Archive for the ‘research’ Category

Study Shows Dead Lyme Debris Persists in CNS Despite Antibiotics and Causes Inflammation

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/29922241/

Primary Human Microglia Are Phagocytically Active and Respond to Borrelia burgdorferi With Upregulation of Chemokines and Cytokines.

Greenmyer JR, et al. Front Microbiol. 2018.

Abstract

The Lyme disease causing bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi has an affinity for the central nervous system (CNS) and has been isolated from human cerebral spinal fluid by 18 days following Ixodes scapularis tick bite. Signaling from resident immune cells of the CNS could enhance CNS penetration by B. burgdorferi and activated immune cells through the blood brain barrier resulting in multiple neurological complications, collectively termed neuroborreliosis. The ensuing symptoms of neurological impairment likely arise from a glial-driven, host inflammatory response to B. burgdorferi.

To date, however, the mechanism by which the bacterium initiates neuroinflammation leading to neural dysfunction remains unclear. We hypothesized that dead B. burgdorferi and bacterial debris persist in the CNS in spite of antibiotic treatment and contribute to the continuing inflammatory response in the CNS.

To test our hypothesis, cultures of primary human microglia were incubated with live, antibiotic-killed and antibiotic-killed sonicated B. burgdorferi to define the response of microglia to different forms of the bacterium. We demonstrate that primary human microglia treated with B. burgdorferi show increased expression of pattern recognition receptors and genes known to be involved with cytoskeletal rearrangement and phagocytosis including MARCO, SCARB1, PLA2, PLD2, CD14, and TLR3. In addition, we observed increased expression and secretion of pro-inflammatory mediators and neurotrophic factors such as IL-6, IL-8, CXCL-1, and CXCL-10. Our data also indicate that B. burgdorferi interacts with the cell surface of primary human microglia and may be internalized following this initial interaction.

Furthermore, our results indicate that dead and sonicated forms of B. burgdorferi induce a significantly larger inflammatory response than live bacteria. Our results support our hypothesis and provide evidence that microglia contribute to the damaging inflammatory events associated with neuroborreliosis.

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**Comment**

The study in the following link corroborates the above study in that it did not find active CNS infection with Lyme encephalopathy:  https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/891992

The following short video shows phagocytosis in action.  For those of my vintage, think of Pac Man gobbling up things in its path.  This is exactly what our immune cells (macrophages or white blood cells) do.  Notice that “special digestive enzymes” shred the bacterium into pieces.  This is why enzyme therapy can help Lyme/MSIDS patients – both digestive and systemic enzymes can help in numerous ways – one of which is by shredding the bacteria, and cleaning the blood of debris.  According to the above study, this debris is very probably ONE reason we have high inflammation, pain, and symptoms.  Anything you can do to clear out that debris is helpful.

Immune Cells Eating Bacteria (Phagocytosis)

Animation by: Fusion Medial Animation (www.fusionanimation.co.uk) Microscopy by: Timelapse Vision (http://timelapsevision.com)

This video describes the structure and function of microglia.

By Matt Jensen. Created by Matthew Barry Jensen.

________________________

For more on Enzymes:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2016/04/22/systemic-enzymes/

https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/03/05/how-proteolytic-enzymes-may-help-lyme-msids/

Lactoferrin, an iron-binding milk glycoprotein has also been found to help due to borrelia’s ability to hijack our plasminogen system allowing it to penetrate tissue barriers:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/05/03/lactoferrin-for-lyme/

DMSO & MSM may also help certain patients due to their anti-inflammatory, anticoagulant, oxygenating, free radical scavenging, detoxifying, and antiparasitic properties.  Please read this article to understand both substances better.  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/03/02/dmso-msm-for-lyme-msids/

And, as always, please work with your medical practitioner and discuss ALL treatment ideas.  There are medical contraindications on nearly every substance and you need to be privy to them.

Category:

Detoxing, Inflammation, Lyme, Pain Management, research, Treatment

Ticks That Carry Lyme Disease Are Spreading Fast

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ticks-that-carry-lyme-disease-are-spreading-fast/

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay July 13, 2018, 5:25 PM

Ticks that carry Lyme disease are spreading fast

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/behind-the-surge-in-diseases-spread-by-mosquitoes-ticks-fleas/“>https://www.cbsnews.com/video/behind-the-surge-in-diseases-spread-by-mosquitoes-ticks-fleas/  (News story here)

Think you live in a place that’s free from disease-carrying ticks? Don’t be so sure.

