Kerry teacher Karin O’Shea needs urgent treatment for chronic Lyme disease after being misdiagnosed for 12 years
By Aoife Breslin
Feb. 14, 2022
With only one option left, housebound Kerry woman Karin O’Shea must go to Germany in order to receive urgent treatment for Chronic Lyme disease after believing her diagnosis to be Fibromyalgia for 12 years
Kerry woman Karin O’Shea contracted Lyme disease from the bite of a tick when she was a teenager and went undiagnosed for 12 years.
Now, she needs urgent treatment.
When Karin became ill in her teens, she was misdiagnosed with Fibromyalgia. She was able to manage her symptoms through medication and lived a normal life.
In 2020, the 26-year-old saw a rapid deterioration in her health. After endless GP visits, countless consultants, MRI’s, X-rays and hospital admissions, there were no answers.
Speaking with RSVP Live, Karin shared her experience:
“Me and my GP extended every avenue but there were still no answers.
“So, I had to send my bloods to Germany myself to test for Lyme disease and the results came back positive, as well as showing chronic immune suppression.”
Karin was tested for Lyme disease under the Irish system when she was 14 years old, but her results came back negative.
This was due to her chronic immune suppression; her body wasn’t creating enough antibodies and the Irish system detects antibodies in order to get results. (See link for article and video)
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**Comment**
Another heart-breaking story of misdiagnosis which has caused yet another case to fester and worsen.
SUMMARY:
O Shea finally obtained appropriate treatment which included 5 antibiotics a day.
Due to her late stage case, she had horrific side-effects, and her body rejected the treatment.
Patient is now housebound due to severe neurological symptoms.
Her remaining option is to travel to Germany for a month of intensive treatment followed by a 6 months of rehabilitation.
She’s been told she has a 70% chance of obtaining remission and should get quality of life back.
O Shea’s advice to others:
“I want people to know if you do get a tick bite, go straight to the doctor and demand two weeks antibiotics, regardless of if you have the bulls-eye rash or not.
I couldn’t agree more, but I’d demand a month’s worth.
She also states that she was untreated because she never got the EM rash. She then states that only 50% get the rash, but it can actually be far less than that, is highly variable, and should never be used to keep people from being diagnosed. While the EM rash IS DIAGNOSTIC for Lyme, not having it means nothing.
The article doesn’t mention co-infections which are almost always an issue with chronic patients and require other medications. They also make cases much more severe. My educated guess is she’s going to St. George Hospital where she will be treated with hypothermia and IV antibiotics, among other modalities. Here’s the story of a woman who got this treatment. I also write about the treatment in the comment section as well as questions I posed to Dr. Douwes, head of St. George Hospital, when he spoke at an ILADS convention.
If you want to support Karin on her journey to recovery click here.
True to form, the day after this information about ivermectin is disseminated, Medpage Today comes out with yetanother trash piece on ivermectin. Mainstream media is also guilty. Rather than discussing solid data, science, and the fact it has worked even on the most severe cases, the article focuses on a singular doctor on twitter who states FLCCC’s therapies for Long COVID is like “throwing spaghetti against the wall,” as well as, “Throwing 20 medications (9 are prescription) at a problem with minimal (or no) evidence is irresponsible. As we will see, this is both unethical & likely harmful.” ~Nick Mark, MD
Lyme/MSIDS patients and Lyme literate doctors take note of this attack because the same thing has been said about effective treatments for tick-borne illness due to the fact pathogens cause severe immune dysfunction and can affect every organ in the human body – similarly to COVID. FLCCC has figured this out and is addressing multiple issues the body is contending with when infected with COVID.
Ivermectin Beats Out 9 Other Meds for Treating Omicron, Study Confirms
Researchers used computational analyses to evaluate the performance of 10 medications against the Omicron variant, finding ivermectin outperformed all of them, including nirmatrelvir (Paxlovid), a new drug from Pfizer that has cost taxpayers $5.29 billion and costs $529 per course of treatment.
Researchers used computational analyses to evaluate the performance of 10 medications against the Omicron variant, finding that ivermectin outperformed all of them, including nirmatrelvir (Paxlovid) a new drug from Pfizer that has cost taxpayers $5.29 billion and costs $529 per course of treatment.
Ivermectin lowers the viral load by inhibiting replication, reduces infection by 86% when used preventively, speeds recovery, protects against organ damage, lowers the risk of hospitalization and death and costs between $48 and $95 for a course of treatment depending on your location.
