a worldwide pandemic. The prevalence of Lyme disease reporting varies dramatically. Canada reporting the lowest cases in the world, with 1 case per million, while Slovenia reports 13 cases per 10,000. In the United Sates the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than 329,000 people are likely to be infected every year in the U.S. alone. Only one in ten cases are reported since clinicians are not looking for Lyme disease. This estimated number of annual infections is higher than hepatitis C, HIV, colon cancer, and breast cancer. Lyme disease accounts for more than 90% of all reported cases of diseases carried by animals (vector-borne illness).

With any good public health strategy there needs to be a two pronged response. One is to address the clinical effects of the disease and the other is to address the underlying cause. In the United States, although research funds to examine and explore cures for Lyme disease are minimal, this avenue is likely to see the most significant increase. But this would be folly without addressing the underlying cause of the disease. Addressing these underlying causes will however be challenging.

Harvard Medical School Center reports that areas suitable for tick habitation will quadruple by the 2080s. But there are more pressing changes that will happen in our lifetime. Deforestation and climate-induced habitat change are affecting insect which carry diseases like malaria and Lyme disease. Slow climate change, urban growth in areas next to forests, reforestation following the abandonment of agriculture, and increases in the deer, mice and squirrel populations (among many others) which harbor these ticks.

Malaria and Lyme disease are both projected to increase. Even taking a more conservative estimate (all of the USA, most of Canada, all of Europe, Middle East and China), more than half the world’s populations are likely to be exposed to Lyme disease. A proportion of these populations will become infected with Lyme disease and eventually some will develop dementia. Pure Lyme dementia exists and reacts well to antibiotics [4].  Is public health ready to address this? [5]

References

[1] Garrett MD (2015) Politics of Anguish: How Alzheimer’s disease became the malady of the 21st century. Createspace. USA.

[2] Hazen H.H. (1937). A leading cause of death among Negroes: Syphilis. Journal of Negro Education, 310-321.

[3] Pearson S. (2014). Recognising and understanding Lyme disease. Nursing Standard, 29(1): 37-43.

[4] Blanc F., Philippi N., Cretin B., Kleitz C., Berly L., Jung B., … & de Seze J. (2014). Lyme Neuroborreliosis and Dementia. Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, 41(4): 1087-93.

[5] Garrett MD, & Valle R (2015) A New Public Health Paradigm for Alzheimer’s Disease Research. SOJ Neurol 2(1), 1-9. Accessible for free from:  https://sites.google.com/site/mariodrmariogarrettcom/GARRETT_VALLE_NEUROLOGY.pdf?attredirects=0

***A few notes***

Firstly, thank you to Dr. Garrett for this important acknowledgement of Lyme Dementia.

Secondly, this addresses a concern I’ve had for some time now.  Since LD is caused by a pleomorphic bacteria that shape shifts into one of three shapes, one of which has a non cell wall that can hide for years, and since doxycycline is typically the first line drug used, which researcher Eva Sapi has found that high doses of doxy pushes the spirochete into the non-cell wall form, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21753890#, are we setting patients with acute Lyme up for dementia later?  

*Until more and better transmission studies are done (the ones we have have 3 inches of dust on them), it would be folly to blame Lyme solely upon the black legged tick.  I am thankful Dr. Garrett pointed out that there are numerous species of ticks that carry numerous diseases.  These diseases are as bad if not worse than Lyme, and synergistically make cases infinitely worse than if infected by a single bacterium.

*Again, until much, much more research is conducted, it’s a stab in the dark to say LD is the most common disease carried by animals.  According to Dr. Breitschwerdt (DVM), that honor would be given to Bartonella, a nasty, persistent infection that has as many strains as there are animals, that coupled with Lyme will bring a person to their knees, and can also cause endocarditis.  And hardly anyone is talking about Bart – except us patients and veterinarians!  

*It is entirely true that physicians are NOT looking for TBI’s (tick borne infections).  It’s up to you to educate yourself and others.  The numbers listed in the article for each country is abysmally low.  If you don’t think TBI’s are in Canada, go here:  https://canlyme.com and http://lymediseasecanada.com.  I assure you, TBI’s are all over Canada and everywhere but Antarctica.  And, as Dr. Bransfield has stated, give it enough time and it will be there too!

*The statistic that only 1 in10 cases are reported in the U.S. is a complete stab in the dark and likely much lower.  Doubt every number you see when it comes to TBI’s.

*I appreciate Dr. Garrett’s insistence that addressing the underlying causes of disease is as important as finding a cure.

