Archive for the ‘research’ Category

Coinfection in Lyme Disease: Clinical Impact, Diagnostic Challenges, and Therapeutic Perspectives

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2607/14/2/325

Tick-Borne Co-Infection in Lyme Disease: Clinical Impact, Diagnostic Challenges, and Therapeutic Perspectives

by Georgi Popov, Dzhaner Bashchobanov* and Radina Andonova
Clinic of Infectious Diseases, Sofiamed Hospital, 1797 Sofia, Bulgaria
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Microorganisms 2026, 14(2), 325; https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms14020325
Submission received: 8 January 2026 / Revised: 27 January 2026 / Accepted: 28 January 2026 / Published: 30 January 2026
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Emerging Perspectives in Lyme Disease: Microbial Interactions, Host Responses, and Therapeutic Innovations)
Abstract
Tick-borne co-infections are an increasingly recognized and clinically important aspect of Lyme borreliosis, particularly in regions where Ixodes ticks transmit a wide range of bacterial, protozoan, and viral pathogens. In addition to Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato, these ticks frequently harbor microorganisms such as Babesia spp.,   Anaplasma phagocytophilum, Ehrlichia spp., Borrelia miyamotoi, Bartonella spp., and several tick-borne viruses. Co-infections may increase disease severity, prolong symptom duration, and contribute to atypical or overlapping clinical presentations, thereby complicating diagnosis and management. Growing evidence from epidemiological studies, clinical case series, and experimental in vivo and in vitro models indicates that pathogen–pathogen and pathogen–host interactions can modulate immune responses and influence disease progression. Diagnostic challenges arise from non-specific clinical features and limitations of current laboratory methods. From a therapeutic perspective, although standard antibiotic regimens for Lyme disease are effective against some bacterial co-infections, they do not provide coverage for protozoan or viral agents, necessitating pathogen-specific and, in some cases, combination treatment strategies. This review synthesizes current knowledge on the epidemiology, clinical impact, diagnostic limitations, and treatment approaches for tick-borne co-infections associated with Lyme disease, and highlights critical evidence gaps and future research directions to improve patient outcomes.
For more:

Category:

Anaplasmosis, Babesia, Bartonella, Borrelia Miyamotoi (Relapsing Fever Group), Ehrlichiosis, Lyme, research, Viruses

Study: Unable to Produce ONE Case of Flu Despite Prolonged Close Contact But NIAID-Funded Scientists Engineer Mutant Flu Virus & ‘Expand its Host Range’

More on the ‘virus,’ ‘no virus,’ debate…..

https://jonfleetwood.substack.com/p/niaid-funded-scientists-tried-to?

NIAID-Funded Scientists Tried to Make Influenza Spread—They Couldn’t Despite 80+ Hours of Close Human Exposure: Journal ‘PLOS Pathogens’

Researchers engineered real-world transmission conditions using infected volunteers and sealed indoor exposure sessions, but no secondary infections were detected.
Jon Fleetwood
Feb 12, 2026

A new peer-reviewed study reports that researchers were unable to produce a single confirmed case of influenza transmission in a controlled human exposure experiment, despite prolonged close contact between infected individuals and healthy volunteers.

The study, published last month in PLOS Pathogens, tested whether naturally infected people could transmit influenza to others under tightly controlled indoor conditions designed to facilitate spread.

Transmission did not occur.

“[N]o transmission was observed in this study,” the authors confirm.

Researchers recruited individuals with confirmed influenza infection and placed them in repeated exposure sessions with healthy participants inside a sealed hotel-based quarantine environment.

Volunteers interacted face-to-face, shared objects, and spent hours together in a room with intentionally low ventilation—conditions chosen to support transmission.

Even under these circumstances, no recipient developed influenza-like illness, tested PCR-positive, or showed serological evidence of infection.  (See link for article)

_____________

**Comment**

Even the most hardened skeptic must scratch his head on this one.

Authors give possible reasons for the unexpected outcome:

  • the sick weren’t coughing enough
  • people had immune protection
  • airflow quickly diluted exhaled breath, reducing exposure

Fleetwood points out the exact same thing was found with COVID challenge studies. In other words, exposed volunteers failed to produce sustained infections.

This experiment has been repeated numerous times now showing the same result: nadda.  Going all the way back to the 1918 influenza pandemic, an experiment was conducted on 62 prisoners:

injected with infected lung tissue from sick or deceased patients, have infected tissue dropped in their eyes, and sprayed in the nose and mouth with infectious aerosols. Others would see mucus taken from critically ill patients and put it into the noses and throats of prisoners. In other parts of the trials, experimenters would take the blood of the sick and inject it into the healthy, to see if it was spread through infectious microorganisms in the blood.

