https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2024/01/right-now-lyme-disease
Deciphering Lyme Disease
by Jonathan Shaw
JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2024
WHOLE-GENOME sequencing of hundreds of samples of Borrelia burgdorferi, the tick-borne bacterium that causes Lyme disease, has revealed why the severity of the illness varies from place to place and person to person. The findings suggest new strategies for diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of Lyme—the most prevalent vector-borne disease in North America and Europe, and one of the fastest-growing infectious diseases in the United States.
Assistant professor of medicine Jacob Lemieux spearheaded the sequencing effort beginning in 2017. Lemieux had become interested in tick-borne disease several years earlier, when he was a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of professor of immunology and infectious diseases Pardis Sabeti. A colleague had mentioned the genetic similarities between the parasites that cause babesiosis (a disease also spread by ticks) and malaria, which Lemieux had studied previously. Intrigued, he and Sabeti, one of the world’s leading geneticists studying the biology and evolution of human disease, published the whole-genome sequence of the Babesia parasite in 2015.
On the heels of that success, they expected their sequencing of Lyme-causing bacteria to take perhaps six months. “It took more like six years,” says Lemieux. “It turned out that the genetic diversity of Lyme disease is orders of magnitude harder to handle than any other pathogen.” And that complexity is associated with the wide range of Lyme disease symptoms—from severe arthritis in children to fatigue and potentially debilitating joint, neurological, and cardiovascular symptoms in adults—that persist in some patients for months or even years after treatment.
Rather than being concentrated in one place, “The genome of the Borrelia spirochete [it is a spiral-shaped bacterium] is shredded,” he explains. “There is one chromosome,” the double-stranded linear sequence of DNA found in most living cells, “but then there are about 20 plasmids.” Plasmids are small, circular strands of DNA that can replicate independently of the DNA in the main chromosome. And though extremely difficult to sequence, they turned out to be critical to understanding variations in the severity of Lyme disease. (See link for article)
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A few key points:
- Patient samples were primarily from those with the “classic” bullseye rash, which while diagnostic of Lyme is highly variable and often not seen at all in many patients.
- The group focused on strains that disseminate easily.
- A study author who also studies COVID states BOTH diseases have plasmids that used to be viruses that infected bacteria.
- Notably, the most severe cases had a surface protein with plasmids that occur only in certain strains that are associated with virus-derived plasmids. Some of the genes encode lipoproteins on the bacterial surface which appear to protect the bacteria against immune assault.
- The authors state their discovery will allow for better diagnostic tests that can single out those at risk of severe disease, which could in turn help researchers test whether longer treatments are more effective against these more dangerous strains.
- Predictably, the group is pushing for a “vaccine” to “block” the illness from ever occurring.
- The team included none other than Allen Steere who first identified the disease affecting children in Lyme, Connecticut that he wrongly attributed to juvenile arthritis. His continued myopic focus on Lyme arthritis is worth noting as the disease(s) in the literature has shown it to cause dermatological, neurological, and neuropsychiatric manifestations since the 1800’s. He was also named in the racketeering lawsuit alleging he colluded to deny persistent infection. He is a pharma consultant, co-author of the antiquated and unscientific IDSA Lyme guidelines and a CDC/EIS biowarfare officer which is chartered with responding to biowarfare agents released on U.S. soil, as well as developing vaccines against them. He also worked for the private Yale Corporation that worked closely with the biowarfare tick lab in Connecticut. Steere personally oversaw the Lymerix vaccine trials and associated tests run by the company that licensed the vaccine from his previous employer. Steere personally testifies against doctors who who treat chronic Lyme. Source
Madison Area Lyme Support Group 