Archive for the ‘Testing’ Category

More Window Dressing: Blumenthal Announces New Federal Funding For Tick Research

https://www.wshu.org/connecticut-news/2023-03-24/blumenthal-announces-new-federal-funding-for-tick-research

Blumenthal announces new federal funding for tick research

WSHU | By Molly Ingram
Published March 24, 2023
Blumenthal

Molly Ingram/WSHU  U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal holds a tick, swollen from drinking blood.

U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) has announced millions of dollars in funding for research into tick-borne diseases.

Diseases caused by ticks have more than doubled in the last ten years across the Northeast.

The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, located in New Haven, will receive $200,000.

Blumenthal said the money will fund vital research at the nationally recognized facility.

(See link for article)

________________

SUMMARY:

  • Money to New Haven will be used to hire staff for testing ticks
  • $26 Million will go to the corrupt CDC to study Lyme disease
  • $7 Million will go to the complicit DOD‘s Tick-borne Disease Research Program

In the words of Willy Burgdorfer, the “discoverer” of Lyme:

“The controversy in Lyme Disease research is a shameful affair.  I say that because the whole thing is politically tainted.  Money goes to people that have for the past 30 years produced the same thing.  Nothing.” ~ Dr. Willy Burgdorferi

Money lining the pockets of the same people in corrupt agencies will come to nothing.
Mark my words.

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Category:

Activism, Lyme, research, Testing, Ticks

Study: Lyme Forms May Affect Persistence

https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/24/6/5594

Pleomorphic Variants of Borreliella (syn. Borrelia) burgdorferi Express Evolutionary Distinct Transcriptomes

by Nina Čorak1, Sirli Anniko2,3, Christina Daschkin-Steinborn2, Viktoria Krey2,4, Sara Koska1, Momir Futo1,5,6, Tin Široki5, Innokenty Woichansky 2, Luka Opašić1, Domagoj Kifer7, Anja Tušar1, Horst-Günter Maxeiner2,8, Mirjana Domazet-Lošo5, Carsten Nicolaus2 and Tomislav Domazet-Lošo1,6,*
1Laboratory of Evolutionary Genetics, Division of Molecular Biology, Ruđer Bošković Institute, Bijenička Cesta 54, HR-10000 Zagreb, Croatia
2BCA-Research, BCA-Clinic Betriebs GmbH & Co. KG, D-86159 Augsburg, Germany
3Institute of Cancer Therapeutics, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Bradford, Bradford BD7 1DP, UK
4Physics of Synthetic Biological Systems-E14, Physics Department and ZNN, Technische Universität München, D-85748 Garching, Germany
5Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Unska 3, HR-10000 Zagreb, Croatia
6School of Medicine, Catholic University of Croatia, Ilica 242, HR-10000 Zagreb, Croatia
7Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry, University of Zagreb, A. Kovačića 1, HR-10000 Zagreb, Croatia
8Comlamed, Friedrich-Bergius Ring 15, D-97076 Würzburg, Germany
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2023, 24(6), 5594; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms24065594
Received: 18 February 2023 / Revised: 7 March 2023 / Accepted: 11 March 2023 / Published: 15 March 2023
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Transcriptomics in Health and Disease)

