Archive for the ‘Testing’ Category

STARI & Lyme Disease

https://danielcameronmd.com/southern-tick-associated-rash-illness-stari-and-lyme-disease/

Southern Tick-Associated Rash Illness (STARI) and Lyme disease

Welcome to another Inside Lyme Podcast with your host Dr. Daniel Cameron. In this episode, Dr. Cameron will be discussing the case of a 63-year-old woman who was diagnosed with Southern Tick-Associated Rash Illness (STARI).

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In their article “Southern Tick-Associated Rash Illness: Florida’s Lyme Disease” Abdelmaseih and colleagues describe the woman’s case, highlighting the differences between STARI and Lyme disease.¹

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The patient was bitten by a lone-star tick on her right leg while camping in Gainesville, Florida. She noticed a pruritic target erythematous lesion after removing the tick.

Two weeks later she was evaluated and reported having a persistent fever, headache, and diffuse myalgias for 4 days following the tick bite. On presentation, she had a fever of 100.5 F and a tachycardia of 127 BPM, low white count, anemia, low platelet count and elevated liver function tests.

Fortunately, the patient’s symptoms resolved with a 14-day course of doxycycline.

The authors discuss the differences and similarities of STARI and Lyme disease:

  • “The associated rash is similar if not indistinguishable from Lyme disease erythema migrans, with lymphocytic dermal infiltrate.”
  • Both the diagnosis of STARI and Lyme disease are based on clinical evidence. “At the present time, there is no approved diagnostic modality to identify STARI; thus, the diagnosis must be made on clinical evidence including erythema migrans and tick exposure.”
  • The diagnosis of STARI and Lyme disease often rely on geography. “Diagnosis usually relies on geographic association (STARI from central Texas and Oklahoma eastward across the southern states and along the Atlantic coast as far north as Maine, versus Lyme disease in northeast, mid-Atlantic, and upper mid-west).”

However, the authors did not address reports documenting the presence of lone-star ticks in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, and upper Midwest and of deer ticks in the South.

It has been assumed that STARI does not have any long-term sequelae.

“A recent study has suggested that STARI is transmitted by the lone-star tick Amblyoma americanum; however, it may take some time before all the necessary data can be collected, since much is still unknown about STARI.”

The treatment of STARI is also uncertain. “STARI is often treated as Lyme disease with doxycycline twice daily for 14 days; however, there is no approved treatment yet.”

The authors conclude, “STARI is an emerging Lyme-like illness that causes the characteristic rash, erythema migrans. The current incidence of STARI remains unknown as it is not nationally reportable.”

The following questions are addressed in this Podcast episode:

  1. What is STARI?
  2. Are there differences between STARI and Lyme disease rashes?
  3. Are there differences in the ticks?
  4. How is STARI diagnosed, compared to Lyme disease?
  5. What clinical evidence does one need to diagnose STARI?
  6. What are the consequences if Lyme disease or co-infections is overlooked?
  7. What do we know about ticks in the South?

Thanks for listening to another Inside Lyme Podcast. Please remember that the advice given is general and not intended as specific advice to any particular patient. If you require specific advice, please seek that advice from an experienced professional.

Inside Lyme Podcast Series

This Inside Lyme case series will be discussed on my Facebook page and made available on podcast and YouTube.  As always, it is your likes, comments, and shares that help spread the word about this series and our work. If you can, please leave a review on iTunes or wherever else you get your podcasts.

References:
  1. Abdelmaseih R, Ashraf B, Abdelmasih R, Dunn S, Nasser H. Southern Tick-Associated Rash Illness: Florida’s Lyme Disease Variant. Cureus. May 28 2021;13(5):e15306. doi:10.7759/cureus.15306

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**Comment**

When I speak with experts they state STARI IS LYME.  Southerners have fought to be heard.  Patients have been turned away undiagnosed and untreated and are told, “You can’t have Lyme because Lyme doesn’t exist here,” which of course is asinine.  Until the birds quit flying, rodents quit crawling, lizards and humans quit moving, and transporting ticks everywhere they go, ticks will continue to travel.