Citizen scientists found ticks capable of transmitting Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses in dozens of places across the United States where the pests had never previously been recorded, a new study reports.

All told, disease-carrying ticks were detected in 83 counties where they’d never been found before across 24 states.

The numbers reflect a rise in tick populations across the country, said study author Nate Nieto. He’s an associate professor with Northern Arizona University’s department of biological sciences.

“People should be aware of ticks and tick-borne disease, even when they may think there’s not a recorded incidence of a tick in a county,” Nieto said. “These things, they’re not obeying borders. They’re going by biology. If they get moved there by a deer or bird or people or pets, they’re going to establish themselves and start growing.”

The massive nationwide study also provides evidence that ticks are born carrying infectious diseases, rather than picking germs up from the animals upon which they feed, said Wendy Adams, research grant director for the Bay Area Lyme Foundation, in California.

All life stages of the most commonly encountered ticks — the deer tick, the western black-legged tick and the lone star tick — carried the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, Adams said.

“That’s important, because that would say that a tick doesn’t need to acquire an infection from a blood meal. It’s born with the infection,” Adams explained.

These findings are the result of an unexpectedly successful effort by the Bay Area Lyme Foundation to collect tick samples from across the country.

Between January 2016 and August 2017, the foundation and Northern Arizona University offered free tick identification and testing to the general public. People were encouraged to send in ticks they found on themselves, their pets or around their communities.

The scientists’ original goal was to collect about 2,000 ticks. They wound up with more than 16,000, sent in by people from every state except Alaska.

“We got such a phenomenal participation,” Nieto said. “Two weeks in May, we got almost 2,000 packages per week. That is just powerful data.”

People found ticks in areas not represented in tracking maps maintained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the researchers discovered.

Most of these new areas were right next to counties with known tick populations, Adams said.

“Ticks are spreading. Tick populations have exploded,” Adams said. “This is good data to show the extent of that. It’s a message to people that even if you think ticks aren’t a problem, they could be.”

The 24 states that contain counties with newly documented populations of deer ticks or Western black-legged ticks are Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.

Further, ticks were found in states where they simply weren’t supposed to be, Adams said. Lone star ticks were found in California and black-legged ticks were found in Nevada, both for the first time ever.

People also found ticks carrying Babesia — microscopic parasites that infect red blood cells and cause the potentially life-threatening disease babesiosis — in 26 counties across 10 states in which the public health department does not require physicians to report cases of the disease.

The new study “highlights the geographic variability of ticks and the pathogens they carry,” said Dr. Paul Auwaerter, clinical director of infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore.

“Surveillance is increasingly important as we see climate and environmental changes, because we do see expanding ranges of ticks. We’ve seen that with Lyme disease. We’ve seen that with babesiosis,” said Auwaerter, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Adams agreed, suggesting that more funding should be directed to these sorts of crowd-sourced tracking efforts.

“We have to invest federal dollars to examine the spread of ticks,” she said.

In the meantime, the Bay Area Lyme Foundation suggests that people protect themselves from ticks by:

  • Wearing light-colored clothes to make ticks more visible.
  • Do regular tick checks after being in a tick-infested area, and shower immediately after to wash away ticks that might be crawling on you.
  • Consider using tick repellents like DEET for skin and permethrin for clothing.
  • Talk with your doctor if you develop any symptoms following a tick bite.

The new study was published online July 12 in the journal PLOS One.

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/lyme-disease-in-dogs-what-you-need-to-know/“>https://www.cbsnews.com/video/lyme-disease-in-dogs-what-you-need-to-know/ (News story here on Lyme Disease in Dogs)

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**Comment**

There has NEVER been a minimum time established for ticks to transmit the Lyme bacterium (or any other pathogen for that matter), so to exclaim with certainty that if the tick drops off the dog before 24 hours they will not get infected is pure conjecture. 

For more on that issue:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2017/04/14/transmission-time-for-lymemsids-infection/

Research on transmission times as well as transmission modes are desperately needed.

This article points out that ticks don’t require a blood meal that they can be BORN infected.  This is important information to disseminate as many still believe a blood meal is required for them to become infected.

 A telling quote:  “These things are not obeying borders.”

