Archive for the ‘Lyme’ Category

Interview: U.S. Bioweapon Lab Suspected of Source of Lyme Disease

**UPDATE **

Here’s a more recent interview of Karl Gross man:  https://www.bitchute.com/video/GoCS7q3OigYj/ as well as a 2014 article he wrote discussing Plum Island, the Nazi connection (Operation Paperclip), and the experimentation on ticks and dropping them out of airplanes.

Go here for the timeline.

http://www.news.cn/english/2021-08/25/c_1310146419.htm

Interview: U.S. bioweapon lab suspected of source of lyme disease: expert

Source: Xinhua| 2021-08-25 00:22:15|Editor: huaxia

by Xinhua writer Xu Chi

GENEVA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) — A U.S. government bioweapons lab, inspired by a Nazi bioweapons expert and with a mission to poison cattle in the Soviet Union, is believed to be the source of the lyme disease, said a university professor and a long-time investigative journalist in a recent interview with Xinhua.

Karl Grossman, a full-time professor of journalism at the State University of New York, has spent five decades investigating a U.S. government laboratory on Plum Island, known as the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, which is located about one mile (about 1609 meters) off Long Island of New York.

For Grossman, this laboratory is “shrouded in secrecy.”

“I wish, there would be ‘transparency.’ That’s the word that has been used for decades in the U.S., so that people would know what their government has done,” he said.

“I am hopeful, but I am kind of doubt it, considering the decades and decades of secrecy involving the Plum Island,” he added.

(See link for article)

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**Comment**

Highlights:

  • Nazi bioweapon expert, Erich Traub, brought to the U.S. after WWII, is the ‘godfather’ of Plum Island laboratory
  • Traub, an active Nazi, did biological warfare experiments on the island of Riems to poison cattle in the U.S.S.R.
  • Fort Terry was also located on Plum Island for over 50 years
  • Eventually the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture took over the Plum Island lab
  • A document reprinted on the front page of Newsday, a newspaper on Long Island, stated the mission of Plum Island was to develop biological warfare weaponry to poison cattle and other livestock in former Soviet Union
  • Grossman was the first to expose this admission in 1971
  • When the USDA opened Plum Island for tours, the public relations person told Grossman, “we do defensive biological warfare”
  • Newsday in 1977 reported that an African Swine Fever outbreak in Cuba in 1971 was connected to an outbreak on Plum Island, the only place the disease existed
  • a 2007 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) exposed some of the pathogens (West Nile virus, Nipah virus, and Rift Valley Fever) on Plum Island “could also cause illness and deaths in humans”
  • Attorney John Loftus specialized in pursuing Nazis for the DOJ and tells in his book about Nazi scientists experimenting with poisoned ticks dropped from airplanes. He hypothesized that the infected ticks were the source of Lyme disease
  • Investigative journalist Kris Newby writes in her book that Willy Burgdorfer, the “discoverer” of Lyme, developed bioweapons for the DOD
  • An amendment in 2019 championed by Rep. Chris Smith (N.J.) resulted in Congress requiring the DOD to investigate; however, this is the third year in a row such a measure introduced by Mr. Smith, but neither received Senate approval

Grossman states:

“There’s the question of whether COVID-19 might have started at a laboratory in China. And for decades there’s the issue of how Lyme disease began. Both cry out for vigorous and full investigations.”  – Karl Grossman

For more:

Category:

Activism, Lyme

Judge Dismisses Lyme Disease Lawsuit Against IDSA, Doctors, but the Ordeal Has Left Its Scars

The following letters written by Lyme advocate Carl Tuttle were written to rebut this Medscape article, which tries to make the reader feel sorry for researchers that have actively worked against Lyme patients and the doctors who dare treat them.  A few details about Leonard Sigal:

  • In the book “Cure Unknown,” Sigal actually bragged that the money he received as payments from the Insurance Defendants was a great fund for his children’s college educations
  • This testimony written by Lyme patient and advocate Kathy White for the Kansas Senate states these payments Sigal & others received deprived suffering patients from proper diagnosis, treatment, and insurance coverage
  • On August 12, 1996 Dr. Leonard Sigal gave a deposition and testified that he reviewed many Lyme disease files for insurance companies, almost always denied coverage, and charged $560 an hour to perform his work. He testified that he reviewed files for most of the Insurance Defendants …
  • The Insurance Defendants paid Dr. Sigal to improperly deny insurance coverage to Lyme disease patients and to improperly influence the treating doctors to not provide long-term treatment for chronic Lyme patients.

