Archive for the ‘Testing’ Category

PTLD Not Recognized by WHO – Why? It Was Never Validated – the APA Deleted it from the DSM-5…..Oops!

c539767d-ca8c-484c-8115-9ad9d27e50be-original

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**Comment**

One of the burning questions which desperately needs an answer:  is Lyme and the other tick borne illnesses persistent/chronic?

All the climate data in the world is not going to answer this.

Until this question is settled once and for all, patients WILL NOT get properly diagnosed or treated.  They also will not get any help from their medical insurance which is hiding behind this repudiated PTLDS diagnosis.  

This singular question is what is driving the lack of care along with not being able to effectively test for these pathogens and being honest about all the possible routes of transmission (sexual, congenital, via breastmilk, via other insects, etc)

For more on Lyme persistence:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2015/09/19/proof-of-borrelia-persistence/

https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/07/23/exploring-the-controversial-concept-of-chronic-lyme-disease/

http://norvect.no/230-peer-reviewed-studies-show-evidence-of-persistent-lyme-disease/

http://www.ilads.org/ilads_news/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/CLDList-ILADS.pdf (700 peer-reviewed articles showing persistence)

https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2016/08/09/dr-paul-duray-research-fellowship-foundation-some-great-research-being-done-on-lyme-disease/ The work of Dr. Elizabeth Burgess DVM PhD in 1990 showed that dogs infected with LD were transmitting and infecting female dogs through sexual transmission, proof in humans is lacking. Pathologist Alan McDonald found B. burgdorferi and B. mayonii in the testicle and brain of a man who had been treated nearly continuously on antibiotics for the last seven years of his life. Grier states the case for sexual transmission is stronger than ever.

https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/06/19/33-years-of-documentation-of-maternal-child-transmission-of-lyme-disease-and-congenital-lyme-borreliosis-a-review/

https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/06/28/the-science-isnt-settled-on-chronic-lyme/

And of course, little to nothing has been done on the other tick-borne pathogen infections.  How many of them are persistent?  This question is so crucial because it would explain why thousands and thousands continue to relapse even on appropriate treatment.

 

 

 

 

 

Category:

Activism, Lyme, Testing

Study Shows Tick Infection & Transmission Potential for Both DTV & WNV

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/vbz.2017.2224#utm_source=ETOC&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=vbz

Generation of a Lineage II Powassan Virus (Deer Tick Virus) cDNA Clone: Assessment of Flaviviral Genetic Determinants of Tick and Mosquito Vector Competence

Kenney Joan L. , Anishchenko Michael , Hermance Meghan , Romo Hannah , Chen Ching-I , Thangamani Saravanan , and Brault Aaron C.
Published Online:1 Jul 2018https://doi.org/10.1089/vbz.2017.2224

Abstract

The Flavivirus genus comprises a diverse group of viruses that utilize a wide range of vertebrate hosts and arthropod vectors. The genus includes viruses that are transmitted solely by mosquitoes or vertebrate hosts as well as viruses that alternate transmission between mosquitoes or ticks and vertebrates. Nevertheless, the viral genetic determinants that dictate these unique flaviviral host and vector specificities have been poorly characterized. In this report, a cDNA clone of a flavivirus that is transmitted between ticks and vertebrates (Powassan lineage II, deer tick virus [DTV]) was generated and chimeric viruses between the mosquito/vertebrate flavivirus, West Nile virus (WNV), were constructed. These chimeric viruses expressed the prM and E genes of either WNV or DTV in the heterologous (from one species to another) nonstructural (NS) backbone. Recombinant chimeric viruses rescued from cDNAs were characterized for their capacity to grow in vertebrate and arthropod (mosquito and tick) cells as well as for in vivo vector competence in mosquitoes and ticks.

Results demonstrated that the NS elements were insufficient to impart the complete mosquito or tick growth phenotypes of parental viruses; however, these NS genetic elements did contribute to a 100- and 100,000-fold increase in viral growth in vitro in tick and mosquito cells, respectively. Mosquito competence was observed only with parental WNV, while infection and transmission potential by ticks were observed with both DTV and WNV-prME/DTV chimeric viruses. These data indicate that NS genetic elements play a significant, but not exclusive, role for vector usage of mosquito- and tick-borne flaviviruses.