Nope.  And they never have.  This tick border thing is a man-made constructed paradigm that has never been accurate, but it’s fit the CDC/NIH/IDSA narrative.  http://steveclarknd.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/The-Confounding-Debate-Over-Lyme-Disease-in-the-South-DiscoverMagazine.com_.pdf (go to page 6 and read about Speilman’s maps which are faulty but have ruled like the Iron Curtain, and have been used to keep folks from being diagnosed and treated)

Time to pull the blinders off and look at this thing as the PANDEMIC it truly is.

Recently, Wisconsin had it’s first death from Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, transmitted by the Lone Star Tick that isn’t supposed to be in Wisconsin at all:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/07/10/first-rmsf-death-in-wisconsin/

The climate-change issue is another man-made paradigm regarding ticks who will be the last species on the planet besides the IRS:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2017/08/14/canadian-tick-expert-climate-change-is-not-behind-lyme-disease/

We don’t need any more climate studies regarding ticks.  What we need to know is how this thing is transmitted (sexual, congenital, via breastmilk as well as other bugs, etc), testing that picks up all the pathogens, how long it takes for transmission, how to control ticks, what effectively kills the pathogens, and how to get our treatments paid for by insurance).

So thankful they brought up Babesia; however, there are 18 and counting pathogens spread by ticks and we need mandatory reporting for ALL of them as well as proper and effective treatments paid for by insurance:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2017/07/01/one-tick-bite-could-put-you-at-risk-for-at-least-6-different-diseases/

Great work Bay Area Lyme Foundation!

Category:

Activism, Babesia, Lyme, research, Testing, Ticks, Transmission

Pediatricians State New WHO AEFI Guidelines Put Children’s Lives at Risk & 200 Evidence-based Reasons Not to Vaccinate

https://www.moneylife.in/article/new-guidelines-from-who-put-childrens-life-at-risk-paediatricians/54601.html

New Guidelines from WHO Put Children’s Life At Risk: Paediatricians

Moneylife Digital Team
06 July 2018

Two leading paediatricians in India have urged the World Health Organization (WHO) to urgently revise its manual on classification of Adverse Events Following Immunization (AEFI), warning that the new guidelines put children’s life at risk.

This needs to be done “urgently in the interest of child safety,” Doctors Jacob Puliyel at St Stephen’s Hospital in Delhi, and Pathik Naik of Children Hospital in Surat, say in a report published in the prestigious journal ‘F1000Research’

Under WHO’s revised manual on AEFI, only those adverse reactions observed during clinical trials of a vaccine, should be classified as vaccine related. All new serious adverse reactions including deaths seen during post-marketing of the vaccine should be considered as ‘coincidental’ or ‘unclassifiable’, and the vaccine should not be blamed.

The WHO has also changed the definition of “causal association,” the doctors say. Under the revised guidelines, if there is an alternate explanation for the adverse event, or another factor is involved, causative association with vaccine should not be made.

“In other words, if after vaccination, a child with an underlying congenital heart disease develops cardiac failure, it would not be considered causally related to the vaccine.”

The revised classification by WHO “is a major step backward for patient safety,” the authors say, adding, “This could embolden vaccine manufacturers to be more reckless with regard to adverse reactions.”.

Puliyel and Naik note that the Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety has documented many deaths in children with pre-existing heart disease after they were administered the pentavalent vaccine (combined diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, Hib, and hepatitis-B vaccine).

“Under WHO’s new definition of causal association, these deaths would not be acknowledged as related to vaccination.”

Both Sri Lanka and Vietnam governments withdrew the pentavalent vaccine following the deaths of five children in Sri Lanka and 12 in Vietnam soon after vaccination.

But WHO investigating teams declared that the deaths were ‘unlikely’ to be related to vaccination, the report says. 

The authors point out that a new study in India, showed that the switch from DPT (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis) to pentavalent vaccine almost doubled the deaths following vaccination.

“A large number of these deaths could have been avoided had the AEFI manual not been revised.”

According to their report, the consequence of India adopting WHO’s new classification can be seen from the causality assessment of 132 serious AEFI cases uploaded on the website of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Of the total AEFI cases, 54 babies died and 78 survived,

“but not even one death was classified as vaccine-related. Nearly all the deaths were simply classified as unclassifiable or coincidental.”

Vaccines are drugs used as a preventive measure, given to healthy persons.  Adverse events following immunization must be monitored more carefully than other drugs, the authors note.

“A credible immunization safety evaluation and monitoring system is essential for the success of immunization programmes.”