Early treatment lowers your risk of long COVID, which includes physical and mental health conditions. According to cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, 50% of those sick enough to be hospitalized have symptoms of long COVID.
Africa has a lower number of cases, severity of disease, hospitalizations and deaths than other areas of the world, which may be due to using prophylactic medications for endemic infections that have successfully treated COVID.
At nearly no other time in history has there been this level of fear generated across the world as experienced thus far in 2020 and 2021. The depth and breadth of the strategies used to stoke those fears have been overwhelming.
Unfortunately, many of the early effective treatment strategies that can be used at home have also fallen victim to censorship.Ivermectin is one of those strategies. In a computational analysis of the Omicron variant against several therapeutic agents, data show that ivermectin had the best results.
Yet, as you look objectively at what’s been happening across the world, the fear being generated is not one-sided. The suppression of information by corporations, government agencies and the pharmaceutical industry is one indication of their concern and how far they’re willing to go to ensure the level of fear remains high enough to manipulate behavior.
Consider the statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2019, 4.6% of the U.S. population was diagnosed with heart disease. The population at the end of 2019 was 328,239,523.
This means there were 15,099,018 people with heart disease in the U.S. in 2019. There were 696,962 people who died that year from heart disease, which is a death rate of 4.6%.
This is 20 times greater than the death rate from COVID-19. Yet these same agencies were not lobbying for mandates against soda or sugar-laden foods — they weren’t banning smoking and they weren’t mandating exercise — all heart disease risk factors.
The censorship and suppression of information has hobbled early treatment of COVID-19 in many western nations. Through 2020, public healthexperts and the mainstreammedia warned against the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
Both are on the World Health Organization’s list of essential drugs, but the benefits have been ignored by public health officials and buried by the media.
Newest ivermectin study showed best results against COVID
This study on Cornell University’s preprint website has not yet been peer-reviewed. Researchers used a computational analysis to look at the Omicron variant, which has demonstrated a lower clinical presentation and lower hospital admission rates.
After having retrieved the complete genome sequence and collecting 30 variants from the database, the researchers analyzed 10 drugs against the virus, including:
Binding energy of promising drugs against main protease of Omicron variant.
The researchers found that each of the drugs had some degree of effectiveness against the virus and most were currently in clinical trials. They used molecular docking to find that the mutations in the Omicron variant didn’t significantly affect the interaction between the drugs and the main protease.
An analysis of all 10 drugs found that ivermectin was the most effective drug candidate against the Omicron variant. The testing included Nirmatrelvir (Paxlovid), which is the new protease inhibitor for which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) provided an emergency use authorization against COVID in December 2021.
In other words, Pfizer released a new drug which cost the U.S. taxpayers $5.29 billion or $529 per course of treatment and which received an EUA despite the availability of a similar drug that has proven to be more effective and is cheaper.
How ivermectin works
Ivermectin is best known for its antiparasitic properties. Yet, the drug also has antiviral and anti-inflammatory properties. Studies have shown that ivermectin helps to lower the viral load by inhibiting replication.
A single dose of ivermectin can kill 99.8% of the virus within 48 hours.
A meta-analysis in the American Journal of Therapeutics showed the drug reduced infection by an average of 86% when used preventively. An observational study in Bangladesh evaluated the effectiveness of ivermectin as a prophylaxis for COVID-19 in health care workers.
The data showed four of the 58 volunteers who took 12 mg of ivermectin once a month for four months developed mild COVID symptoms as compared to 44 of the 60 health care workers who declined the medication.
Ivermectin has also been shown to speed recovery, in part by inhibiting inflammation and protecting against organ damage. This pathway also lowers the risk of hospitalization and death. Meta analyses have shown an average reduction in mortality that ranges from 75%to83%.
Additionally, the drug also prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 when taken before or after exposure. Added together, these benefits make it clear that ivermectin could all but eliminate this pandemic.
Early intervention lowers long COVID and hospitalization
Some people who have had COVID-19 seem to be unable to fully recover and complain of lingering symptoms of chronic fatigue. Others struggle with mental health problems.
One study, in November 2020, found 18.1% of people who had COVID-19 received their first psychiatric diagnosis in the 14 to 90 days after recovery. Most commonly diagnosed conditions were anxiety disorders, insomnia and dementia.
These symptoms have come to be called long COVID, long-haul COVID, post-COVID syndrome, chronic COVID or long-haul syndrome. They all refer to symptoms that persist for four more weeks after an initial COVID-19 infection.