And this is information only on Sigal.  There is a litany of misdeeds done by The Cabal.  The Medscape article is like ripping a scab off of Lyme/MSIDS patients.  No wonder Tuttle took them to task.  Personally, I view Medscape as “yellow journalism.”  I only read it to understand how the enemy thinks. 

https://www.change.org/p/the-us-senate-calling-for-a-congressional-investigation-of-the-cdc-idsa-and-aldf

Judge Dismisses Lyme Disease Lawsuit Against IDSA, Doctors, but the Ordeal Has Left Its Scars

Nov 6, 2021 — 

The following letter was mailed directly to Robert N. Brisco, Chief Executive Officer of WebMD, parent company of Medscape and forwarded to the editors of Medscape via email.  There was no response whatsoever from Medscape. Go figure!  If you are as outraged as I am over the continued collusion to deny chronic Lyme disease why not voice your opinion to the Medscape editors: editor2@webmd.net

MEDSCAPE MEDICAL NEWS

Judge Dismisses Lyme Disease Lawsuit Against IDSA, Doctors, but the Ordeal Has Left Its Scars

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/961484
Tara Haelle October 25, 2021

Excerpt:

“The cause of PTLDS [chronic Lyme] is still under investigation, and the evidence does not support the idea of a persistent bacterial infection.”

Dear Mr. Brisco,

In reference to the recent Medscape article above I would like to call attention to the following letter addressed to Brenda Fitzgerald, MD former Director of the CDC. As you know, culture is the diagnostic gold standard for many bacterial infections but there appears to be a double standard in the case of Lyme disease especially when it threatens a thirty-year narrative.

Postmortem examination to discover the cause of death also appears to have been thrown out the window when Lyme disease is involved.

Seronegative Lyme in which no one will test positive using the current twenty-five-year-old two-tier testing algorithm has been suppressed for decades.

And you wonder why patients have filed a lawsuit against the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA)?

What are the chances that the information/references in my 2017 letter below addressed to Dr. Fitzgerald will find its way into a Medscape article?  For the record, there was no response from Fitzgerald, Redfield or current CDC Director Rochelle P. Walensky, MD.

Cc: Tara Haelle, Independent science/health journalist, Timothy Flanigan, MD Professor, Brown University, Leonard Sigal, MD, Berkshire Medical Center, Daniel McQuillen, MD, President of IDSA, Raymond J. Dattwyler, MD, Professor New York Medical College

Letter to Brenda Fitzgerald, MD Director US Centers for Disease Control:
———- Original Message ———-

Dear Dr. Fitzgerald,
Untreated strep throat leads to rheumatic fever which can cause irreversible heart damage but rapid culture tests for strep available in the primary care setting has virtually eliminated rheumatic fever and the life-threatening complications associated with that disease.

Misdiagnosed and untreated Lyme disease creates the same life-altering/life-threatening consequences but this has been hidden from the worldwide medical community and general population. Just ask Duke University Professor Neil Spector who required a heart transplant after his Lyme infection went four years untreated. Spector’s laboratory tests (serology) were repeatedly negative. Faulty/misleading antibody tests are the root cause of unimaginable pain and suffering.