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**Comment**

I’m no microbiologist and without the full article and better understanding of what this NS backbone is, 

The study shows 4 things:

  1.  The NS elements gave a 100 fold “test tube” increase in viral growth in tick cells.  These organisms are extremely fastidious and difficult to study in a lab.  It’s even tougher to figure out how this plays out in the human body.
  2. INFECTION & TRANSMISSION potential by ticks was observed with both DTV and WNV.  Read that sentence again.
  3. Why didn’t this make the news?
  4. Mosquitoes are nasty but ticks are a whole other monster.  Mosquito research gets all the money.  Why?

http://www.dutchessny.gov/CountyGov/Departments/Legislature/2017Auerbach.pdf  This pdf by Lyme Advocate Jill Auerbach shows that while there were only 5,700 cases of WNV in 2012, research dollars were $29 million, whereas, Lyme cases in 2012 were 312,000 but received only $25 million.  While the number of the infected continue to soar the research dollars for Lyme are radically reduced in successive years:

Disease New Cases (annual) NIH Funding
 

Hepatitis C 2012

  

1,300

  

$112 million

West Nile Virus 2012

5,700

$29 million

HIV/AIDS 2012

56,000

$3 billion (11% total NIH budget)

Influenza 2012

73,000

$251 million

Lyme disease 2012

312,000

$25 million

Lyme disease 2013

363,070

$20 million

*Lyme disease 2004             198,040                                  $34.4 million

Disease

      New Cases 2015

CDC funding 2016

Lyme Disease

           380,690  (10 x 38,069)
2016 numbers not yet available

 $10 million
This does NOT include other Tick-borne diseases

Houston, we have a problem.

 

 

 

Category:

mosquitoes, research, Testing, Ticks, Transmission, Viruses

Lyme Testing Problems & Solutions

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lyme-testing-problems-solutions-malia-mcclean/

Lyme testing problems and solutions

storm

Published on

The testing validity measures sensitivity and specificity are both referred to with regard to testing and depending on which you are speaking about what is said about the test may sound very different and confusing. In this case I am talking about the C6 Elisa test and when I speak of the validity of the test I basically mean does the test accomplish what it sets out to do (i.e. is it an accurate test).
Sensitivity is simply a reflection of how many patients with the disease test positive.
So with the C6 Elisa its around 50% sensitive (in the context of the two tiered testing system on its own it has a sensitivity of 75%) because it misses about half of true positive cases. Meaning 50% of the people tested who do have Lyme will test negative. So your odds of testing positive are about 50%. Not great at all, about the same as flipping a coin.
Specificity is a measure of your false positive rate.
So with the C6 Elisa it has a Specificity 98.5%, it is very specific and only comes up with a false positive result 1.5% of the time. Meaning if you do happen to test positive for Lyme it is highly probable that you do in fact have Lyme because the test doesn’t often make a mistake of identification. – Excellent.
So you can see if you are talking about the C6 Elisa Specificity you will say it’s excellent but if you are talking about it’s Sensitivity you could say its terrible and both would be true. Sensitivity and Specificity are relative terms so ideally for a test to be very valid you would want it to have both high Sensitivity and Specificity.
Also keep in mind that these numbers are not taking into consideration the large percent of Sero Negative patients who would have been excluded at the outset of analytical testing making these numbers in reality much lower. These numbers are just to give you an idea of the state of testing but it is important to note that the case definition needs to be changed first to encompass all of us with lyme in order for any change in testing to be of real value. If the samples being used to validate the testing are only from people with the HLA genes (the people who test positive on traditional testing) you can see how this would skew all the results so its paramount that the case definition be changed to include all sero negative cases as well as as describing Neurological Lyme as it truly is first and then to move on to testing).

 

I find parables helpful so this is an example I made up to help clear it up (Keep in mind this is just an illustration to help you visualize the difference between Specificity and Sensitivity).