According to Dr. Peter McCullough (5:43), board-certified internist and cardiologist, 50% of those who have been sick enough to be hospitalized will have symptoms of long COVID:
“So, the sicker someone is, and the longer the duration of COVID, the more likely they are to have long COVID syndrome. That’s the reason why we like early treatment. We shorten the duration of symptoms and there’s less of a chance for long COVID syndrome.”
Some of the common symptoms of long COVID include shortness of breath, joint pain, memory, concentration or sleeping problems, muscle pain or headache and loss of smell or taste.
According to McCullough (6:05), a paper presented by Dr. Bruce Patterson at the International COVID Summit in Rome, Sept. 11 to 14, 2021:
“… showed that in individuals who’ve had significant COVID illness, 15 months later the s1 segment of the spike protein is recoverable from human monocytes. That means the body literally has been sprayed with the virus and it spends 15 months, in a sense, trying to clean out the spike protein from our tissues. No wonder people have long COVID syndrome.”
It should come as no surprise that studies have also confirmed that early intervention improves mortality and reduces hospitalizations. Perhaps one of the greatest crimes in this whole pandemic is the refusal by reigning health authorities to issue early treatment guidance.
Instead, they’ve done everything possible to suppress remedies shown to work. Patients were simply told to stay home and do nothing. Once the infection had worsened to the point of near-death, patients were told to go to the hospital, where most were routinely placed on mechanical ventilation — a practice that was quickly discovered to be lethal.
However, as the featured study and others have demonstrated, ivermectin is one of the successful treatment protocols that can be used against SARS-CoV-2.
Africa has lowest case and death rate, likely from ivermectin
Across the world, countries have taken different approaches to address the spread of the virus. The steps taken in Africa varied depending on the country, yet the infection and death rates were relatively stable and low across the continent.
In the last year there have been reports of small areas in the world where the number of infections, deaths or case-fatality rates have been significantly lower than the rest of the world. For example, India’s Uttar Pradesh State reported a recovery rate of 98.6% and no further infections.
However, the entire continent of Africa appears to have sidestepped the massive number of infections and deaths predicted for these poorly funded countries with overcrowded cities. Early estimations were that millions would die, but that scenario has not materialized.
The World Health Organization has called Africa “one of the least affected regions in the world.”
There are several factors that may influence the infection rate in Africa. A study from Japan (1.25) demonstrates that after just 12 days that doctors were allowed to legally prescribe ivermectin to their patients, the cases dropped dramatically.
The chairman of the Tokyo Medical Association had noticed the low number of infections and deaths in Africa, where many use ivermectin prophylactically and as the core strategy to treat onchocerciasis, a parasitic disease also known as river blindness.
More than 99% of people infected with river blindness live in 31 African countries.
In addition to ivermectin use in Africa, other medications are also commonly available, such as hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, which have long been used in the treatment and prevention of malaria, also endemic in Africa.
Finally, Artemisia annua, also known as sweet wormwood, is an herb used in combination therapies to treat malaria. It was used in traditional Chinese medicine for more than 2,000 years to treat fever.
Today artemisinin, a metabolite of Artemisia, is the current therapeutic option for malaria. The plant has also been studied since the 2003 SARS outbreak for the treatment of coronaviruses, with good results.
In other words, whether by design or default, the medications that have proven to be successful against the virus are commonly used in Africa for other health conditions.
While Pfizer tests the short- and long-term effects of a genetic experiment on Israel’s population, it appears one continent has demonstrated administration of a 30-year-old, inexpensive drug with a known safety profile could reduce the cases, severity and mortality from this infection.
The question that must be asked and answered to get to the bottom of this plandemic is what is blinding mainstream media, government agencies, public health experts, medical associations, doctors, nurses and your next-door neighbor from recognizing and speaking out in support of science?
Dr. Robert Califf, head of FDA under the Obama administration, is back as head of the FDA. Under his watch, he helped Big Pharma reap in record profits and sales and shielded them from any liability due to the opioid crisis. An FDA exec was taped by Project Veritas proving that the FDA is utterly controlled by Big Pharma. The fraud, collusion, and conflicts of interests are all exposed, plain as day, yet the lawlessness continues.
It’s gotten so bad, state attorney generals have had to call out the FDA, CDC, Fauci, and the media for ‘fueling confusion and misinformation’ by interfering with the treatment of COVID patients. Both Nebraska and Oklahoma doctors are now free to prescribe off-label medications such as ivermectin and HCQ for COVID without fear of disciplinary action from corrupt groups like the AMA and state medical boards.
This legal action needs to happen in each and every state in the U.S.