Adverse reaction and deaths may not show up as significantly increased in small safety studies. However, records of all deaths and serious adverse events following vaccinations should be maintained and periodically reviewed for safety signals.

According to the authors, WHO’s new AEFI classification scheme “that allows for an outright denial of any new causative association with vaccination” could fall foul of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Adverse reaction and deaths may not show up as significantly increased in small safety studies. However, records of all deaths and serious adverse events following vaccinations should be maintained and periodically reviewed for safety signals.

“Paradoxically, the AEFI algorithm is said to be for vaccine safety,” says Puliyel. “Perhaps we need a scheme for public safety rather than vaccine safety.”

Please see:

200 Evidence-Based Reasons NOT To Vaccinate – FREE Research PDF

http://cdn.greenmedinfo.com/sites/default/files/gmipub_58635_anti_therapeutic_action_vaccination_all.pdf  Written By:  GreenMedInfo Research Group

Also, Lyme/MSIDS patients need to consider vaccinations very carefully as vaccines have reactivated latent infections:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2017/12/02/scottish-doctor-gives-insight-on-lyme-msids/…..young women who fell ill after their HPV vaccination, which seems to have stimulated a latent Lyme infection to reactivate.

https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2016/04/24/gardasil-and-bartonella/   Asymptomatic girls after receiving Gardasil activated dormant Bartonella which was confirmed by testing.

Dr. Klinghardt in this article states that many patients improve after dealing with retroviruses which can be acquired from vaccines:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/06/23/the-role-of-retroviruses-in-chronic-illness-a-clinicians-perspective/  An unintended source of retroviruses are some vaccines as reported in Frontiers in Microbiology in January 2011.

Since retroviral contaminated vaccines was first reported to the CDC, NIH, FDA, and other government agencies in 1991 by American immunologist Elaine DeFreitas, the government did absolutely nothing for over two decades until the FDA approved technologies developed by the Cerus Corporation in 2014 to clean up the problem.

Microbiologist Judy Mikovitz sounded the alarm and was viciously persecuted:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2017/10/15/vaccines-and-retroviruses-a-whistleblower-reveals-what-the-government-is-hiding/

But unless your ear is to the ground, you probably didn’t even hear about it.  Yet many are probably dealing with it.

Data suggests that 6% of the U.S. population is harboring a retrovirus in their bodies that can develop into an acquired immune deficiency. It began with trials of polio vaccines and yellow fever vaccines given in the early 1930s. This is when the first recorded cases of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and autism appeared. It involved the use of laboratory mice to prepare vaccines for human use. Retrovirus exposure intensified in the 1970s as new vaccines and pharmaceutical products were developed. These retroviruses and related infectious agents are now associated with dozens of modern chronic illnesses – perhaps nearly all of them. In these diseases, infection leads to inflammation — and unresolved inflammation can lead to chronic disease.

Even though 20 million Americans are likely to be infected, not everyone will develop serious illness.  Retroviruses in the human body are like sleeping giants. They are quiet until they are activated in immune deficient people.  Once activated, they create diseases such as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), Chronic Lyme disease, Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), numerous cancers, and a wide range of other autoimmune, neuroimmune, and central nervous system diseases. 

These retroviruses can be passed between family members through body fluids.

It is not unusual to find a family where everyone tests positive for a retrovirus, but only one person is experiencing a retrovirus-related illness. Symptom free carriers are common in human retroviral infections.
And our government hid it.

Do your research on vaccines and think long and hard about it as acquiring Lyme/MSIDS can be the trigger that activates retroviruses and vice a versa.

 

Category:

Activism, research, vaccines, Viruses

We Have No Idea How Bad the US Tick Problem Is

https://www.wired.com/story/we-have-no-idea-how-bad-the-us-tick-problem-is/
AUTHOR: MEGAN MOLTENIMEGAN MOLTENI
SCIENCE
7.04.18

WE HAVE NO IDEA HOW BAD THE US TICK PROBLEM IS

WHEN RICK OSTFELD gets bitten by a tick, he knows right away. After decades studying tick-borne diseases as an ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, Ostfeld has been bitten more than 100 times, and his body now reacts to tick saliva with an intense burning sensation. He’s an exception. Most people don’t even notice that they’ve been bitten until after the pest has had time to suck up a blood meal and transfer any infections it has circulating in its spit.