Lyme disease is capable of producing sudden death with no warning signs; [1,2,3,] heart damage requiring transplant, [4] paralysis with seizures, [5] lymphoma [6] and persistent infection after antibiotic treatment [7, 8,9,10,11] along with congenital transmission [12] and ability to create wheelchair bound patients [13]. The last time we recognized a disease with this potential to cause serious harm, (Zika) the CDC wanted 1.8 billion for research. [14]

Quote from Senator Richard Blumenthal:

“Today for me culminates more than a decade of work and probably a decade more, because I’ve seen firsthand the devastating, absolutely unacceptable damage done by Lyme disease to individual human beings, Connecticut children and residents whose lives have been changed forever as a result of Lyme disease”

Source:  http://ctmirror.org/2011/07/18/blumenthal-takes-lyme-disease-fight-senate/

In regards to laboratory testing (culture), please see the following quote from Dr. Kenneth Liegner:

“In 1991 the Lyme disease organism, Borrelia burgdorferi, was grown from the cerebrospinal fluid of my patient Vicki Logan at the Centers for Disease Control in Fort Collins, Colorado despite prior treatment with intravenous antibiotics.  Her case made the front page of the New York Times Science Times in August of 1993.” -Kenneth Liegner, MD

Source:  http://cognitiveliberty.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/David-Dennis.pdf

Vicki Logan’s CDC Fort Collins Positive CSF Culture Report: (My personal Dropbox account):  https://www.dropbox.com/s/vthfdpn7gv8bne2/Logan%20CDC%20Fort%20Collins%20Positive%20CSF%20%20Culture%20Report.JPG?dl=0

Lyme patient Vicki Logan’s 1991 positive culture test performed by the Centers for Disease Control should have set off a red flag but was ignored while the focus remained on discrediting the sick and disabled Lyme patient population. [15]

Here are links to the seven page autopsy results of patient Vicky Logan showing histopathologic findings consistent with neurologic manifestations of chronic Lyme disease.

(Vicky Logan’s Autopsy results Page # 1 ,  2 ,  3 ,  4 ,  5 ,  6 ,  7 )

  1. https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ykib95sfp66adb/Logan%20Autopsy%201.JPG?dl=0
  2. https://www.dropbox.com/s/lysfqd3vjc63bkl/Logan%20Autopsy%202.JPG?dl=0
  3. https://www.dropbox.com/s/zq7kj953f7mejkn/Logan%20Autopsy%203.JPG?dl=0
  4. https://www.dropbox.com/s/uqkgxynm5bn88jg/Logan%20Autopsy%204.JPG?dl=0
  5. https://www.dropbox.com/s/id8bbppoiscxuiq/Logan%20Autopsy%205.JPG?dl=0
  6. https://www.dropbox.com/s/mnms2un02g19kg7/Logan%20Autopsy%206.JPG?dl=0
  7. https://www.dropbox.com/s/nfvqbidao16yynf/Logan%20Autopsy%207.JPG?dl=0
The destructive nature of Borrelia is evident in Vicky Logan’s liver (nutmeg liver), kidneys, heart, lungs and brain. The patient died after the insurer refused additional IV antibiotic therapy.

I would like to point out the following case study from Stony Brook Lyme clinic. I understand the patient received thirteen spinal taps, multiple courses of IV and oral meds, and relapsed after each one, proven by CSF antigens and/or PCR. The only way this patient (said to be a physician) remained in remission was to keep her on open ended clarithromycin- was on it for 22 months by the time of publication.

Seronegative Chronic Relapsing Neuroborreliosis. 
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7796837
Lawrence C.a · Lipton R.B.b · Lowy F.D.c · Coyle P.K.d
aDepartment of Medicine, bDepartment of Neurology, and cDivision of Infectious Diseases, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and dDepartment of Neurology, State University of New York at Stony Brook, New York, NY., USA

Eur Neurol 1995; 35:113–117  (DOI:10.1159/000117104)

Abstract

We report an unusual patient with evidence of Borrelia burgdorferi infection who experienced repeated neurologic relapses despite aggressive antibiotic therapy. Each course of therapy was associated with a Jarisch-Herxheimer-like reaction. Although the patient never had detectable free antibodies to B. burgdorferi in serum or spinal fluid, the CSF was positive on multiple occasions for complexed anti-B. burgdorferi antibodies, B. burgdorferi nucleic acids and free antigen.