In this informative presentation, chuck full of facts and data, Dr. Raphael Stricker, a San Francisco internist and hematologist, and board member of LymeDisease.org, who is an internationally recognized leader in tick-borne disease diagnosis and treatment, discusses what it will take to develop new drug treatments for Lyme disease.
He shows that the Lyme disease epidemic is much larger than HIV/AIDS, HCV, and tuberculosis in the USA and may involve sexual transmission. He calls on Big Pharma to take the lead in the global fight against Lyme disease.
Clearly, this will never happen. Big Pharma and our corrupt public health ‘authorities’ and therefore mainstream research are too enamored with a shiny newLyme “vaccine” which will reap in billions, of which they all will get a nice cut from, to be bothered by such mundane things like treatments, which would immediately help patients and alleviate suffering, but aren’t cash-cows like “vaccines.” Just look at how COVID has been handled for a current example. Doctors are screaming that there have been cheap, safe, treatments from the beginning of COVID, and that 500,000 lives could have been saved, but they are being censored, bullied, and persecuted by regulatory agencies – similarly to the way Lyme literate doctors have been treated.
I argue that the only path forward is to do the work ourselves with independent researchers without ties to Big Pharma and the government. Historically, this is the only positive forward movement that has been made in Lymeland.
The sooner we wake up and realize our corrupt public health ‘authorities’, regulatory agencies, and research institutions that rely upon government grants are captured agencies the sooner we can fix this by going around the system not crawling in bed with it.
N-acetylcysteine (NAC) is a powerful antioxidant which contains the amino acid cysteine, a precursor to glutathione, that was approved as a drug in 1963 and has been widely used as a nutritional supplement since it is not found in food. It is also used in prescription form as an antidote for acetaminiphen-induced toxicity as well as for depression, precancers, HIV & AIDS, to alleviate cancer treatment side-effects, and as a mucolytic agent for upper respiratory conditions such as COVID.
The FDA abruptly decided in 2020 that NAC should suddenly require a doctor’s prescription and issued a warning to seven companies who were illegally selling hangover products with NAC in them. Amazon then completely stopped selling it.
The timing of this abrupt decision is suspicious at best, since NAC very well may help lower the risk of COVID and the fact those with glutathione deficiencies have worse outcomes. Many doctors have recommended NAC as part of an early at-home treatment that is safe, cheap, and effective. Within this article is a video where a pulmonologist explains NAC is necessary to reduce the oxidative stress associated with severe COVID and thus may significantly impact the sales of antiviral drugs.Drugs, in fact, which our conflict-riddled public health ‘authorities’ have a stake in.
Natural Products Insider reports, the warning letters stated that NAC could not be “lawfully marketed in dietary supplements because it was first studied as a drug in 1963.” The Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN) sent a letter in December 2020 to the FDA’s Office of Dietary Supplement Programs describing the position as “legally invalid.”
To appear reasonable, the FDA announced they wanted more information on how NAC has been marketed as a dietary supplement.
Quick to respond, numerous associations have submitted proof to the FDA of numerous NAC-containing products sold pre-DSHEA and that the FDA is misapplying the prior drug-restriction to NAC, and that it can’t be applied retroactively from the date of DSHEA’s enactment. They also submitted comments, countering FDA’s safety concerns, noting that NAC has been in use for decades and that FDA had access in that time to its own Adverse Event Reporting System, to manufacturing facility inspections, and other tools, as well as data from publicly available research studies conducted on NAC or NAC-containing formulations. CRN pointed to data provided by Pure Encapsulations, a brand marketed by Nestlé Health Science, which includes nine years of adverse event data for the company’s supplement containing NAC:
From 2013 to the present day, the adverse event rate per unit sold of NAC-containing products was only 0.002%
those adverse events were mild and resolved on their own
Sevo Nutraceuticals reported fewer than 10 adverse events for approximately 500,000 unites sold
In a press release, Megan Olsen, CRN’s VP and Associate General Counsel, commented:
“The agency’s continued failure to address the singular legal issue on the table is inexplicable. Their refusal to act is causing harm to consumers and businesses.”
A press release summarized The United Natural Products Alliance’s (UNPA) position on the matter as of January 25, 2022:
The FDA, in attempting to exclude NAC from the dietary supplement market, is acting outside of its statutory jurisdiction and authority.
UNPA provided definitive evidence of pre-DSHEA use of NAC – it is an ODI (Old Dietary Ingredient), NAC is safe, and there is broad agreement on this.