Not one got ill or died.

What nobody is saying here is that viruses don’t exist.  But, there is a camp that asserts just that.  Go here for the history of this camp.  I would say these challenge studies don’t help the virus camp.

One thing is sure: exposure alone is not enough to make someone sick.

Which makes you wonder about the purpose of this……

https://jonfleetwood.substack.com/p/niaid-funded-scientists-engineer?

NIAID-Funded Scientists Engineer Mutant Influenza Virus and ‘Expand its Host Range’: Journal ‘Nature Communications’

Gain-of-function flu pathogen acquires new cell entry function, expands infection capability.
Jon Fleetwood
Feb 16, 2026

Scientists funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) engineered influenza viruses and introduced mutations that expanded the virus’s host range—an outcome that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) itself formally defines as gain-of-function research under a 2025 Executive Order implementation notice.

The study, published in Nature Communicationslast week, confirms the work was funded through a NIAID influenza research center.

The authors state:

“Funding was also provided, in part, by … CRIPT (Center for Research on Influenza Pathogenesis and Transmission), a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funded Center for Influenza Research and Response (CEIRR, contract 75N93021C00014…).”

The CEIRR network is one of NIAID’s primary federally funded influenza research programs.

The current Director of NIAID—allowing such risky influenza lab engineering—is Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, who holds a patent on the technology behind the Trump administration’s $500 million influenza vaccine platform.

The same federal agency funding the creation of mutated influenza viruses is led by the man who helped invent—and could profit from—the vaccine meant to fight them.

Moreover, the study comes as Congress and President Donald Trump have enacted a new law allocating more than $5.5 billion in taxpayer funding for pandemic preparedness, with influenza—the same pathogen engineered in these experiments—named as the only virus explicitly identified in the statute.

Funding for the experiment also came from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

(See link for article)

______________

**Comment**

According to attorney Tom Renz, the scuttle that dangerous ‘gain of function’ research was recently banned due to an Executive Order, is false.  Rather, it’s codified and allowed under new regulation.  It’s all good if you are compliant with current regulation.

“Gain of Function” has now been legitimized and sanctioned.  Far from being banned.

The ‘no virus’ camp rolls their eyes at all of this because according to them, none of this exists.

Something exists and something is making people sicker than dogs. How about we find out what is causing these illnesses killing people and STOP funding research making pathogens deadlier?

For more:

Regarding Wisconsin:

 

 

Category:

Activism, research, Viruses

Stealth Viruses as Biological Weapons in Vaccines

https://immunetolerance.substack.com/p/stealth-viruses-as-biological-weapons?

Stealth Viruses as Biological Weapons in Vaccines

How hidden viruses contaminating vaccines could be utilized as binary bioweapons for bioterrorism
A. W. Finnegan
Jan 20, 2026

Stealth is a very promising feature in biological weapons work, and it is a sought after characteristic in both the way they spread and the way they act on the host, which by its nature, has to be of the incapacitating agents that slowly tire, exhaust, and overwhelm the targets, rather than cause immediate deaths and overly apparent disease. Utilizing stealth agents with long incubation periods that can evade detection and disable the immune system were sought after in the Cold War, agents that were geared toward long-term attacks, so that by the time it is realized that such an agent is doing harm, it is often of such a late stage that is hard to correct or contain.

This is why the agents that cause slow chronic diseases became the most successful biological weapons during the Cold War, which is the focus of my first book The Sleeper Agent: The Rise of Lyme Disease, Chronic Illness, and the Great Imitator Antigens of Biological Warfare. In addition to that, all the better if they could find ways to introduce such viruses into the very medical technologies meant to prevent disease – the vaccine.

While contamination has plagued vaccine manufacturing as an inherent problem in the technology from its inception, the idea of deliberately tainting vaccines is not new in biowarfare history. In fact, even as far back as the Civil War the Confederates accused the North of deliberately tainting their smallpox vaccines with vaccino-syphilis.1  Sabotage of vaccines with specific agents was certainly known in potential and a very sensitive topic in the biological warfare race in motion since the start of the United States of America.2 By the time of the Cold War, the biological warfare race was in full swing and stealth agents were already being developed.

Erich Traub was the godfather of these stealth bioweapons – bioweapons that target the immune system, because it was Traub who discovered the mechanics of how they work when he discovered immune tolerance with LCM Virus beginning in 1935 at the Rockefeller Institute.3 Immune tolerance is chronic immunodeficiency, a paralyzed immune system.

