The chemokine CXCL13 is an intensively investigated biomarker in Lyme neuroborreliosis (LNB). Its role in other neuroinfections is increasingly recognized but less clear.
OBJECTIVE:
To determine the significance of CXCL13 in established central nervous system (CNS) infections other than LNB by matching cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) CXCL13 elevations with severity of the disease course.
METHODS:
We investigated 26 patients with bacterial (n = 10) and viral (n = 16; tick-borne encephalitis, n = 6; varicella zoster infection, n = 10) neuroinfections of whom CSF CXCL13 levels were available twice, from lumbar punctures (LP) performed at admission and follow-up. As outcome classification, we dichotomized disease courses into “uncomplicated” (meningitis, monoradiculitis) and “complicated” (signs of CNS parenchymal involvement such as encephalitis, myelitis, abscesses, or vasculitis). CXCL13 elevations above 250 pg/ml were classified as highly elevated.
RESULTS:
Eight of 26 patients (31%) with both bacterial (n = 4) and viral (n = 4) neuroinfections had a complicated disease course. All of them but only 3/18 patients (17%) with an uncomplicated disease course had CSF CXCL13 elevations > 250 pg/ml at the follow-up LP (p < 0.001). At admission, 4/8 patients (50%) with a complicated disease course and 3/18 patients (17%) with an uncomplicated disease course showed CXCL13 elevations > 250 pg/ml. All four patients with a complicated disease course but only one with an uncomplicated disease course had sustained CXCL13 elevations at follow-up. Patient groups did not differ with regard to age, time since symptom onset, LP intervals, type of infections, and anti-pathogen treatments.
CONCLUSION:
Our study revealed pronounced CXCL13 elevations in CSF of patients with severe disease courses of bacterial and viral neuroinfections. This observation indicates a role of CXCL13 in the CNS immune defense and points at an additional diagnostic value as biomarker for unresolved immune processes leading to or associated with complications.
Lyme disease often misdiagnosed, resulting in unnecessary antibiotics
JUL 15, 2019 —
Please see the letter below to the TBDWG announcing yet another propaganda paper published by Paul Auwaerter
——— Original Message ———-
From: CARL TUTTLE <runagain@comcast.net>
To: tickbornedisease@hhs.gov, chris.smith@mail.house.gov
Cc: (98 Undisclosed recipients)
Date: July 14, 2019 at 8:50 AM
Subject: Lyme disease often misdiagnosed, resulting in unnecessary antibiotics
To: the Tick-Borne Disease Working Group,
Please see the letter below addressed to Dr. Paul Auwaerter who “speaks with great authority” in his recent interview with Healio.
-Carl Tuttle
Letter to Auwaerter:
——- Original Message ———-
From: CARL TUTTLE <runagain@comcast.net>
To: Paul Auwaerter <pauwaert@jhmi.edu>
Cc: psax@bwh.harvard.edu, jli@bwh.harvard.edu, cbusky@idsociety.org, tkobaya5@jhmi.edu, jmstiglich@healio.com, infectiousdisease@healio.com
Date: July 14, 2019 at 8:33 AM
Subject: Lyme disease often misdiagnosed, resulting in unnecessary antibiotics
Lyme disease often misdiagnosed, resulting in unnecessary antibiotics
Kobayashi T, et. Open Forum Infect Dis. 2019;doi:10.1093/ofid/ofz299.
“Many patients seen for infectious disease evaluation of Lyme disease usually have multiple, longer standing complaints such as fatigue and musculoskeletal pain yet have been treated with antibiotics when there is not good evidence they have an active infection,”
Disclosures: Auwaerter reports serving on a scientific advisory board for DiaSorin.
July 14, 2019
The IDSA Foundation
1300 Wilson Boulevard Suite 300
Arlington, VA 22209
Attn: Paul Auwaerter, vice chair of the IDSA Foundation
Dear Dr. Auwaerter,
The Healio article doesn’t mention how the hard fact of “not infected” was established; do you have some revolutionary test we don’t know about yet?
I would like to call attention to the following publication coauthored by Dr. Paul Mead of the US Centers for Disease Control formally announcing that serology is wholly inadequate for the management of Lyme disease.
“These serologic tests cannot distinguish active infection, past infection, or reinfection. Reliable direct-detection methods for active B. burgdorferi infection have been lacking in the past but are needed and appear achievable.”