________________________

For the past three decades, Lyme disease has been portrayed as hard to catch and easily treated [16] while those who control the narrative (through editorial censorship) refuse to recognize this pathogen as an antibiotic resistant/tolerant superbug by suppressing evidence of persistent infection. [17] This misclassification has all but eliminated government funding that should have been equal to or greater than AIDS or Zika which are also life-altering/life-threatening infections in need of cures.

What we are dealing with here is an antibiotic resistant/tolerant superbug but the focus over the past three decades (as seen in the Lancet article) has been to discredit the sick and disabled along with the practitioners attempting to help these patients as opposed to finding new antimicrobials effective in eradicating all forms of the Borrelia spirochete; L-forms, round bodies and persister cells.

The truth about this devastating disease has been kept from the public for 43 years and there are no Public Service Announcements informing the public that you could become horribly disabled or die from Lyme disease

A worldwide community of physicians has been influenced by the ongoing disinformation campaign aimed at promoting the idea that Lyme is little more than a nuisance disease as health agencies across the globe are blindly following what has been deceitfully established here in the U.S.

We are dealing with a life-altering/life-threatening infection with faulty/misleading antibody tests, inadequate treatment, no medical training and absolutely no disease control.

This has been a 43 year epic failure on the part of the CDC and now you inherited this travesty.

Will you continue to turn a blind eye to this 21st Century plague?

A response to this inquiry is requested.

Carl Tuttle
Independent Researcher
Lyme Endemic Hudson, NH USA
Reviewer, American Journal of Infectious Diseases

Lyme Disease: Call for a “Manhattan Project” to Combat the Epidemic
Raphael B. Stricker, Lorraine Johnson
Published: January 02, 2014DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.100379
http://www.plospathogens.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.ppat.1003796

Cc: Associate Editors, Diagnostic Microbiology and Infectious Disease

References: ( Please read them!)

Category:

Activism, Lyme

Nov. Madison Lyme Support Group Meeting Reminder & Helping Families With Lyme Via Online Support

REMINDER: Please mark your calendars for the upcoming November Madison Lyme Support Group Meeting. 

**Note the new location**

For future reference, anytime you want to know upcoming meeting times, go to the upper right hand corner on the website and click on the “meetings”  tab.

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https://www.lymedisease.org/families-with-lyme-re-capture-joy/

TOUCHED BY LYME: Helping families with Lyme re-capture their joy

Nov. 4, 2021

Gloria Kim, a mother of three from New Jersey, fell into the Lyme world when her son was bitten by a tick at a young age.

As a result, her family has been dealing with chronic Lyme and co-infections for the last 14 years. And as she learned early on, Lyme disease affects the whole family—not just the ones who are sick.

“As a caretaker, I worked tirelessly to keep my son alive and was constantly in a state of despair, isolation and survival,” she recalls.

“As much as I wanted to be there for my other two healthy children and husband, the struggle of saving my son overwhelmed me and I lost myself.”

She understands the “difficulty, frustration, sadness and anger” of being a Lyme caregiver, she says.

To help others, she has created a weekly online support group to help bring connection and community to people in this situation–and to help them rediscover joy.

One of the things that Gloria said really helped her and her family was to find ways to laugh together. Here’s something she recently posted on her Facebook page.

Add this to your toolbox to help you heal from Lyme.

Laugh, giggle, chuckle and laugh some more!

Posted by Gloria Kim on Monday, November 1, 2021

Learn more at the Families For Joy website.

TOUCHED BY LYME is written by Dorothy Kupcha Leland, LymeDisease.org’s Vice-president and Director of Communications. She is co-author of When Your Child Has Lyme Disease: A Parent’s Survival Guide. Contact her at dleland@lymedisease.org.