These kinds of stealth agents were being unleashed on America and certainly vaccine contaminants would have been a highly esteemed method of infecting a population with stealth viruses that could cause chronic disease, mental illnesses, and cancers to explode in the decades to follow, which is exactly what we’ve seen, and its continued climbing ever since.

A 2003 declassified CIA assessment titled The Darker Bioweapons Future discusses the mechanisms of stealth viruses as biological weapons and talks about how an enemy could seed a population with a stealth virus that would remain dormant and be triggered later, as binary bioweapons that are effective through two components. It states:

According to the scientists convened, other classes of unconventional pathogens that may arise over the next decade and beyond include binary BW agents that only become effective when two components are combined (a particularly insidious example would be a mild pathogen that when combined with its antidote becomes virulent); “designer” BW agents created to be antibiotic resistant or to evade an immune response; weaponized gene therapy vectors that effect permanent change in the victim’s genetic makeup; or a “stealth” virus, which could lie dormant inside the victim for an extended period before being triggered. For example, one panelist cited the possibility of a stealth virus attack that could cripple a large portion of people in their forties with severe arthritis, concealing its hostile origin and leaving a country with massive health and economic problems.4

(See link for article)

____________

**Comment**

Finnegan does it again.  He dives deeply into forbidden territory showing the possibilities of what we are seeing all around us, and maybe experiencing personally.

He points out that vaccines are the perfect delivery system as they are designed to lower your immune system.  And it’s happened.  Cancer causing SV40 has been found polio vaccines (which exposed 200 million Americans) and in the COVID gene therapy injections.  

Finnegan points out how simple it all is to execute:  introduce stealth viruses into the animals to be used in the manufacture of ‘vaccines.’

Finnegan names names, and the chronologically shows very real connections of people and institutions – particularly that the FBI cleared Jonas Salk to advise the government to manufacture a polio vaccine when he couldn’t even pass a background check and was an active member of many communist front groups.  Further, he wrote books about overpopulation and stated we need to stop medical advances due to overpopulation. He also said viruses could be used to degenerate and test the gene pool of humanity (which the SV40 contaminated polio vaccine does).

In other words, he’s an outspoken eugenicist and feels more folks need help dying.
The SV40 problem still exists.

Important excerpt:

…..the FBI then clear[ed] Albert B. Sabin to team up with the Soviet bioweaponeer M. P. Chumakov, traveling back and forth between America and the Soviet Union to collaborate on a polio vaccine that would be given to many millions of Americans at a time when biowarfare activity between these countries was very active. M. P. Chumakov was very active in developing and testing biological weapons in the 1930s with ticks and other insects which they tested on the restive Muslim and Mongolian populations in Siberia. 

Highly recommended read.  It’s deep, but explains a lot.

For more:

 

 

Category:

Activism, Lyme, research, vaccines, Viruses

Why Lyme Disease Can Feel Like PTSD

https://danielcameronmd.com/why-lyme-disease-can-feel-like-ptsd/

Why Lyme Disease Can Feel Like PTSD

Posted By: Dr. Daniel Cameron
11/25

A growing number of my patients tell me something they struggle to say out loud: “Why Lyme disease can feel like PTSD.” They describe a body that reacts like it’s in danger even when nothing is happening, a nervous system that fires alarms without a trigger, and symptoms that feel more like trauma physiology than traditional Lyme disease. This experience is real, biologically driven, and far more common than most clinicians recognize.

1. Why Lyme Disease Can Feel Like PTSD: When the Nervous System Misreads Signals

Lyme disease affects the brain regions responsible for threat detection — especially the amygdala, hippocampus, and autonomic fight-or-flight centers. When inflammation touches these circuits, the system can confuse normal sensations with danger, firing “protective” responses too early or too intensely.

Patients describe sudden adrenaline surges, waves of dread that appear without warning, air hunger, trembling, and nights filled with cortisol spikes. These trauma-pattern sensations occur not because of a traumatic event but because Lyme disrupts the same circuitry involved in PTSD-like responses. This is one of the main reasons why Lyme disease can feel like PTSD to so many patients.

2. PTSD-Like Lyme Symptoms Driven by Unpredictability

Lyme symptoms rarely follow a predictable path. Good days collapse without warning, flares strike suddenly, and stability feels fragile. Over time, the nervous system learns to anticipate danger even when nothing is happening.

One patient said, “The good days scare me the most because I don’t trust them,” and that captures how trauma physiology develops — not from one dramatic event, but from repeated internal unpredictability and the loss of safety in one’s own body.