Category:

Lyme, research, Testing, Ticks, Treatment

Clinical Spectrum of Persistent Bartonella Infection and Considerations in Diagnosis & Treatment

http://  Approx. 53 Min

Dr B Robert Mozayeni,
2nd European Crypto-Infections Conference
26th-27th September 2020,
via Zoom

For more:

Category:

Bartonella, Testing, Treatment

Dr. Ruby: No Validated COVID Test, Rapid Antigen Test Not Specific, Can You Get COVID Again? Monoclonal Antibodies, Vaxxed Blood, Vial Batches, & Nebulized Peroxide Treatment

https://www.redvoicemedia.com/2022/01/ask-dr-jane-worldwide-pcr-fraud-blood-cell-death-staying-healthy/  Video Here (Approx. 13 Min)

Ask Dr. Jane

The Stew Peters Show

Jan. 12, 2022

Great, practical information within this video.  Please watch.

Summary:

  • Starting at 1:00 Dr. Jane discusses “chain of custody,” or the process and verification of how an object moves from point A to point B. There are special procedures for moving samples to and from a lab for screening. COVID injection vials also have “chain of custody” where they are signed for and carefully followed.
  • At 2:20 Dr. Ruby discusses that in her experience those getting COVID again (which again, can’t be verified due to the PCR fraud occurring and the inability to know if something truly is COVID) have had experimental monoclonal antibodies or the jab.  Getting the antibodies is like renting an army for a day. They come in, clean house, but then go away.  On the other-hand, the soldiers in your immune system stay around, continuing to clean house as needed.  Those getting the jab are catching every little cold bug or flu that’s going around.
  • at 4:30 Dr. Ruby discusses the doctors looking at “vaxxed” blood continue to follow up with patients, and at 5:04, they show a slide with strange, irregular, compact blood vessels.  The patients are also doing worse clinically – struggling with weakness, fatigue, severe illnesses, autoimmunity, and even hospitalizations. Doctors looking at vial ingredients have revealed horrific findings.
  • at 6:45, they discuss the fact that the Novavax shot still injects you with the toxic, bioweapon spike protein by the billions, you just get it differently.  They take mRNA designed to force the development of toxic, foreign spikes in your body and they put it in a baculovirus (insect pathogenic virus) which infects moths but not humans per say. They then transport the mRNA to the moth, which then makes billions of spikes which the company then extracts and puts on a graphene sheet and then fills a vial with adjuvant.  All of the COVID jabs are dangerous.  There isn’t one that’s safe, and none of them are “vaccines.”
  • At 8:30 Dr. Ruby discusses nebulized hydrogen peroxide.
  • “Viruses burn down, not up.”  ~ Dr. Ruby  This simply means that viruses grow weaker over time, not stronger.
  • We are in a cold and flu season.  This is nothing new, but it will all be labeled COVID.
  • Despite the fact the CDC recalled the PCR test  they state it can continue to be used for the rest of the year. There is absolutely no way PCR can determine what variant is causing illness.

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For a bit of humor that is spot on:

http://

CDC Walensky states, “These tests are not authorized for the purpose of evaluating contagiousness.”  Yet, these very tests have been used to keep people from working, going to school, and participating in society. 

https://popularrationalism.substack.com/p/rapid-antigen-tests-cannot-distinguish

Rapid Antigen Tests Cannot Distinguish SARS-CoV-2 and HKU-1 – and That’s Dangerous

FDA Documents Show They Are Not Specific. The Law of the Instrument Tells Us That’s a Big Problem.
 
   
   
 

There’s an old expression: “When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Sometimes referred to a “Maslow’s hammer”, this expression captures the idea of the law of the instrument. The origin of the expression seems to be from the observations that if you give a boy a hammer, they start pounding away at everything. Wikipedia has a good page on the history of this expression.

Thank goodness that regulations require that the FDA EUA documents not only be submitted, but that they can be viewed and read by anyone with access to the internet or who write to the FDA for a copy.