So say there are 6 people fishing in a pond full of bug-eyed-brown fish. All 6 fishermen are trying to catch this specific type of fish. They have heard that the bug-eyed brown is very attracted to the flint worm and has great success in getting the bug-eyed-brown to bite. So imagine the flint worm on the hook is the test and we want to know if the test is valid and if it does what it intends to do (in this case lure bug-eyed-browns to bite the worm/hook). After an hour of fishing 3 of the 6 fisherman hooked the right fish the bug-eyed-brown and the 3 others hooked nothing. The specificity is 100% because it only attracted the right kind of fish each time it managed to hook one and never attracted the wrong kind of fish (so 0% false positives) but the sensitivity is only 50% because 3 of the 6 times the flint worm wasn’t able (or sensitive) enough to catch it at all (so missed 50% of true positives).

Problematic areas of Lyme testing

First Tier ELISA:

As stated above the Elisa has terrible sensitivity and misses at least half of true cases of lyme. This is a big problem, and this fact alone should exclude it from being used as a screening test because screening tests are to have 95% accuracy and it is far from that. The fraud comes in when you look at why this validity measure uses 5 standard deviations above baseline noise for a positive when the standard for testing measures is 3. The idea is to capture the lowest level of the analyte in question, not the highest. They have purposely increased the cut off to miss everyone who has neurological lyme (the 85%). This test is only good for people who have an autoimmune HLA link to Lyme disease (approx 15%) as these people are genetically predisposed to produce more antibodies and therefore do not get the immune suppression and neurological symptoms the rest of us get. The people who test positive are ironically the ones who really aren’t sick other than a bad knee (Lyme arthritis). This is how after the Dearborne conference, where the case definition was fraudulently changed to a very narrow set of criteria that lyme came to be associated with arthritis, namely an arthritic knee, when in reality that is the very least of the symptoms most lyme patients encounter.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11532615 These results suggest that the presence and or lack of production of specific antibody to Bb infection may be associated with particular HLA specificities of the Class II.

Nine out of the 22 seropositive LD patients (40.9%) had HLA-DRB1*0701, *0703, *0704 (HLA-DR7); only 1 out of the 18 seronegative LD patients (5.6%) had HLA-DR7 (odds ratio (OR)=11.8, P=0.0126). HLA-DRB1*01021 and HLA-DRB1*0101, *0104, *0105 (HLA-DR1) contributed negatively to anti-Bb antibody production. Seven of 18 seronegative LD patients had HLA-DR1, only 1 of 22 seropositive LD patients had HLA-DR1 (38.9% vs. 4.5%, OR=13.4, P=0.0138). These results suggest that the presence and or lack of production of specific antibody to Bb infection may be associated with particular HLA specificities of the Class II.

In addition, most doctors give this test right away when someone arrives with a tick bite and the body requires weeks to create the antibodies needed to pop a positive on this test so this is a big problem as well. The rationale they use with the two tiered system for adding in the Western Blot is that it will reduce the false positives (people testing positive who don’t have the disease) as you can see the problem with the Elisa is the opposite, that is has a high rate of false negatives (telling people they don’t have lyme when they in fact do) so this in my opinion is a fraudulent scientific message as well when you consider that there is a 50% chance of a false negative and only 1.5% chance of a false positive.

Second Tier Western Blot:

As you can see the Western Blot also has many problems with sensitivity at all stages but especially within the first month and again later on the more chronic it becomes. If you take the terrible sensitivity of both tests in the two tiered system you will start to see how testing positive consecutively on both is very unlikely, mathematically improbable and biologically almost impossible unless you are in the HLA autoimmune group which is comparatively rare. The other bit of insanity with antibody tests like this is that within 10 days of infection the germinal centres where B cells are assigned an immune duty have been shut down. B cells normally mature into antibody secreting cells, however in the presence of lyme they do not mature properly and therefore are functionally unable to produce the amount of anitbodies required to pop a positive. Quote below taken from Suppression of Long-Lived Humoral Immunity Following Borrelia burgdorferi Infection ttps://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1004976

"Germinal centers (GC) are main immune response outcomes that usually develop in secondary lymphoid tissues after infections. They are required for development of long-lived plasma cells, which provide ongoing protection by continuous antibody secretion. They also induce recirculating memory B cells, which respond quickly to reinfection with differentiation and production of high affinity antibodies [23]. Germinal centers do form in Bb-infected lymph nodes at around two week after infection, but then rapidly involute over the next two weeks [22].