Around the world, diseases spread by ticks are on the rise. Reported cases of Lyme, the most common US tick-borne illness, have quadrupled since the 1990s. Other life-threatening infections like anaplasmosis, babesiosis, and Rocky Mountain spotted fever are increasing in incidence even more quickly than Lyme. Meat allergies caused by tick bites have skyrocketed from a few dozen a decade ago to more than 5,000 in the US alone, according to experts. And new tick-borne pathogens are emerging at a troubling clip; since 2004, seven new viruses and bugs transmitted through tick bite have shown up in humans in the US.

Scientists don’t know exactly which combination of factors—shifting climate patterns, human sprawl, deforestation—is leading to more ticks in more places. But there’s no denying the recent population explosion, especially of the species that carries Lyme disease: the black-legged tick.

“Whole new communities are being engulfed by this tick every year,” says Ostfeld. “And that means more people getting sick.”

Tick science, surveillance, and management efforts have so far not kept pace. But the country’s increasingly dire tick-borne disease burden has begun to galvanize a groundswell of research interest and funding.

In 1942, Congress established the CDC specifically to prevent malaria, a public health crisis spreading through mosquitoes. Which is why many US states and counties today still have active surveillance programs for skeeters. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses data from these government entities to regularly update distribution maps, track emerging threats (like Zika), and coordinate control efforts. No such system exists for ticks.

Public health departments are required to report back to the CDC on Lyme and six other tick-borne infections. Those cases combined with county-level surveys and some published academic studies make up the bulk of what the agency knows about national tick distribution. But this data, patchy and stuck in time, doesn’t do a lot to help public health officials on the ground.

“We’ve got national maps, but we don’t have detailed local information about where the worst areas for ticks are located,” says Ben Beard, chief of the CDC’s bacterial diseases branch in the division of vector-borne diseases. “The reason for that is there has never been public funding to support systematic tick surveillance efforts.”

That’s something Beard is trying to change. He says the CDC is currently in the process of organizing a nationwide surveillance program, which could launch within the year. It will pull data collected by state health departments and the CDC’s five regional centers about tick prevalence and the pathogens they’re carrying to build a better picture of where outbreaks and hot spots are developing, especially on the expanding edge of tick populations.

The CDC is also a few years into a massive nationwide study it’s conducting with the Mayo Clinic, which will eventually enroll 30,000 people who’ve been bitten by ticks. Each one will be tested for known tick diseases, and next-generation sequencing conducted at CDC will screen for any other pathogens that might be present. Together with patient data, it should provide a more detailed picture of exactly what’s out there.

Together, these efforts are helping to change the way people and government agencies think about ticks as a public health threat.

“Responsibility for tick control has always fallen to individuals and homeowners,” says Beard. “It’s not been seen as an official civic duty, but we think it’s time whole communities got engaged. And getting better tick surveillance data will help us define risk for these communities in areas where people aren’t used to looking for tick-borne diseases.”

The trouble is that scientists also know very little about which interventions actually reduce those risks.

“There’s no shortage of products to control ticks,” says Ostfeld. “But it’s never been demonstrated that they do a good enough job, deployed in the right places, to prevent any cases of tick-borne disease.”

In a double-blind trial published in 2016, CDC researchers treated some yards with insecticides and others with a placebo. The treated yards knocked back tick numbers by 63 percent, but families living in the treated homes were still just as likely to be diagnosed with Lyme.

Ostfeld and his wife and research partner Felicia Keesing are in the middle of a four-year study to evaluate the efficacy of two tick-control methods in their home territory of Dutchess County, an area with one of the country’s highest rates of Lyme disease. It’s a private-public partnership between their academic institutions, the CDC, and the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Foundation, which provided a $5 million grant.

Ostfeld and Keesing are blanketing entire neighborhoods in either a natural fungus-based spray or tick boxes, or both. The tick boxes attract small mammal hosts, which get a splash of tick-killing chemicals when they venture inside. They check with all the human participants every two weeks for 10 months of the year to see if anyone’s gotten sick. By the end of 2020 the study should be able to tell them how well these methods, used together or separately on a neighborhood-wide scale, can reduce the risk of Lyme.

“If we get a definitive answer that these work the next task would be to figure out how to make such a program more broadly available. Who’s going to pay for it, who’s going to coordinate it?” says Ostfeld. “If it doesn’t work then perhaps the conclusion is maybe environmental control just can’t be done.”

In that case, people would be stuck with pretty much the same options they have today: protective clothing, repellants, and daily partner tick-checks. It’s better than nothing. But with more and more people getting sick, the US will need better solutions soon.