3. Medical Dismissal Reinforces PTSD-Like Lyme Reactions

Invalidation intensifies trauma-like reactivity. Patients repeatedly hear:

  1. “Your tests are negative.”

  2. “This sounds like anxiety.”

  3. “You’re overthinking it.”

When someone already feels unsafe inside their own body, medical dismissal becomes another threat.
A patient once said, “The dismissal was more traumatizing than the illness,” and unfortunately this is a common experience. This medical trauma is part of why Lyme disease can feel like PTSD and why patients carry both physical and emotional wounds.

4. Trauma Without a Trauma Event: A Hallmark of PTSD-Like Lyme Symptoms

Lyme can create trauma physiology even without a traditional trauma event. No accident, no assault, no dramatic storyline — just:

  1. inflammation affecting the brain’s alarm system

  2. symptoms that appear and disappear without warning

  3. the nervous system learning from each flare

  4. loss of trust in one’s own body

  5. dismissal during the most vulnerable moments

Patients say, “My body remembers being sick,” or “My system reacts before I can think,” and these are accurate descriptions of a trauma-pattern nervous system responding to infection-driven disruption.

The Core Truth: Why Lyme Disease Can Feel Like PTSD

Lyme activates the same circuits trauma uses, disrupts the same autonomic pathways, and creates the same hypervigilance and internal alarms. The body braces for danger because the systems designed to sense danger have been altered by illness.

Patients are not imagining danger — their nervous system is responding to inflammation, unpredictability, and lived experience.

When we finally recognize this pattern, patients feel understood, and the nervous system can begin to settle after years of being on guard.

Have your Lyme symptoms ever felt like PTSD? Share your experience below — your story may help someone else feel less alone.

Resources

  1. National Institute of Mental Health. Traumatic Events and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
  2. Pubmed. Post-traumatic stress disorder: clinical and translational neuroscience from cells to circuits
  3. Dr. Daniel Cameron: Lyme Science Blog. PTSD-Like Symptoms After Medical Gaslighting in Lyme Disease
  4. Dr. Daniel Cameron: Lyme Science Blog. What PTSD Research Reveals About Chronic Lyme Disease

_____________

**Comment**

Great article.  Thankfully, those days are long gone from me, but I remember them.

Lyme/MSIDS has a lot of unpredictability.  Patients often relapse.  This can set you up for holding your breath waiting for the shoe to drop!  This is no way to live but it takes time and experience to learn how to cope with this beast.

I’ve written this before, but it bares repeating – early on in my journey I found a patient online who had obtained their health back.  Please understand, I was desperate for hope!  Fighting the notion I would be sick forever, struggling with excruciating pain, I sent off an email asking their advice.  They got back to me immediately.  They ‘got it’ and understood my fear.  First, they told me I Could Get Well.  I can’t even begin to express the relief I felt.  But second, they told me to not get depressed about being depressed – that there were going to be hard days ahead, so just embrace the suck and know tomorrow could be much better.

I’m telling you, I would hug this person if they stood before me today.  They gave me hope and that is a medicine that is in short supply!

For more:

Lastly, I found I felt the worst mentally in tandem with feeling my worst physically.  This makes complete sense when you understand the systemic, widespread assault your body is battling.

Category:

Inflammation, Lyme, Psychological Aspects, research

Measles Highly Treatable & Latest ‘Outbreak’ Shaped by Missing Data Points. Therapeutic Candidates for Measles

https://imahealth.substack.com/p/major-new-study-measles-is-highly?

Major New Study: “Measles Is Highly Treatable” IMA Peer-Reviewed Study Published in Antiviral Research

Comprehensive analysis highlights evidence-based therapeutic strategies and calls for a broader public health conversation about measles.
Independent Medical Alliance
Feb 11, 2026
 
Article Excerpts:

The study, titled “Acute Management of Measles: A Systematic Review of Therapeutic Strategies,” appears in the journal Antiviral Research and was authored by Amandeep Kaur, Ugo Alaribe, Joseph Varon, Sidra Hassaan, and Matthew Halma. Key Takeaways:

  1. Measles highly treatable. With a combination of strengthening the immune system and supportive supplements, Measles can be treated with a high degree of success.

  2. Vitamin A supplementation is supported by multiple randomized controlled trials and meta-analyses showing reduced measles-related mortality, particularly in vitamin A–deficient populations.

  3. Ribavirin and Interferon-α have demonstrated clinical benefit in severe or high-risk cases, especially among immunocompromised individuals.

  4. Supportive therapies, including intravenous immune globulin (IVIG), antibiotics to prevent secondary bacterial infections, and immune-supportive nutrients such as vitamins C and D, may reduce complications.