Abstract

Borreliella (syn. Borrelia) burgdorferi is a spirochete bacterium that causes tick-borne Lyme disease. Along its lifecycle B. burgdorferi develops several pleomorphic forms with unclear biological and medical relevance. Surprisingly, these morphotypes have never been compared at the global transcriptome level. To fill this void, we grew B. burgdorferi spirochete, round body, bleb, and biofilm-dominated cultures and recovered their transcriptomes by RNAseq profiling. We found that round bodies share similar expression profiles with spirochetes, despite their morphological differences. This sharply contrasts to blebs and biofilms that showed unique transcriptomes, profoundly distinct from spirochetes and round bodies. To better characterize differentially expressed genes in non-spirochete morphotypes, we performed functional, positional, and evolutionary enrichment analyses. Our results suggest that spirochete to round body transition relies on the delicate regulation of a relatively small number of highly conserved genes, which are located on the main chromosome and involved in translation. In contrast, spirochete to bleb or biofilm transition includes substantial reshaping of transcription profiles towards plasmids-residing and evolutionary young genes, which originated in the ancestor of Borreliaceae. Despite their abundance the function of these Borreliaceae-specific genes is largely unknown. However, many known Lyme disease virulence genes implicated in immune evasion and tissue adhesion originated in this evolutionary period. Taken together, these regularities point to the possibility that bleb and biofilm morphotypes might be important in the dissemination and persistence of B. burgdorferi inside the mammalian host. On the other hand, they prioritize the large pool of unstudied Borreliaceae-specific genes for functional characterization because this subset likely contains undiscovered Lyme disease pathogenesis genes.
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**Comment**
And herein lies the age-old problem: unstudied Borreliaceae-specific genes that have not been functionally characterized, and undiscovered Lyme disease pathogenesis genes.  Everything else hinges on these unknowns.
This research is begging to be done, but has been avoided like the plague because of corrupt public health, run by one man doling out research grants whom has far too much power, and whom receives untracked, secret royalty payments.
COVID has shown the world what Lyme/MSIDS patients have been facing, only they have been in this hideous time-warp for over 40 years. Researchers are smart – they know they must cow-tow to the NIAID mafia overlord to get research funding, which means they must espouse the accepted narrative that Lyme is a simple nuisance cured with a couple weeks of a mono-therapy that hasn’t worked from the get-go.
Nobody seems to care but sick patients and a handful of ethical researchers who feverishly attempt to move a 40 year old needle that’s covered with an inch of rust.  When dissenting research finally does come out, it is retracted for flimsy reasons, in this case due to testing methods, but my educated guess is the research simply couldn’t stand because it revealed too much truth.  This is quite ironic considering the COVID ‘pandemic’ only occurred due to faulty testing insisted upon & patented by corrupt public health which quietly had to withdraw its EUA because it can’t distinguish between COVID and the regular flu.  Monopolizing medicine/disease is the CDC & FDA‘s MO and this includes testing, as virtually everything else spawns off of testing.  Control testing and you control the entire paradigm from research to drugs.
This diabolical monopoly then sets the ball rolling for the entire world, again demonstrating the frightening monopoly that must be broken.  Mainstream medicine, which is lazy, remains brain-washed and simply follows orders. And compliance is what corrupt public health is counting on.  Truth is crucified and dissenters are promptly tarred and feathered despite saving lives.  Censorship, bullying, firing and closing labs down, tossing out and manipulating data, fake science, and “disappearing” are efficiently deployed to silence any opposition.
Believe it or not, mainstream medicine still does not even believe Bb is pleomorphic.

Category:

Lyme, research, Testing

COVID Testing Company Faked Tests, Threw Samples Away While Taking $83 M in Government Funding, Says DOJ

https://www.theblaze.com/news/testing-company-federal-indictment-23

COVID testing company faked tests, threw samples away while taking $83 million in government funding, says DOJ

ANDREW CHAPADOS

March 15, 2023

Excerpts:
The co-owner of a Chicago, Illinois, company is accused of cheating the United States government out of money through a fraudulent COVID-19 testing scheme.

ABC News reports that Zishan Alvi, a 44-year-old co-owner of company Laboratory Elite, fraudulently planned to seek reimbursements for providing PCR tests and 15-minute rapid antigen tests after lying about the results.

The indictment alleges that the tests were either not performed, done in such a way that results were unreliable, or had already been paid for by customers when the company sought federal reimbursement.

Between February 2021 and February 2022, the company received over $83 million in federal funding, with some of the money allegedly transferred to the Alvi’s personal account.

Alvi also told employees to provide customers with negative results despite tests never being performed.

Alvi is charged by a federal grand jury with 10 counts of wire fraud and one count of theft of government funds.

(See link for article)

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Category:

Activism, Testing, Viruses

CA Ticks Spread Lyme But That’s Not the Whole Story

https://www.globallymealliance.org/blog/california-ticks-can-spread-lyme-disease-but-thats-not-the-whole-story

California Ticks Can Spread Lyme Disease…But That’s Not the Whole Story

by Paul Killinger on February 24, 2023

<span id="hs_cos_wrapper_name" class="hs_cos_wrapper hs_cos_wrapper_meta_field hs_cos_wrapper_type_text" style="" data-hs-cos-general-type="meta_field" data-hs-cos-type="text" >California Ticks Can Spread Lyme Disease…But That’s Not the Whole Story</span>
If you find a tick bite from an Ixodes tick in California, it’s important to consider possible exposure to pathogens that cause more than Lyme disease

Originally published on Medzulabs.org 

The risk of contracting Lyme disease from a tick bite in California has been well-documented, though there is still a long way to go in educating health providers and the broader community in the exposure risk from a tick bite. TickReport’s surveillance of ticks from California (and Oregon and Washington) goes back as far as 2006 and has expanded in recent years.

What ticks are endemic (commonly and consistently found in wild populations) to California and other West Coast states?

That’s a big question, and there are a few dozen species from different genera or families. Many of those species are specialist feeders and—if everything goes “right” in their life cycle—they will only feed on certain wild mammals, birds, or lizards and will bite humans very rarely. That’s doesn’t mean that finding one of these “specialists” attached to ourselves or a family member is impossible: it’s just much less common (and a topic we’ll try to visit soon in another post).