Everyone testing with the BinaxNOW nasal swab test, for example should be aware that per the documents provided by Abbott to the US FDA, their test can be a false positive if the person is infected with the HKU1 virus. (See the IFU Document):

“The comparison between SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein, MERS-CoV and human coronavirus HKU1 revealed that cross-reactivity cannot be ruled out.”

This language (or similar) is found in other IFU Documents for other COVID-19 RAT tests as well.

That means the test lacks pathogen specificity, and FDA cannot tell us what the risk of a false COVID-19 indication is without follow-up PCR testing. Further, like the PCR test, the comparison was only computational, based on BLAST-determine homology, not based on studies of thousands of patients. Further, protein structure, not sequence, is important for cross-reactivity – BLAST is not refined enough a tool to determine actually binding capacity, yet the FDA allowed negative BLAST results as evidence of degree of specificity.

PCR testing is similarly fraught with its own false positive problems, in part due to the same error (allowing BLAST results instead of requiring actual data from large studies). This is an issue the CDC could be finally coming to terms with after IPAK published a peer-review study in our journal on the problem, after Dr. Sin Hang Lee published two studies, after dozens of videos and articles have been written by yours truly alerting the world of the problem of PCR false positives due to the use of high cycle thresholds, and after an uproar over the fact that the PCR tests do not rule in Influenza.

HKU1, aka HCoV-HK1, first detected in 2004 in Hong Kong, is a Betacoronavirus (because it has a Hemagglutinin esterase gene), and enters the cell via a different recept that SARS-CoV-2. Like SAR-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV-2, it is an enveloped, single-stranded RNA virus.

Here’s an array of symptoms of HKU1 infection reported in 2017:

“Of 832 adult respiratory specimens screened, 13 (1.6%) cases of CoV-HKU1 were identified. Adults age ranged between 23 and 75 years and 6 (46%) were males. All of whom had 1 or more respiratory symptoms, and 5 (38%) also reported 1 or more gastrointestinal symptoms. Eleven (85%) reported history of smoking and 5 (38%) used inhaled steroids. Seven (54%) required hospitalization, 5 (71%) of these needed supplemental oxygen, and 2 (29%) were admitted to intensive care. Median length of hospitalization was 5 days. Eight (62%) received antibiotics despite identification of CoV-HKU1. Infectious work-up in 1 patient who died did not reveal any other pathogen. In 2 (15%) CoV-HKU1-positive adults, the only viral coinfection detected was influenza A.”

In 15% of people studied, co-infection with Influenza A was detected. That’s fairly common. For all of 2020-2021, for two years, “co-infection” of COVID-19 patients (PCR+ for SARS-CoV) was not even mentioned. Now that everyone (well, nearly everyone) is testing with in-home nasal swab kits for antibodies, many will be positive but will actually be HKU-1. Given the FDA’s allowance of specificity-by-BLAST, the problem could be much worse.

Why This is Dangerous

There are few good reasons why this is dangerous. Yes, the problem will make it appear as if more people have COVID-19 than actually do. The clinical workflow for COVID-19 is far more strenuous than for influenza A or HKU-1, so there’s the added burden on the healthcare system. I’ve heard reports that some hospitals are resorting to triage, placing non-PCR+ non-respiratory illness patients at risk (the in-hospital PCR screening adds to this as well).

However, people who have had a positive Rapid Antigen Test may also come to think of COVID-19 as mild for them, and their families – and worse – they may believe they have natural immunity and let their guard down. They may be more willing to attend a large gather, or mingle with others while symptomatic.

Third, false positives from PCR and from RAT tests alike will lead the public – and public health and medical communities – to believe that re-infection with SARS-CoV-2 is possible. The dynamics of societal responses will be flawed, leading to more quarantine, shut-downs, draconian control measures.

Fourth, the clinical care for a person who has respiratory viral infections other than SARS-CoV-2 may be different. If 15% of patients with “COVID-19” have something else, the CDC should know and medical practice should be altered to address this.

Fifth, co-housing non-COVID19 respiratory patients with COVID-19 patients can place them at risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Being sick already, they may have a more difficult clinical course as a result. Here’s a case of a woman who had HKU-1 infection on the day of entry and tested positive for COVID-19 on Day 3 of hospitalization.