Here we tested the functionality of the GC responses to B. burgdorferi. We demonstrate that following infection of mice with Bb, GC are structurally abnormal and long-lived plasma cells and B cell memory, normal outputs of GC responses, fail to develop for months after infection rendering mice susceptible for reinfection with the same strain of Bb. When mice were infected with Bb, vaccination with influenza antigens failed to induce protective anti-viral immunity, revealing that Bb-infection actively inhibits long-term humoral immune response development"  https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1004976

Additionally due to antigenic variation the bands, which are protein antigens, are able to change their outer surface once the immune system is on to their presence, so the bands are always changing in an attempt to elude the immune system, which means western blotting bands will be different at any given period. How can you test someone using a static measurement criteria such as the CDC criteria for something that is constantly in flux? You can’t!

I liken the two tiered testing for lyme to giving a blind person a vision test then telling them they can see – it’s madness!

Other Lyme tests:

Nanotrap Urine Test:

This is a DNA test and is good IF and only if there happens to be DNA in the urine sample which may or may not be the case. So if found then you can say with certainty that the person has lyme but if negative it is quite worthless much like the ELISA.

Blood Culture Testing:

Lyme is notorious for being difficult to culture and as you can see from the image above taken from J Clin Microbiol. 2005 Oct; 43(10): 5080–5084 that the sensitivity of such methods are low. Blood cultures while definitive if positive are really also quite futile if negative, as Lyme once disseminated does not hang out in the blood as much as in tissues, bone, brain etc.

The Solution Band 41 test.

The band 41 test that is patent owned by Yale reserachers is an excellent diagnostic test for Lyme (See patent below)

Band 41 is highly immunogenic meaning even people with a suppressed immune system as in those of us with Neurological lyme can often still produce this band. Band 41 is also not subject to antigenic variation being the flaggelar (tail) region of the Spirochete. Quote below from J Clin Invest. 1986 Oct;78(4):934-9 . The antigens (bands) are always varying even late in the disease which makes it scientifically nonsensical to use a standard criteria for all but band 41. The emphasis in the quote below is on lyme being “alive” throughout the disease, meaning it is always changing in response to threats from the immune system.

The IgG response in these patients appeared in a characteristic sequential pattern over months to years to as many as 11 spirochetal antigens.The appearance of a new IgM response and the expansion of the IgG response late in the ilnness, and the lack of such responses in patients with early disease alone, suggest that B. burgdorferi remains alive throughout the illness.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3531237


In early-stage borreliosis, the 41,000-molecular-weight flagellin protein (41K) of Borrelia burgdorferi was the major antigen detected by antibodies in sera, but the specificity of the reaction pattern was dependent on the intensity of the band. The evaluation of different interpretation rules based on a semiquantitative record of band intensities showed the highest specificity (96%) and a corresponding sensitivity of 78% if there was at least one distinct (optical density range, 0.2 to 0.4) immunoglobulin G and immunoglobulin M reaction with the 41K band.

https://www.readbyqxmd.com/read/1993754/validity-of-western-immunoblot-band-patterns-in-the-serodiagnosis-of-lyme-borreliosis

Consequently there are a few aspects that make it a very good diagnostic test; the fact that band 41 is more immunogenic (causes a more robust immune reaction) and that it isn’t subject to antigenic variation. Additionally, band 41 is one of the first bands to appear and therefore can be used to diagnose earlier in the disease which is an enormous benefit as clearly early disagnosis and treatment is paramount. The sensitivity and specificity are an improvement over current methods and should be utilized. See sensitive and specificity break down from the band 41 test below.