*Please remember when folks keep beating the “Climate Change” drum, that LD, with rare cases reported since 1883, originally started out as an epidemic in Connecticut in the 70’s http://whatislyme.com/history-of-lyme-disease/.  It has since spread (much like the proverbial “classic” bulls-eye rash that hardly anyone gets) to the rest of the world and is now a pandemic.  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2017/07/08/global-warming-numbers-fudged/  Respected whistle-blowers have exposed the fraudulent changing of temperatures to make the drastic rise in temperatures proponents use to push the agenda.

And according to independent Canadian tick researcher, John Scott, ticks are marvelous ecoadaptors that will be the last species on earth besides the IRS.  Climate has NADDA to do with the spread of ticks and Lyme:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/08/13/study-shows-lyme-not-propelled-by-climate-change/

“For blacklegged ticks, climate change is an apocryphal issue.” -John Scott

Whatever has caused the Lyme/MSIDS pandemic, it probably has more to do with pathogens being tweaked in a lab (think biowarfare) and spread due to a perfect storm of events:   https://sites.newpaltz.edu/ticktalk/social-attitudes/story-by-smaranda-dumitru/

*Regardless of how LD started, brace yourselves for the Lyme Dementia pandemic.*

 

 

 

 

 

Category:

Activism, Lyme, Psychological Aspects, Syphilis

LDA President Pat Smith on Contagion Live


Patricia Smith, President of the Lyme disease Association, discusses Lyme disease has spread throughout the United States in the past decade. Part 1

Lyme Disease: What Makes Diagnosis & Treatment Difficult? Part 2

How Have Tick-Borne Diseases Grown in the United States? Part 3

What Do I Need to Know About Lyme Transmission Time? Part 4

Are Patients Facing Difficulties in Accessing Treatment for Lyme? Part 5

Why is May Lyme Disease Awareness Month? Part 6

How Does Government Acknowledgement of Lyme Affect Patient Care? Part 7

The Current State of Lyme Disease Prevention. Part 8

Lyme Disease Legislation May Advance Patient-Centered Research. Part 9

Category:

Activism, Lyme, Lyme Vaccine, research, Testing, Ticks, Transmission, Treatment, vaccines

Medicine is Behind the Times When it Comes to Treating Lyme

http://www.contagionlive.com/news/is-the-medical-community-behind-the-times-when-it-comes-to-treating-lyme

MAY 24, 2017 | PAT SMITH

Is the Medical Community Behind the Times When It Comes to Treating Lyme?

 Lyme disease has been recognized in the United States for more than 40 years, with about 400,000 new cases occurring in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Nineteen tick-borne diseases now affect Americans, and one tick bite can cause more than one disease. A recent CDC study uncovered that ticks that cause Lyme disease are found in 50% of continental US counties.1 In addition, according to the results of a large Johns Hopkins University study, as many as 36% to 63% of patients with Lyme disease go on to develop chronic symptoms (posttreatment Lyme disease).2
Major problems surrounding Lyme disease today include reliance upon dogma, promoting beliefs people are expected to accept without questioning or doubting, and the use of selective science by many in the medical community, the Lyme “experts,” who often blame the patient, the internet, and treating doctors with divergent opinions for their own lack of successful patient outcomes. They continue to approach Lyme with a “cookbook” approach. Patients are told the symptoms are “in their head,” that they need to stop reading the internet, or parents of patients are accused of Munchhausen by proxy syndrome (ie, making their children sick). These experts neither want to understand why their approach does not work, nor do they want to take the necessary time to understand the disease by researching and reading all the science, not just that which supports their unsuccessful treatment approach. Steeped in dogma, they ignore the fact that Lyme is meant to be a clinical diagnosis using testing as an adjunct.Lyme clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) (eg, Infectious Diseases Society of America [IDSA] guidelines) often used by these physicians to treat Lyme are outdated and not posted on the National Guidelines Clearinghouse (NGC) These guidelines are most often used to deny treatment to patients with chronic disease, and so their current absence from the NGC is beneficial to patients who may need long-term antibiotic therapy and have been denied this through use of these guidelines. The only Lyme CPGs available on the NGC are those adhering to newly revised National Academy of Medicine, formerly Institute of Medicine, standards for guidelines− the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS) Lyme Guidelines,3 which address the usefulness of antibiotic prophylaxis for tick bites, the effectiveness of erythema migrans (EM) treatment, and antibiotics’ role in retreatment of persistent Lyme disease symptoms.