  5. Investigational antivirals and monoclonal antibodies show promise in preclinical studies.

https://popularrationalism.substack.com/p/whats-really-going-on-in-south-carolinas?

What’s Really Going On in South Carolina’s Measles Outbreak?

Key data points are missing that would allow a rational assessment.
James Lyons-Weiler, PhD
Feb 10, 2026

As of early February 2026, South Carolina remains the center of the largest measles outbreak in the U.S. in over 30 years. With 920 confirmed cases and over 90% reportedly occurring in “unvaccinated” individuals, headlines suggest a crisis of vaccine refusal. But beneath the headlines lies a more complex picture—one shaped by data classification, eligibility confusion, and methodological blind spots that public health authorities have failed to address.

This article unpacks the numbers behind the outbreak, highlights structural flaws in case reporting, and shows why surface-level interpretations of vaccination status are no substitute for scientific analysis.  (See link for article)

A few examples of the shamwizardry:

  1. Classification flaws: “Unvaccinated” includes infants under 12 months that are not eligible for MMR, conflating ineligibility with refusal
  2. No Denominators: Vaccine effectiveness (VE) requires knowing how many vaxxed and unvaxxed were at risk, exposed, or susceptible
  3. Misclassification: Those vaxxed who developed a rash within 21 days and were not genotyped via testing may have been declared ‘measles cases’ even though they are not contagious
  4. Confirmation Method not disclosed: measles outbreaks in high-vaxxed settings rely heavily on epi-linkage which means ONE PCR-confirmed case can result in DOZENS of cases being confirmed simply by association – without any testing.
  5. No breakdown of hospitalizations by vax status or age group.  Without cross-tabs, no assessment can be made.
  6. Most moms were vaxxed, not infected and antibody titers passed to babies wane far earlier leaving infants vulnerable the first year. Blaming parents for not vaxxing ignores the change in measles immunity
  7. No public access to raw case data.  What’s up with that?  Without public scrutiny any claims made are assertions not conclusions.
  8. Misapplication of surveillance architecture designed to detect outbreaks not evaluate efficacy.
  9. No audits on time, location, vaccine lot, etc revealing a logistical problem not an immunological problem

New Study Reviews Therapeutic Candidates for Measles

A new peer-reviewed study from IMA researchers reviews therapeutic candidates for measles, including Vitamin A. Why isn’t this part of the conversation?
Independent Medical Alliance
Feb 10, 2026
acute management of measles hero

If you’ve followed the news this year, you might think measles is an unstoppable force. Headlines warn of “surges” and “outbreaks,” case counts are tallied like a scoreboard, and the message is clear: be afraid.

But there’s a part of the story that rarely makes it into the coverage. In developed countries, serious complications from measles are rare. And perhaps most importantly: promising therapeutic candidates exist.

A new peer-reviewed study co-authored by IMA President Dr. Joseph Varon and Director of Research Matthew Halma adds to a growing body of research aimed at exploring therapeutic candidates for measles. Published in Antiviral Research, this systematic review compiles clinical evidence for treatment options—the kind of information that could help patients and physicians make informed decisions. So why isn’t it part of the conversation?

“Adjunctive therapies, including Vitamin A, Ribavirin, and Interferon-α, and emerging antiviral candidates, play an important role in reducing complications… Continued research is urgently needed to validate novel antivirals and immunomodulatory treatments.” — Study authors

📖 Read and Download the Full Paper

Acute management of measles: A systematic review of therapeutic strategies Authors: Amandeep Kaur, Ugo Alaribe, Joseph Varon, Sidra Hassaan and Matthew Halma

(See link for article)

_______________

**Comment**

I love it when people who swallow the red pill decide to act in their sphere of influence.  Be thankful for the COVID train-wreck.  It woke a lot of people up!

Please read the entire article above but it’s worth pointing out a few salient facts:

  • Measles was nearly eradicated before a vaccine was introduced.  Deaths dropped from about 13 to .2 per 100,000.
  • Like any other disease, the outcome depends heavily on pre-existing health.
  • Vitamin A deficiency is a major factor (92% of hospitalized measles patients are deficient)

The following treatment candidates should be considered:

  • Vitamin A
  • Antivirals (Ribavirin and Interferon-a)
  • Supportive therapies (IVIG, antibiotics, vitamin C and D)
  • Investigational therapies (ERDRP-0519 and Monoclonal antibodies)

For more resources on measles, check out these guides from IMA:

For more:

Download the Measles Fact Sheet

 

 

 

Category:

research, Treatment, vaccines, Viruses