The sensitiv- ity of the two-step process for patients with erythema migrans or with later manifestations of Lyme disease was 64% and 100%, respectively. The specificity for healthy blood donors was 100% and was 90% for the aggregate of all persons with illnesses that may cause serologic cross-reactivity(98% if the samples from relapsing fever patients were excluded). Test precision was 96% overall,99% for Lyme disease case serum samples, 100% for specimens from blood donors, and 88% for samples from persons with other illnesses.

 In early-stage borreliosis, the 41,000-molecular-weight flagellin protein (41K) of Borrelia burgdorferi was the major antigen detected by a
ntibodies in sera
One has to wonder why Yale didn’t want to use a test that they patented that would capture the vast majority of lyme patients.
However as I see it if they utilized this test to validate their Lyme vaccine the results would show that their so called vaccine was in fact the opposite of a vaccine and induced the very disease it was supposed to protect the person from, as was the case for many people who were injured by the first Lyme vaccine Lymerix which was taken off the shelf.

I can not fathom any other reason why they would not use a test they owned that has 96% accuracy overall and 100% specificity.

The answer can only be fraud.

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For more on testing:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2017/08/15/reliability-of-lyme-testing/

https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/09/08/whats-the-best-test-for-lyme-dr-rawls/

https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/01/16/2-tier-lyme-testing-missed-85-7-of-patients-milford-hospital/

https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/09/02/particles-may-be-the-answer-to-accurate-lyme-disease-detection/

https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/08/06/lyme-nanotrap-test-granted-breakthrough-device-designation-by-fda/

https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/08/08/ny-grants-approval-of-igenexs-lyme-immunoblot-tests/

 

 

Category:

Activism, Lyme, research, Testing

Manifestation of Anaplasmosis as Cerebral Infarction: a Case Report

https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-018-3321-4

Manifestation of anaplasmosis as cerebral infarction: a case report

  • Seok Won Kim†, Choon-Mee Kim†, Dong-Min Kim and Na Ra Yun
†Contributed equally
BMC Infectious Diseases201818:409

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12879-018-3321-4

Abstract

Background

Human granulocytic anaplasmosis is a tick-borne zoonotic disease caused by Anaplasma phagocytophilum, an obligate intracellular granulocytotropic bacterium.

Case presentation

A 70-year-old female patient was admitted with the clinical signs of fever and an altered state of consciousness 1 week after experiencing a tick bite while planting lawn grass. Magnetic resonance imaging, performed at the time of admission, indicated cerebral infarction in the left basal ganglia, whereas increasing immunofluorescence assay antibody titers for A. phagocytophilum were also documented. A. phagocytophilum was identified using groEL and ankA targeted polymerase chain reaction and sequencing. Because of severe thrombocytopenia, only doxycycline was administered, without any antiplatelet agents. Subsequently, the symptoms improved without any focal neurologic sequela.

Conclusion

This is the first reported case of cerebral infarction occurrence in an anaplasmosis patient.

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**Comment**

I could literally hug these researchers who didn’t make the mistake of pronouncing this to be a “rare occurrence.”  They wisely stated it is the first reported case. 

Big difference.

Please notice the altered state of consciousness.  This stuff is surreal and unless you’ve had it, nearly unbelievable.  The basal ganglia is often affected with Lyme/MSIDS and certainly has been a marquee symptom for me personally.  Thankful this woman got prompt treatment.  Let’s pray the doxy was enough but she should be followed up on.  

Most practitioners don’t treat this seriously enough.  It can kill you.

It is a head scratcher; however, that even with severe thrombocytopenia (low platelets) and a cerebral infarction in the brain, it appears she obtained just 12 days of doxycycline.  This is a great example of an issue for further research as to treatment type and duration.  Just because “the patient exhibited an improvement in symptoms after doxycycline treatment and was discharged on the 12th day with no specific sequela,” does not mean she’s out of the woods.

 

 

 

Category:

Anaplasmosis, research, Testing, Treatment

As the Threat of Lyme Disease Rises, Why Hasn’t Research Funding Followed Suit?

https://undark.org/2018/09/06/lyme-research-funding/

As the Threat of Lyme Disease Rises, Why Hasn’t Research Funding Followed Suit?