Category:

Activism, Lyme, Meetings, Uncategorized

Delayed Diagnosis of Lyme Disease is a Huge Problem. How Can We Fix it?

https://www.lymedisease.org/delayed-diagnosis-lyme-wright/

Nov. 2, 2021

Melissa Wright is the Director of Patient Engagement & Outreach for LymeDisease.org and Project Manager of MyLymeData.

She spoke at the recent Tick-borne Disease Diagnostics online event spons

  1. Lyme is not recognized as a possibility in their area
  2. Many patients do not present with a classic erythema migrans rash
  3. The diagnostic testing for Lyme is flawed

View her presentation here:

Here’s the text of her remarks:

Hello everyone, my name is Melissa Wright and I am the Director of Patient Engagement & Outreach for LymeDisease.org and Project Manager of MyLymeData. I am happy to be with you today for the Tick-borne Disease Diagnostics Innovation Incubator, and have the opportunity to talk with you about the impact of diagnostic delays in the Lyme community.

Founded over 30 years ago, LymeDisease.org, is one of the oldest Lyme disease organizations in the nation. It is the largest and most trusted communications network for Lyme patients. Our mission is to harness the power of tens of thousands of patients to improve patient care and accelerate the pace of Lyme disease research. We do this through providing tools like our symptom checker, physician directory, and the MyLymeData patient registry and research platform with over 15,000 patients enrolled.

Today I’ll briefly discuss diagnostic issues with data from MyLymeData, the current testing and what we’re doing to push the needle
Using a diagram first developed by the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) in its report “Improving Diagnosis in Health Care,” which identified different points along the path to diagnosis where things can go wrong and diagnosis can be delayed or missed. It has been modified to reflect the diagnostic issues we encounter in Lyme disease. For example:

  • Lyme is not identified as a possibility in (name your state)
  • Many patients do not present with a classic EM rash
  • And the diagnostic testing is flawed

Which leads to a large majority of patients being misdiagnosed.

In MyLymeData we found that 70% of those with late or chronic Lyme disease experienced years of diagnostic delays even though 45% had presented with early symptoms. It had taken the majority, 3 or more years to be diagnosed after seeing 5 or more doctors with 72% being misdiagnosed and likely unnecessarily treated for another disease.

So why the delay? In Lyme disease we know early diagnosis can be a ticket to recovery. 70-80% do become well. Unfortunately, a diagnosis of early Lyme disease is not so straight forward. A lot of the symptoms are not specific for Lyme disease and do occur in other illnesses. So, there’s a big emphasis on whether the patient has distinguishing factors.

– Was the patient exposed to an area where there are ticks that carry the disease? (Remember, no Lyme in name your state)

– Did the patient have a distinctive round rash that could have been caused by the bite of a tick. (only 34% of patients report having a rash)

– And were any blood tests positive? (flawed testing, with 37% receiving a false negative)

In regard to testing, we know during the first four to six weeks of Lyme infection, standard Lyme disease tests are unreliable because most people have not yet developed the antibody response that the test measures, and even later in Lyme the two-tiered testing is highly insensitive.

The chart (Stricker, Johnson 2010) illustrates the studies examining the testing. As you can see, the mean sensitivity for Lyme testing is 46%. This means 108 of every 200 cases is missed in Lyme compared to that of the highly sensitive testing for HIV/AIDS, which has a mean sensitivity of 99.5%, where only 1 in every 200 cases is missed.

Simply put, the likelihood of Lyme disease being diagnosed from a positive lab test is the equivalent of getting a heads or tails in a coin toss. This ultimately means many patients go undiagnosed.

Now everyone knows the saying there is power in numbers, but despite Lyme disease having 475,000 cases annually little has been done to advance Lyme testing or research.

According to research by Goswami, the number of clinical studies for Lyme disease trails behind leprosy–which has an incidence of less than 200 cases per year.  So, Lyme disease should be thought of as a research disadvantaged disease that faces the same challenges that rare diseases face.

Patients are the most underutilized resource in medical research, and we are striving to bridge that gap.