The UNPA NAC Working Group will pursue this important issue until a proper outcome is reached, which is recognition of NAC as a lawful ODI and FDA abandons its misguided retro lookback policy.
The FDA appears to be in hot-water these days and is embroiled in yet another fiasco. The FDA has long been accused of corruption, and ties to Big Pharma which has resulted in unsafe pharmaceuticals. Interestingly, while it approves and promotes toxic drugs like remdesivir and COVID injectionswhich aren’t vaccines and have caused more adverse reactions and death than any other vaccine in the history of VAERS, it squashes safe supplements and proven drugs like NAC, vitamins D, C, zinc, and ivermectin which could improve cases and remove the need altogether for COVID injections. If you have less than 4 minutes, go here to listen to Dr. Kory passionately explain the situation. It literally brought tears to my eyes. Doctors who are truly attempting to help patients are bullied, censored, and shouted down. Kory’s frustration is tangible.
The current top-down, “one-sized fits all” approach to medicine puts everyone into a 4-cornered box regardless of medical history, health status, and individual needs. I highlight how this current dangerous, singular approach, which also includes mainstream media and Big Pharma colluding with public health officials, is removing our precious medical freedoms in this article, as well as is causing a shortage of medical professionals in the U.S. Front-line workers, who were heroes a year ago but are currently being bullied and summarily dismissed without a job or pay simply for not taking an experimental, fast-tracked gene therapy that doesn’t stop infection or transmission.
Unless we educate others and speak and act now it may be too late to roll this back, and it will restrict Lyme/MSIDS patients more than they already are. Mark my words.
The Asian longhorned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis, an invasive species associated with human pathogens, has spread rapidly across the eastern USA. Questing H. longicornis ticks recovered from active surveillance conducted from 1 May to 6 September, 2019 throughout Pennsylvania were tested for rickettsial pathogens. Of 265 ticks tested by PCR for pathogens, 4 (1.5%) were positive for Anaplasma phagocytophilum. Sequence analysis of the 16S rRNA gene confirmed two positives as A. phagocytophilum–human agent variant. This is the first reported detection of A. phagocytophilum–human pathogenic strain DNA in exotic H. longicornis collected in the USA.
Welcome to another Inside Lyme Podcast with your host Dr. Daniel Cameron. In this episode, Dr. Cameron will be discussing the case of a 64-year-old woman with central nervous system involvement of the brain.
A 64-year-old woman was hospitalized with a 24-hour history of confusion and lethargy. The following morning, her lethargy had worsened and she developed subjective fever, mild headache, nausea, vomiting and increased confusion, according to the authors.
The physical exam showed “aphasia and memory lapse of the past 24 hours and an engorged tick behind the knee.”
Her tests revealed leptomeningeal enhancement and bilateral frontal lobe subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH).
Note: Leptomeninges are the two innermost layers of tissue that cover the brain and spinal cord. The causes of leptomeningeal enhancement can include infectious meningitis of bacterial, fungal, and viral etiology; autoimmune and inflammatory diseases such as encephalitis, vasculitis, and sarcoidosis; trauma; and metastatic disease.1
Anaplasmosis testing is positive
The Anaplasmosis PCR test of the serum was positive. A spinal tap was not performed.
The authors point out that the time from transmission to symptom onset in anaplasmosis can be within 24 hours. And typically, neurologic involvement is seen more often in Lyme disease and Ehrlichia.
Tests for Lyme disease or other co-infections were negative. However, the authors acknowledged that these tests might not be positive in early disease.
Treatment for Anaplasmosis
The woman was treated with doxycycline and discharged home.
“However, the patient was again hospitalised 6 weeks later due to persistent headache, word finding difficulties, memory loss and generalised fatigue,” wrote the authors.
“Repeat MRI and MRA of the brain showed significant increase in the FLAIR hyperintensity and hypointensity involving bilateral frontal, parietal occipital lobes, consistent with SAH with persistent left MCA anterior division vasospasm.”
She was discharged without retreatment and speech therapy was arranged.
“The patient has had marked improvement and returned to her cognitive baseline 3 months later,” wrote the authors.
The following questions are addressed in this Podcast episode:
What is Anaplasmosis?
What is leptomeningeal enhancement?
What is subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH)?
How quickly can tick-borne infections be transmitted?
How long does it take for Anaplasmosis symptoms to appear?
What other treatments are there for Anaplasmosis?
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:
Mullholand JB, Tolman N, De Obaldia A, et al. Central nervous system involvement of anaplasmosis. BMJ Case Reports CP 2021;14:e243665.
Madison Area Lyme Support Group 