Every single person who tests positive via PCR or RAT who has clinical symptoms or who has been exposed to a confirmed case of COVID-19 should have a confirmatory Sanger Sequencing test conducted to ensure what they have (or had) was truly a SARS-CoV-2 infection. As an added benefit, unlike PCR or RAT, Sanger Sequencing can tell us what variant we have (or have had).

There are over 6,000 laboratories around the US that can conduct Sanger Sequencing, and Sin Hang Lee, MD of Millford, CT is happy to provide the information on the primers he has developed for nested primer target amplification – and for Omicron detection.

Here’s a requisition form that can be used to order the Sanger Sequencing test (I have no financial relationship w/Dr. Lee or Millford Diagnostics).

The Law of the Instrument tells us that if you only test for COVID-19, you’ll only find COVID-19. Multiplex respiratory pathogen tests are also used in some places.

Please share with doctors and nurses in your area. This could help you & your loved ones travel a safer course.

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For more:

Until We the People refuse to be tested by a test that doesn’t test for the very thing they claim it does, we can expect more lockdowns, more mandates, and more tyranny.  Time to stand up and refuse to be a part of this complete farce.

Category:

Testing, Treatment, vaccines, Viruses

AONM Newsletter: Long COVID, Mitochondrial Test, PANS Conference, Book Reviews, Upcoming Events

AONM-Newsletter-January-2022 (1)

Please read in it entirety.  A few teasers:

  • University of Washington reports that almost a third go onto suffer persistent COVID symptoms.  They found that the S1 segment of the spike protein is recoverable from human monocytes in PASC patients up to 15 months after an acute infection compared to controls.
  • The Royal Society’s SET-C group describe a wide range of symptoms that overlap with M.E.
  • Since its introduction in 2006, Seahorse XF technology has been used in over 7,000 peer-reviewed publications and AONM now offers a range of tests of mitochondrial and cellular performance using Seahorse as well as extracellular flux analysis with luciferase assays. AONM will be holding a series of webinars in the first quarter of 2022 explaining the tests.
  • Virtual conference on autoimmune encephalopathy (PANDS/PANDAS) takes place on Feb. 9-11.
  • Early bird tickets if you do not wish to be awarded CPD points are available here hopehealingknowledge.com for $69 for all three days, until January 17th, after which the price rises to $99. For medical professionals (with CPD included), the early bird until Jan. 17th is $325, and $375 afterwards:  https://inevent.com/en/FoundationforTotalRecovery-1625240794/94-FoundationforTotalRecovery-1639074062/purchase.php  You can view the complete agenda and lineup of  incredible speakers by clicking here.
  • The books Toxic Legacy and Chronic are reviewed.
  • A list of upcoming events is at the end of the newsletter.

Category:

Activism, PANS, research, Testing, Viruses

Answers Still Needed About Possible Biowarfare Connection To Lyme Disease

https://www.lymedisease.org/lyme-biowarfare-pat-smith-lda/

Jan. 10, 2022

Answers still needed about possible biowarfare connection to Lyme disease

By Pat Smith

Forty-six years after a mother alerted public health about an unknown disease affecting her Connecticut neighborhood, patients still await answers about Lyme disease and help from the federal government− little has been forthcoming.

It’s been 37 years since I first saw Lyme as a board of education member in New Jersey, and 29 years since I first contacted New Jersey Congressman Chris Smith for help regarding Lyme disease.

I approached him because my school district had many seriously ill students and staff members who could find little medical help and no assistance for disrupted educations. Congressman Smith set up a Washington DC meeting for me with CDC and NIH officials to present a report on nine Monmouth/Ocean NJ school districts in the same situation, yet no public health authorities were involved to help the districts.

Shocking devastation

Officials were shocked and could not believe the devastation I described to them. They subsequently came to NJ and did their own study of five of the school districts, which confirmed the effects on the districts and these children. Congressman Smith held a Congressional meeting in Wall Township which overflowed the room. The CDC presented its study, and I spoke at this meeting as did my daughter who was then suffering seizures from Lyme.