The tick-borne illness now costs Americans up to $1.3 billion a year in medical expenses. It’s time for politicians to mount a response.
/ By Rocky Kistner Federal funding for Lyme disease research has stagnated in recent years.  Visual: NIH NIAID/Flickr
In 1987, Sherrill Franklin was pregnant and living in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, when she discovered a rash on her leg as big as a dinner plate. She had been bitten by a tick. She soon began to suffer fatigue, a sore throat, and severe arthritis that made her hands feel “like claws.” It took almost two years, and a three-week course of intravenous antibiotics, for her to get back on her feet.
Two decades later, Franklin got a second tick bite, and this time she developed more extensive neurological symptoms. She lost weight, experienced heart complications, and had to be rushed to the hospital by ambulance. She was eventually diagnosed with Graves’ disease, an immune disorder that her endocrinologist said could have been triggered by Lyme disease. Today, Franklin is still experiencing symptoms. After countless visits to health care experts, she says she’s spent $50,000 of her own money on medical help.

 

“The best thing about Lyme disease is you usually don’t die,” Franklin says. “The worst thing about it is that you don’t die.”

Franklin is not alone. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), annual cases of Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses in the U.S. have skyrocketed to more than 300,000 — up from just 50,000 three decades ago. And those totals are thought to underestimate the true tally of patients who suffer from chronic tick-borne illnesses. A Johns Hopkins study estimates that Americans now spend up to $1.3 billion a year battling Lyme disease alone. Yet, the research that could help us better understand, treat, and prevent the disease remains woefully underfunded. That needs to change.

The recent explosion in Lyme disease cases stems from a perfect storm of climate and environmental change: Global warming has made northern latitudes more hospitable to the tiny blacklegged ticks that transmit the disease, and rapid deforestation and development have left large populations exposed to the wooded areas that harbor the ticks. The CDC reports that the number of tickborne illnesses in the U.S. has doubled from 2004 to 2016, and a new study finds that Lyme disease, once primarily a scourge of the northeast, has now spread to all 50 states. Economist Marcus Davidsson predicts that as many as one million Americans will be infected in 2018. And experts say it will only get worse.  (Please see my comment after article)

The growing medical crisis has exacted not only a physical but a financial toll as well. Policy experts say that, after accounting for lost productivity and hard-to-detect chronic conditions, the real costs of Lyme disease could be many times more than the $1.3 billion estimated in the Johns Hopkins study.

Laurie Johnson, executive director of the Climate Cost Project, and co-founder Sieren Ernst are working to home in on the true societal costs of Lyme disease. The team has been collecting surveys from Lyme disease patients to create a database of the patients’ medical expenses. So far, the results are astounding. Half of the respondents reported more than $30,000 in out-of-pocket expenditures on Lyme disease treatments, with some reporting more than $200,000.

“We believe the data is just the tip of the iceberg,” Ernst says.

What’s more, the rising threat of tick-borne disease has led Americans to take fewer trips outdoors — up to a billion fewer trips annually in the northeastern U.S. alone, according to a Yale study published last year. The authors of that study estimate that the economic burden associated with the lost trips could amount to as much as $5 billion annually.

As the societal costs of Lyme disease soar, funding for Lyme disease research remains in a rut. An unpublished draft report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Tick-Borne Disease Working Group finds that, while the National Institutes of Health and the CDC spend $53,571 and $14,054 respectively for each new case of HIV/AIDS, they spend just $90 and $35 per new case of Lyme disease.

“Federal funding for tick-borne disease today is orders of magnitude lower, compared to other health threats, and it has failed to increase as the problem has grown,” the report states.

Dr. John Aucott, chair of the working group and director of the Johns Hopkins Lyme Disease Research Center, says the federal research community is not doing enough to find an accurate test and a cure for Lyme disease. He adds that the problem is compounded by controversies surrounding the symptoms of chronic Lyme disease, which makes it difficult for patients to get proper medical care.