From the Tick-Borne Disease Working Group 2018 Report to Congress: (Page 40)
“Metagenomic sequencing of DNA/RNA and proteomics can be used to identify tick-borne pathogens in clinical samples.”
Dr. Auwaerter… I would like to suggest that part of the grant money in the “search for infectious cause of Alzheimer’s disease” be directed toward organizing a nationwide proficiency test program to find out if there are any methods already available to detect Borrelia burgdorferi, Borrelia miyamotoi, Borrelia mayonii, Borrelia lonestari, Borrelia hermsii, and Borrelia turicatae (known pathogens in the U.S.) in simulated blood or plasma samples.
I believe that Milford Molecular Diagnostics may have this capability right now so doesn’t it make sense to focus on direct detection methods as soon as possible or are we going to promote outdated serology from DiaSorin for the next decade?
A response to this inquiry is requested.
Sincerely,
Carl Tuttle
Lyme Endemic Hudson, NH
Cc: Paul E. Sax, MD, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, Open Forum Infectious Diseases
Of note, Auwaerter is on the scientific advisory committee of Diasorin, a company that makes diagnostic tests for Lyme as well as EBVhttps://www.diasorin.com/en/node/8937.
In 1970 DiaSorin began the development of Infectious Disease products designed for use with ELISA technology. Since 2001 it has launched a broad array of new CLIA products, with unique infectious disease assays for use on the LIAISON® systems.
All DiaSorin Infectious Disease products are registered in compliance with the European CE mark rules with commercially available assays in the US having FDA clearance.
The House vote to require the Pentagon inspector general to tell Congress whether the department experimented with weaponizing disease-carrying insects and whether they were released into the public realm — either accidentally or on purpose.
The House quietly voted last week to require the Pentagon inspector general to tell Congress whether the department experimented with weaponizing disease-carrying insects and whether they were released into the public realm — either accidentally or on purpose.
The unusual proposal took the form of an amendment that was adopted by voice vote July 11 during House debate on the fiscal 2020 defense authorization bill, which lawmakers passed the following day.
The amendment, by New Jersey Republican Christopher H. Smith, says the inspector general “shall conduct a review of whether the Department of Defense experimented with ticks and other insects regarding use as a biological weapon between the years of 1950 and 1975.”
If the answer is yes, then the IG must provide the House and Senate Armed Services committees with a report on the experiments’ scope and “whether any ticks or insects used in such experiments were released outside of any laboratory by accident or experiment design.”
The amendment is an attempt to confirm or deny reports that Pentagon researchers — at places such as Fort Detrick in Maryland and Plum Island in New York — implanted diseases into insects to learn about the effects of biological weapons and also looked into using such insects to disseminate biological agents.
President Richard Nixon banned U.S. government research into biological weapons in 1969, but research into protecting U.S. military personnel from such agents may have continued, Smith said in an interview Monday.
A book called “Bitten,” published this year, makes the case that the Defense Department research occurred and hints at a possible connection between the experiments and the spread of maladies such as Lyme disease, which is borne by ticks.
To Smith and other advocates of the Pentagon IG report, studying the past may provide data that can help stem the spread of Lyme disease in the future.
Between 300,000 and 427,000 new cases of Lyme disease occur each year, with further growth expected in the years ahead, said Smith, a founding co-chairman of the Congressional Lyme Disease Caucus, which advocates for greater awareness of the disease and for more funding for research into a cure.
“We need answers and we need them now,” Smith said.
Smith’s amendment was co-sponsored by Minnesota Democrat Collin C. Peterson, who is the House caucus’s other leader, and by Maryland Republican Andy Harris.
Pat Smith, president of the Lyme Disease Association, said in an interview Monday that she is hopeful the IG report could provide information that could save lives.
“We need to find out: is there anything in this research that was supposedly done that can help us to find information that is germane to patient health and combating the spread of the disease,” she said.
It remains to be seen whether Congress will send President Donald Trump a defense authorization bill with the weaponized ticks amendment. The Senate has passed its version without any similar provision, and now House and Senate negotiators must reconcile the two bills.
________________
**Comment**
If the Pentagon states anything other than “yes,” they are lying, and it’s not just Lyme:
Transmission of the disease has been clearly documented after bites by fleas, mites, mosquitos and ticks. There is compelling evidence that Lyme disease (LD) can be spread by sexual and congenital transfer…. miscarriage, premature births, stillbirths, birth defects, and transplacental infection of the fetus have all been reported. Studies at the University of Vienna have found Bb in urine and breast milk of LD mothers...researchers at the University of Wisconsin have reported that dairy cattle can be infected with Bb, hence milk could be contaminated. Bb can also be transmitted to lab animals by oral intake such as food…the Sacramento, California blood bank thinks that LD can be spread by blood transfusions. The CDC (Center of Disease Control) in Atlanta, Georgia states that their data indicates that Bb can survive the blood processing techniques used for transfusions in the US.