The CDC refused to publish its school study, continuing to tell me they would, so the LDA asked the Lyme Times [published by LymeDisease.org] to publish it a few years ago for all to read, as it had been presented publicly by CDC.

Patients and advocates have been benefiting from Mr. Smith’s efforts to help us change that situation. Working with Congressman Smith, the Lyme Disease Association has been able to get bills introduced and passed over decades; educate federal & state legislators; help set up a federal Tick-Borne Disease Working Group under the Department of Health and Human Services; help parents threatened with Munchausen-by-proxy [an accusation that the parents have made the child sick] whose children were going to be removed because of long-term treatment with antibiotics; and help doctors whose licenses were threatened for treating with antibiotics. Sadly, some parents still have had their children removed and Lyme-treating physicians continue to be harassed.

Unanswered questions

Uncomprehendingly, we are left with many asked but unanswered questions. There continues to be government resistance to solving even the most basic issues. One is the continued use of tests discussed during a 1994 meeting where dissenting researchers were refused the right to present a minority report—tests which studies have shown are less than 50% accurate, whereby a person can test negative and still have the disease. Scientists have come forth over time with tests to be examined, but CDC has appeared to have neither considered them nor recommended them for further study to our knowledge.

Why do CDC and NIH continue to rely on one set of treatment guidelines for Lyme disease which recommend (read: allow) only a few weeks of doxycycline for a complex organism such as Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria that causes Lyme disease, when there is another set of guidelines that permit doctor discretion?

Why are patients still told: it’s in your head; you need a psychiatrist; you’re cured because you had two weeks of treatment; you have to learn to live with it; don’t use alternative therapies; it’s not Lyme? (When you ask what is it, the response is a shrug.)

Why are some patients being misdiagnosed with MS, ALS, CFS, FM, lupus, ADD, RA, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s which turn out to be Lyme and other tick-borne diseases apparently causing these symptoms in a number of cases?

Why are doctors who help patients get better with long-term and combinations of antibiotics still called quacks, unable to be a part of insurance plans, and subject to medical board actions?

Why is research being privately funded in prestigious institutions investigating antibiotic treatment options while the government says research is done, and that long-term antibiotics don’t work and can be harmful?

Denial of chronic Lyme

Many doctors, scientists, patients, and advocates have known for decades it’s “chronic Lyme”—persisting symptoms after short-term treatment. This occurs in 20% or more of Lyme patients−often combined with other tick-borne diseases, almost 20 of which are now found in the US, and can be acquired singly or in combinations.

Those suffering or helping these patients have been ridiculed in media over the decades, with Lyme called a housewife’s disease, a yuppie disease, mass hysteria, conspiracy theory, hoax perpetrated by those anti science.  In 2021, the “long haulers” of COVID 19 have thankfully not been scorned or shamed, why are “chronic Lyme” sufferers singled out for this abuse?

Why investigate any biowarfare origins?

The origins of COVID19 have already been investigated and linked with the NIH having been shown to have funded “gain of function” research—modifying a biological agent to confer new or enhanced activity to that agent. Why is it then a conspiracy theory to investigate the murky origins of Lyme?

Biowarfare has been out there for hundreds of years.

“Man has used poisons for assassination purposes ever since the dawn of civilization, not only against individual enemies but also occasionally against armies. However, the foundation of microbiology by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch offered new prospects for those interested in biological weapons because it allowed agents to be chosen and designed on a rational basis.”  (F. Frischnecht, Pasteur Institute: 2003, EMBO, “The History of Biological Warfare”-see NIH website)

It’s time for government transparency. Provide whatever the truth is about tick releases and other tick-borne disease experiments that some US scientists have come forth with and that government documents appear to support

476,000 people are diagnosed and treated annually in the US according to CDC. They and the general public deserve to know what happened in the past, to aid in the search for prevention and cure of Lyme and other tick-borne diseases.

Pat Smith is President of the Lyme Disease Association, which funds research, promotes education and jointly puts on an annual scientific conference with Columbia University. From 2017-2020, she served on the federal Tick-Borne Disease Working Group.

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For more:

Category:

Activism, Lyme, Testing