Many physicians solely rely on the two-tiered indirect Lyme tests recommended by the CDC and the outdated guidelines. These recommendations include a positive/equivocal enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) followed by western blot (WB), and the tests that are US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-cleared (substantially equivalent to a predicate test),4 yet not necessarily approved. To date, the FDA has not been able to provide Lyme Disease Association, Inc., with any information on any FDA-approved test for Lyme, including the original predicate test.  According to research in BMJ,5 the two-tiered system, although very specific for Lyme disease (99%)—yielding few false-positives—has a uniformly low sensitivity (56%), missing 88 of 200 patients with Lyme. The current archaic Lyme tests remain unreliable decades later. By comparison, AIDS tests have a sensitivity of 99.5%, missing only one of 200 infected patients.

Additionally, there is no test for active Lyme disease infection, and test interpretation, especially the use of specific bands in the WB (IgM 2/3; IgG 5/10), developed at the 1994 CDC/Association of State and Territorial Public Health Laboratory Directors Dearborn meeting,6 is problematic. Some doctors and researchers believe those bands were selected only to protect the then-in-development Lyme disease vaccine (subsequently licensed and withdrawn over 4 years). Furthermore, the Lyme ELISA used for screening may not react with serum antibodies if at least a month has not elapsed between the tick bite and the test. If antibodies do develop, research in the Journal of the American Medical Association7 has shown that the antigen and the antibody produced by the patient can form a complex. Current commercial tests can only test for a free antibody, not an antibody in a complex, so patients can remain undiagnosed despite having produced antibodies.

Perhaps most noteworthy is that FDA-cleared commercial serological tests are based on one strain of Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria in contrast, for example, to a 2-strain Lyme test developed by one independent Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments-approved lab.  The recent discovery by Mayo Clinic/CDC of the Borrelia mayonii species in the Midwest, which can also cause Lyme, and the acknowledgement that Borrelia miyamotoi, a spirochete closely related to the relapsing fever bacteria and more distantly related to the Lyme bacteria, causes a Lyme-like disease in the United States, means Ixodes scapularis ticks transmit all three of those bacteria, further clouding the diagnostic picture.

There has been considerable research over the past several years supporting the existence of chronic Lyme, including the discovery at Northeastern University that persister cells are formed by B. burgdorferi.8 These cells go dormant when treated with antibiotics, but can grow again after treatment stops. Persisters are found in other diseases as well. Work at Johns Hopkins has also been done on persisters: research in Emerging Microbes & Infections,9 “…identified 165 agents approved for use in other disease conditions that had more activity than doxycycline and amoxicillin against B. burgdorferi persisters. The top 27 drug candidates from the 165 hits were confirmed to have higher persister activity than the current frontline antibiotics.” Additionally, work on biofilms in Lyme, by researchers from the University of New Haven, and published in European Journal of Microbiology & Immunology,10 demonstrated for the first time “…the presence of Borrelia biofilm in human infected skin tissue.”

The results of several animal studies have shown that the Lyme spirochete survives antibiotic treatment for Lyme disease, including a University of California mouse study,11 a Tulane monkey study,12 a Cornell dog study,13 and a National Institutes of Health human xenodiagnosis study.14

As new research continues to unlock persistence mechanisms used by B. burgdorferi, the medical community needs to avail itself of those scientific findings by attending continuing medical education conferences and grand rounds and partaking in preceptorships that foster divergent views. The medical community needs to support further research on why some individuals remain sick. It is imperative that healthcare professionals learn how to change that outcome rather than relying on outdated methodologies that have not benefited patient health.

**Patricia Smith (Pat), President of the Lyme Disease Association, Inc., graduated from Monmouth University. She has been involved with Lyme disease issues for 33 years and is a Member of the Columbia Lyme & Tick-Borne Diseases Research Center Advisory Committee, the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programmatic Panel on Tick-Borne Diseases, and the Environmental Protection Agency Pesticide Environmental Stewardship Program. She has twice testified before US House Subcommittees on Lyme and is former Chair of the NJ Governor’s Lyme Disease Advisory Council. She has published on and been interviewed for broadcast, electronic, and print media on Lyme and tick-borne diseases.  
**Comment**
If you find a doctor willing to be properly trained, please give them this link:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2017/06/20/help-doctors-get-educated-on-lyme-and-tick-borne-illness/

Category:

Activism, Lyme, Lyme Vaccine, research, Testing, Treatment