Regarding bioweaponry, the article goes on to state:
Several US government scientists including Dr. Shuy-Ching Lo, of the American Institute of Pathology, hold a patent on a Pathogenic Mycoplasma (mycoplasma fermentans) which has been converted into a crystalline form. In the patent application the diseases AIDS, chronic fatigue syndrome, Wegener’s Granulomatosis, Sarcoidosis, lupus and Alzheimer’s Disease were mentioned as related to this patented form of mycoplasma fermentens. The crystalline form of mycoplasma fermentens contains the part of the brucella bacteria that causes disease in patients. In its crystalline form this mycoplasma can be transmitted into subjects by intravenous administration or injections, spread as an aerosol,implanted by the bite of an insect, or placed into food or water. There is no laboratory evidence for infection by brucella in subjects who have received the “crystalline pathogenic mycoplasma.”
When a nation is developing biologic warfare agents it is imperative that these agents be tested on humans to evaluate the results. If an infectious biologic warfare agent was able to produce person to person transfer it would have to be regarded as a gigantic success.
In the Faroe Islands in 1943 British biowar researchers ran tests to see if sheep could be infected by air-borne brucella. The brucella spread into sheep dogs as brucella canis and then appeared to cause several humans to develop multiple sclerosis.
In 1947 and 1948, approximately 1,100 school children in remote northern Icelandic villages (Akureyri) became ill with a new disease that caused severe burning pain in the limbs, profound muscle weakness, and severe fatigue. Of these 1,100 teenagers who became ill, 5 of the students developed an aggressive form of Parkinson’s disease and proceeded to die (unheard of in teenagers not using methedrine-like drugs). The United States had effective control of Iceland during these years and a research scientist trained in plant and animal virology at the Rockefeller Institute (oriented toward eugenics), Dr. Bjorn Sigurdson, was installed to start an Institute of Experimental Pathology at the University of Iceland with $200,000 in grant money from the Rockefeller Institute. In 1950 a group of American physicians, microbiologists, and biologic researchers sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation arrived in Iceland to study the effects of the mystery illness that had struck Northern Iceland. The appearance of a new disease was of such great interest that Icelandic Disease was promptly reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The Canadian government set up the Dominion Parasite Laboratory in Belleville, Ontario in the 1950’s and 60’s to grow one hundred million mosquitos a month. In late August of 1984, 500 persons in the St. Lawrence Valley became ill with a mystery illness which had the profound weakness seen in brucellosis without any laboratory evidence of brucella infection. One woman was certain her illness came from a mosquito bite. She recalled being bitten by a mosquito and woke up the next day with a target skin lesion at the bite site (same skin lesion as seen in Lyme Disease) and such profound weakness she was unable to get out of bed. Another woman recalled a target lesion at the site of a mosquito bite. Both women remain ill 20 years later.
Citizens in Punta Gorda, Florida woke up one spring morning in 1956 with a cloud of mosquitos in their town. Calls to the Meteorological Service about the mosquito influx were answered with the information that there had been a forest fire thirty miles away in the Everglades and that these mosquitos had fled the fire. The truth is mosquitos will not move from one side of a barn to the other when a fire breaks out, let alone fly 30 miles. One week later 5 persons appeared in the local medical clinic with symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome.
In 1984 mycoplasma may have been transmitted by aerosol into a high school in Incline Village, Nevada, where many persons suddenly developed chronic fatigue syndrome. Children became ill with a similar mysterious illness in 1984 after drinking goat’s milk in Lyndonville, New York. The cities of Adelaide, Australia 1949, West Otago, New Zealand 1984, and Royal Free Hospital London, England 1955 have all been visited by mini-epidemics of chronic fatigue syndrome.
The United States maintains a biological warfare research laboratory on Plum Island directly across Long Island Sound from the sites where Lyme Disease and West Nile Disease were first encountered in Old Lyme and Madison, Connecticut. Massive deaths of birds are common at the sites where West Nile viral disease appears, suggesting that the illness may afflict birds before entering humans. Dr. Warren Levin of Wilton, Connecticut states that 56% of the families in Wilton have at least one family member with LD. Could seagulls containing crystalline mycoplasma fermentens and West Nile Virus have escaped or been released from Plum Island?