The research cycle illustrated is derived from Groft’s work with rare diseases. His model suggests forming a patient registry that links with a biorepository—we are collaborating with the Lyme Disease Biobank here.

The registry helps to develop a research hypothesis—here we have published three peer-reviewed publications to better characterize the disease, assess patient reported outcomes, and analyze treatment effects among patient subgroups. The registry can then be used to help recruit patients. We have worked on recruiting for two clinical studies.

A team research approach will allow rapid knowledge generation to accelerate the pace of research–-leading to improved diagnostics, treatment and care.

Thank you for your time, I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you all today and I want to close by encouraging anyone not yet participating in MyLymeData to enroll.

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For more:

Category:

Activism, Lyme, Testing

Does Lyme Carditis Differ in Children vs. Adults?

https://danielcameronmd.com/lyme-carditis-children-vs-adults/

Does Lyme carditis differ in children vs. adults?

lyme carditis in child being examined by doctor
In their article, “Lyme Carditis in Hospitalized Children and Adults, a Case Series,” Shen and colleagues compare, for the first time, the presentation, management, and outcomes of Lyme carditis in the pediatric versus adult populations.
By

The authors analyzed charts of pediatric and adult patients with heart block and a positive Western Blot test for Lyme disease, who were hospitalized at Maine Medical Center. The study included 10 children and 20 adults who were admitted for Lyme carditis between January 2010 and December 2018.¹ The children’s mean age was 12.4 years. The adult mean age was 41.4 years.

The case series found:

  • 90% of the Lyme carditis patients were male, with 87% having no prior cardiac history.
  • All cases presented between June and October.
  • Of the 13 cases who noted symptom onset, 76% presented within 3 weeks of illness.
  • Out of 30 patients, 17 were evaluated at an outpatient facility. “Of these, a minority (41%) had Lyme disease suspected in the outpatient setting, and fewer (12%) were initiated on Lyme disease treatment.”

“Improved early recognition and treatment of Lyme disease may decrease Lyme carditis.”

  • Children with Lyme carditis were more likely to present with disseminated erythema migrans and fever. Otherwise, children and adults had similar symptom presentations, exhibiting predominantly presyncope and syncope.
  • “There was no statistical difference between pediatric and adult cases with regards to heart block type or other cardiac complications,” the authors write. “However, the most common heart block in pediatric cases was first-degree (40%) vs second-degree Mobitz type 2 in adult cases (55%).”
  • Adults were more likely to require a pacemaker (60%) compared with 20% of children. “Proportionately more adults needed temporary pacing,” the authors write, while “Children had shorter antibiotic durations…”

“… there is room for improving outpatient diagnosis and treatment of early Lyme disease, even in a high-incidence state like Maine.”

  • Out of the 30 cases, 27 had improved heart block, while 3 adults required a pacemaker at discharge. One patient died.

The authors point out that the majority of these cases were evaluated by an outpatient provider before carditis developed. However, only 41% of the patients were diagnosed with or suspected to have Lyme disease at that visit.

Furthermore, even fewer (12%) of those patients received appropriate antibiotics.

“Overall, there were no major differences seen between the presentations or outcomes of pediatric and adult Lyme carditis cases,” the authors write.

“Earlier diagnosis and treatment would likely have prevented carditis and the need for hospital admission,” the authors conclude.

“… there is room for improving outpatient diagnosis and treatment of early Lyme disease, even in a high-incidence state like Maine.”

Related Articles:

Lyme carditis diagnosis: 18 cases

Patients can die when Lyme carditis is not treated

Study identifies 189 children with Lyme carditis

References:
  1. Richard V Shen, Carol A McCarthy, Robert P Smith, Lyme Carditis in Hospitalized Children and Adults, a Case Series, Open Forum Infectious Diseases, Volume 8, Issue 7, July 2021, ofab140, https://doi.org/10.1093/ofid/ofab140

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For more:

Category:

Heart Issues, Lyme, research