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**Comment**

Great article pointing out the scary fact that only 6 pathogens transmitted by ticks are being reported on.  There are currently 18 pathogens and counting…..so the numbers are woefully inadequate.

Here’s the list so far:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2017/07/01/one-tick-bite-could-put-you-at-risk-for-at-least-6-different-diseases/

Babesiosis
Bartonellosis
Borrelia miyamotoi
Bourbon Virus
Colorado Tick Fever
Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic Fever
Ehrlichiosis/Anaplasmosis
Heartland Virus
Meat Allergy/Alpha Gal
Pacific Coast Tick Fever: Richettsia philipii
Powassan Encephalitis
Q Fever
Rickettsia parkeri Richettsiosis
Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever
STARI: Southern Tick-Associated Rash Illness
Tickborne meningoencephalitis
Tick Paralysis
Tularemia

And the number keeps growing…..but nobody’s keeping score.

Category:

Activism, Alpha Gal Meat Allergy, Anaplasmosis, Babesia, Bartonella, Borrelia Miyamotoi (Relapsing Fever Group), Ehrlichiosis, Lyme, mosquitoes, research, Rickettsia, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Testing, Ticks, Transmission, Viruses

Bartonella henselae Neuroretinitis in Patients Without Cat Scratch

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/29962482/

Bartonella henselae neuroretinitis in patients without cat scratch.

Celiker H, et al. Jpn J Infect Dis. 2018.

Abstract
Cat-scratch disease (CSD) is a syndrome which is characterized by lymphadenopathy, fever, and skin lesions in association with a cat scratch or bite. Bartonella henselae is the primary bacterial agent responsible for CSD. Here we report serologically proven atypical presentation cases of B henselae neuroretinitis. In this study, three neuroretinitis patients were evaluated. Animal contact histories, ocular examinations, systemic work-up, clinical findings, and treatment compliance of the patients were assessed. All the patients denied a history of a cat or any animal contact, or of having CSD findings. Serologic testing with indirect immunofluorescence assay (IFA) was used for diagnosis of Bartonella neuroretinitis. IFA test results were positive for all patients. Two of the patients were treated with antibiotics. Optic disc edema and macular exudates resolved gradually, and at their last follow-up visits, all the signs had disappeared. There was no disease recurrence after finishing treatment. Serious complications were seen in the untreated patient. In conclusion, even though there may be a lack of systemic signs and symptoms of CSD in a patient with neuroretinitis, B henselae infection should be considered.

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**Comment**

This article points out an extremely important point – Bartonella is spreading without a history of cat or animal contact, which begs the question:

HOW DID THEY GET IT?

I just posted this today and commented that many Lyme/MSIDS patients have Bartonella yet authorities are denying tick involvement:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/07/10/infective-endocarditis-associated-with-bartonella-henselae-a-case-series/

https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/?s=Bartonella+Treatment  Here we see far more than ticks carry Bart:

Arthropod vectors including fleas and flea feces, biting flies such as sand flies and horn flies, the human body louse, mosquitoes, and ticks; through bites and scratches of reservoir hosts; and potentially from needles and syringes in the drug addicted. Needle stick transmission to veterinarians has been reported. There is documentation that cats have received it through blood transfusion. 3.2% of blood donors in Brazil were found to carry Bartonella in their blood. Bartonella DNA has been found in dust mites. Those with arthropod exposure have an increased risk, as well as those working and living with pets that have arthropod exposure. 28% of veterinarians tested positively for Bartonella compared with 0% of controls. About half of all cats may be infected with Bartonella – as high as 80% in feral cats and near 40% of domestic cats. In various studies dogs have close to a 50% rate as well. Evidence now suggests it may be transmitted congenitally from mother to child – potentially leading to birth defects.

Is this getting any media coverage?  Nope.  Yet we STILL hear about Zika…..despite the fact mosquitoes here in Wisconsin can’t even carry it!  And according to 2017 CDC data, only SEVEN cases were reported through “presumed” local mosquito transmission in Florida and Texas:  https://www.cdc.gov/zika/reporting/2017-case-counts.html

So the question begs to be asked, why are my tax dollars going toward a disease that can’t even be acquired in the state of Wisconsin, yet no work is being done on Bartonella, yet nearly every Wisconsin patient I work with has it?  

Oh, and it can kill you…..

 

Category:

Bartonella, research, Testing, Treatment