Much of this information about biowarfare agents and crystalline mycoplasma fermentens is from an article written by biochemist Donald W. Scott and published in the Winter 2003 edition of The Journal of Degenerative Diseases Volume 5 Number 1. The publisher is Common Cause Medical Research Foundation, Box 133, Station B, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada P3E 4NR Canada.
Genes part of the HIV-1 envelope were found in these Mycoplasmas, which in a nutshell means that a person may not get HIV but they may get some of the symptoms. It is also important to note that while military personnel were likely exposed to the Mycoplasmas from weapons in the Gulf War, they were also exposed through vaccinations.
Nicholson found Mycoplasma to be the #1 coinfection of Lyme disease.
Lyme disease or Lyme borreliosis (LB) is the commonest vector-borne disease in the North America. It is an inflammatory disease caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi. The role of the inflammatory processes mediated by prostaglandins (PGs), thromboxanes and leukotrienes (LTs) in LB severity and symptoms resolution is yet to be elucidated.
OBJECTIVES:
We aim to systematically review and evaluate the role of PGs and related lipid mediators in the induction and resolution of inflammation in LB.
METHODS:
We conducted a comprehensive search in PubMed, Ovid MEDLINE(R), Embase and Embase Classic to identify cell-culture, animal and human studies reporting the changes in PGs and related lipid mediators of inflammation during the course of LB.
RESULTS:
We identified 18 studies to be included into this systematic review. The selected reports consisted of seven cell-culture studies, seven animal studies, and four human studies (from three patient populations). Results from cell-culture and animal studies suggest that PGs and other lipid mediators of inflammation are elevated in LB and may contribute to disease development. The limited number of human studies showed that subjects with Lyme meningitis, Lyme arthritis (LA) and antibiotic-refractory LA had increased levels of an array of PGs and lipid mediators (e.g., LTB4, 8-isoPGF2α, and phospholipases A2 activity). Levels of these markers were significantly reduced following the treatment with antibiotics or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.
CONCLUSION:
Dysregulation of prostaglandins and related lipid mediators may play a role in the etiology of LB and persistence of inflammation that may lead to long-term complications. Further investigation into the precise levels of a wide range of PGs and related factors is critical as it may propose novel markers that can be used for early diagnosis.
__________________
**Comment**
Systematic reviews are only as good as the studies they utilize. The area of Lyme research is notoriously controlled by “The Cabal,” a highly vested group of individuals rife with conflicts of interests.
The “limited” number of human studies is two-fold: 1) the entrance parameters into studies requires a positive on the CDC-two tiered testing(which misses half of all cases & leaves out a huge subset of patients) as well as having the EM rash which is highly variable with patients (studies show 25-80% get it, and some not at all), and 2) anyone who doesn’t agree with the long-held CDC/IDSA narrative that Lyme is hard to catch and easy to treat and doesn’t persist, struggles to be heard and published: https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2017/01/13/lyme-science-owned-by-good-ol-boys/Numerous researchers have told the same sordid tale:
Christian Perronne, physician on the infectious diseases faculty at the University of Versailles-St Quentin, France, states,
“If you try to publish a little bit different from the guidelines, it’s anti-science.”
What researcher in their right mind wants to swim up this stream? Only a few and we are so thankful to have them!
I find it interesting that although patients improve with antibiotics(as clearly stated right here in this article) authorities state antibiotics don’t help.Their studies are rigged for a preconceived outcome. I would not be writing today without numerous long-term antibiotics used judiciously. I can say the same for many other patients. Antimicrobials, of course, are only one prong of treatment and it’s a holistic venture requiring many modalities, experience, and a lot of savvy.
Neuroborreliosis can induce a variety of neurological syndromes: e.g., cranial neuritis, plexitis, radiculitis, meningitis, cerebellitis, … We report on five cases of patients with a diagnosis of neuroborreliosis based on clinical symptoms, serologic tests and MR imaging results. However, neither of them fulfils the diagnostic criteria for definite neuroborreliosis. Are the diagnostic criteria still valid or is there a need to revise them? Is our diagnosis correct? Are these cases post-Lyme auto-immune neuronal inflammation, and not due to still active spirochetal infection? Do we need to consider immunosuppressive therapy instead of third-generation cephalosporins?