In late August came a ray of hope from Capitol Hill. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer announced that, after five years of stagnant funding, the Senate had authorized a 12 percent increase for the CDC’s research on Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses for the 2019 fiscal year. The measure would raise allocations from $10.7 million to $12 million.

Still, patients like Sherrill Franklin say that’s sorely inadequate, and that the measure would do little to address chronic conditions that afflict millions like her. As the planet warms and populations grow, tick-borne illnesses are skyrocketing. It’s time for politicians to mount a serious response to the rising threat.

William “Rocky” Kistner is a multimedia journalist who writes about environmental issues and climate change. He publishes stories at www.TheRockyFiles.com and lives near Washington, D.C.

________________

**Comment**

Once again, according to independent tick researcher John Scott, the climate has absolutely nothing to do with the spread of ticks and therefore Lyme/MSIDS:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/08/13/study-shows-lyme-not-propelled-by-climate-change/ A recent study shows that warm winters are lethal to I. scapularis (black-legged) ticks. In fact, overwinter survival dropped to 33% when the snow melted. This has been substantiated by other researchers as well. Scott & Scott, 2018, ticks and climate change, JVSM

This is an important distinction for a number of reasons:

  1. Earmarking tick/MSIDS research with the moniker “climate change” will divert precious money to the wrong subject matter when issues like accurate testing, education on how to clinically diagnose, settling the matter of pathogen persistence once and for all, and the need for research studying the cumulative effects of ALL of the pathogens involved on the human body would get a great start in helping patients.  But, there are hundreds of other topics as well.  
  2. Scott goes as far as to state the climate change issue is a “red herring” to divert attention away from the fact nothing has been done to help patients in over 40 years and is actually part of a “nefarious plot.”  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2017/08/14/canadian-tick-expert-climate-change-is-not-behind-lyme-disease/
  3. Scott, infected himself, has determined black legged ticks require 14 hours to molt to the next stage, something he dubs “photo period.”  Light has much more of an impact on ticks than climate as ticks are marvelous ecoadaptors and will seek out leaf litter and snow when conditions become harsh.
  4. Scott offers that yearly bidirectional, songbird migration in spring and fall is behind tick expansion and that the climate change model actually reflects migratory flight not warmer futuristic temperatures.
  5. Research on migratory birds and their impacts on tick expansion would be a far better topic to spend money on than more climate data.
  6. We need to know if other insects can transmit this.  To date, researchers smugly point to a 30 year old study and say it can’t, yet patients all over the world have far different experiences:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/03/01/strides-in-lyme-research-links-to-mosquitos-as-carriers/.  The potential for ALL blood sucking insects to transmit all or some of the pathogens commonly blamed on ticks is very real.  And just because it can’t be seen doesn’t mean it isn’t there.  These are notoriously stealthy pathogens who thrive on hiding and avoiding detection.
  7. We all know that MS, Lupus, Fibro, ALS, dementia, and Alzheimer’s can be undiagnosed Lyme as well as the fact that according to a prominent Wisconsin Lyme doctor, 80% of his PANS/PANDAS patients have Lyme/MSIDS as well.  Research on these topics would again, be far more helpful than the same – o- same-o climate data that’s been collected for years.
  8. Since many couples are infected and they’ve actually found borrelia in semen and vaginal secretions, we need to know if this is a STD:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2017/02/24/pcos-lyme-my-story/  We also need the medical community to admit it’s congenital and spread via breast milk https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/06/19/33-years-of-documentation-of-maternal-child-transmission-of-lyme-disease-and-congenital-lyme-borreliosis-a-review/ and https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/05/24/new-berlin-mom-given-life-altering-lyme-disease-diagnoses-after-pregnancy/  These are practical day to day issues that require answers.  Knowledge is power and we need it!  I literally could go on and on to infinity here but these 7 issues are screaming for research.  Nobody is touching this with a 10 foot pole yet life marches on with the very real probability we are transmitting this is far more ways than the dastardly black legged tick.  We need to know.
We needed to know these answers 40 years ago.

Category:

Activism, Lyme, research, Testing, Ticks, Transmission