Our surveillance shows that the majority (91.5%) of human or human-adjacent (dogs, cats, horses, etc) tick bites are caused by the following ticks:

  • Ixodes pacificus (“Western black-legged tick,” a close relative of the Deer tick in the Eastern U.S.)
  • Dermacentor variabilis (“American dog tick”)
  • Dermacentor occidentalis (“Pacific Coast tick”)
  • Dermacentor andersoni (“Rocky Mountain Wood tick”)
  • Ixodes spinipalpis
  • Ixodes angustus
What pathogens can these ticks transmit to humans?

Vector competence (the ability of a vector like a tick to transmit a given disease-causing pathogen) tends to run along genus lines, so species within the Ixodes genus tend to be able to transmit pathogens X and Y but not Z, while Dermacentor species tend to transmit Z but not X and Y.

The most common pathogen found in California ticks is Borrelia burgdorferi, which causes Lyme disease in humans and pets. But there’s more than Lyme in those hills! If you find a tick bite from an Ixodes tick in California, it’s also important to consider possible exposure to these pathogens:

  • Borrelia miyamotoi: a bacterium that can cause hard tick relapsing fever—sometimes called Borrelia miyamotoi disease.
  • Anaplasma phagocytophilum: a bacterium that can cause Human granulocyctic Anaplasmosis.
*For every two ticks we find infected with Borrelia burgdorferi (Lyme disease bacteria), we detect one (or more) of these other pathogens

It’s vital that both tick surveillance and diagnostic approaches keep these non-Lyme pathogens in mind. For every two ticks we find infected with Borrelia burgdorferi (Lyme disease bacteria), we detect one (or more) of these other pathogens, so be sure to resist Lyme Tunnel Vision when responding to a tick bite! Common diagnostic tests for Lyme disease have a specific focus on Lyme disease and will not detect infection by these other pathogens if present. Make sure you and your doctor are considering the whole story of a tick bite.

To learn more about the pathogens we find in West Coast ticks, browse our real-time testing data at TickReport.com/stats. If you find and remove a tick, arrange for fast and accurate identification and testing at TickReport.com.
The above material is provided for information purposes only. The material (a) is not nor should be considered, or used as a substitute for, medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, nor (b) does it necessarily represent endorsement by or an official position of Global Lyme Alliance, Inc. or any of its directors, officers, advisors or volunteers. Advice on the testing, treatment or care of an individual patient should be obtained through consultation with a physician who has examined that patient or is familiar with that patient’s medical history. 

Paul Killinger oversees tick surveillance and pathogen testing at the TickReport testing lab in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has led the lab's public health education and outreach since 2018.

Category:

Activism, Anaplasmosis, Borrelia Miyamotoi (Relapsing Fever Group), Lyme, research, Testing, Ticks, Transmission

Molecular Detection of Bartonellosis

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/29/3/22-1223_article

Bartonella spp. Infections Identified by Molecular Methods, United States

David W. McCormick, Sara L. Rassoulian-Barrett, Daniel R. Hoogestraat, Stephen J. Salipante, Dhruba SenGupta, Elizabeth A. Dietrich, Brad T. Cookson, Grace E. Marx1Comments to Author , and Joshua A. Lieberman1
Author affiliations: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA (D.W. McCormick, E.A. Dietrich, G.E. Marx); University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA (S.L. Rassoulian-Barrett, D.R. Hoogestraat, S.J. Salipante, D. SenGupta, B.T. Cookson, J.A. Lieberman)
March, 2023

Abstract

Molecular methods can enable rapid identification of Bartonella spp. infections, which are difficult to diagnose by using culture or serology. We analyzed clinical test results of PCR that targeted bacterial 16S rRNA hypervariable V1–V2 regions only or in parallel with PCR of Bartonella-specific ribC gene. We identified 430 clinical specimens infected with Bartonella spp. from 420 patients in the United States. Median patient age was 37 (range 1–79) years; 62% were male.

We identified:

  • B. henselae in 77%
  • B. quintana in 13%
  • B. clarridgeiae in 1%
  • B. vinsonii in 1%
  • B. washoensis in 1% of specimens
  • B. quintana was detected in 83% of cardiac specimens
  • B. henselae was detected in 34% of lymph node specimens

We detected novel or uncommon Bartonella spp. in 9 patients. Molecular diagnostic testing can identify Bartonella spp. infections, including uncommon and undescribed species, and might be particularly useful for patients who have culture-negative endocarditis or lymphadenitis.

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Currently, 12 species of Bartonella genus are associated with human infection, but that number is constantly changing. Because Bartonella spp. infections are not nationally notifiable diseases, there is limited knowledge of the epidemiology of this disease in the US.  In my experience it is prolific.

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Category:

Bartonella, research, Testing