Madison Area Lyme Support Group

Interview with Dr. Wakefield

http://www.vaccinesrevealed.com/free/episode-1-watch-now/?em=Acashman%40charter.net&inf_contact_key=972aa0fefc90205de726b2f4f5634cb49393eb782959474fc9d5222ecf96ec17  Dr. Patrick Gentempo interviews Dr. Andrew Wakevield about Vaccines and Autism  (Link above only active for the next 9 hours)

Wakefield states he was taught old school in which the patient comes first, and the first things out of their mouths are the most important to hear.

At 5:43 in this episode, Dr. Wakefield tells the story of his son’s encounter with an orthopedic surgeon – and how the zeal to make money in medicine overrides the narrative and need of the patient.

6:20 The Patient History reveals what tests to take

8:90 My child was fine then got the MMR (Child lost ability to talk but showed behavior he was in pain such as hitting himself, banging his head, etc). Connection between what he was eating and his behavior (gut/brain).

10:50 There was great support in the beginning looking at this gut/brain issue and considering the vaccine.

11:20 People believe in a religious way in vaccines and folks are making a fortune off of them and folks have invested into careers around them.

12:50 What is the science behind vaccines? Wakefield went back and reviewed all the details and science (safety studies) and was appalled. Wrote a 250 page report.

13:25 MMR came out in 1989. Patients were reporting all along that the MMR was causing Autism. 14:40 – Authorities did nothing about the reports. 15:20 Get informed and read the inserts. Go to the CDC website and the NVIC and learn.

16:07 Without maternal instinct we would not be here. Medicine has tried to usurp that instinct with public health being around for about 150 years.

17:25 Autism is an epidemic. 1 in 25 children have it. If it doesn’t affect you now it will. Wakefield states it can be stopped 18:20 feels there is a common set of denominators and we can identify, eliminate, and prevent the epidemic.

18:43 The most important variable is childhood vaccines. Wakefield is not sure which ones. MMR, mercury, aluminum, viruses and viral components are all culprits.

19:50 Don’t even have baseline safety studies on vaccines.

20:24 Study coming out of India saying, “Please Stop,” in regard to the Polio vaccine due to damage it has caused.

Wakefield feels that clean water, sanitation, and other means are far more beneficial to countries like Africa and will help the immune system in a better way.

22:20 Philanthropy and the pharmaceutical agendas are in conflict. (Helping vs business)

35:15 When scoped, the children had inflamed bowels.  When they treated this, the children got better.  They began smiling and speaking.  Treat the bowel and the brain gets better.

38:30  Wakefield was presented with a choice.  Go down the vaccine road and suffer the consequences of the loss of career, position, license, fellowships, have papers retracted, and lose your country.  Wakefield chose to listen to patients and has lost it all.

40:00 He reveals how it all went down.

47:00 Suing in Texas court – the outcome will be important.

44:00 Mumps vaccine doesn’t work.  Outbreaks in highly vaccinated populations.  The vaccine has taken a mild disease in children and turned it into a severe issue (testicular inflammation and possible sterility) for adults.

45:10: Whistleblowers at Merck revealed that the efficacy of the mumps vaccine was faked because they altered the assay measuring the potency of the vaccine by using rabbit blood to give an artificial result. The whistleblowers told the FDA. The FDA told Merck they were coming to investigate giving them time to destroy all results.

50:02 Now it’s up to the public to say, “Enough is enough. We trusted you and you failed us.” The public needs to vote for politicians who listen to their voice to change this.

51:40 A Recent study from the University of Michigan showed 87% of parents put vaccine safety science as their #1 medical research priority. They want more information. Over 50% of Americans believe vaccines can cause serious injury including Autism.

Next, you’ll hear from Gary Goldman. Gary was a CDC Researcher, and the things he has to say about his experience there will help you understand what is going on in the darker corners of the industry.

Why does a decrease in Chicken Pox directly link to an increase in the painful disease Shingles? See exactly how this occurs at 1:01:27 in this episode. You’ll also hear how he resigned because he did not want to be part of research fraud.

Lastly, this episode introduces you to Dr. Toni Bark. Hear her comments about the wildly controversial vaccine, Gardasil at 1:28:28.

Bark at 1:36:23 states the placebos in vaccines are dangerous adjutants and/or experimental vaccines.  They are supposed to be inert substances.  The FDA is complicit in this because they help vaccine companies by designing the studies.  

1:39:15  Media won’t cover this because their major advertisers are pharmaceutical companies.  Academic researchers are vilified & lose funding.  There are NO whistleblower protections.  Can’t sue pharmaceutical manufacturers.  Vaccines have a tax on them which pays the vaccine court cases.  The DOJ will not get involved in vaccine cases.  No incentive to create a better product.  It’s status quo and business as usual.

Monkeys, Men, and Why Lyme/MSIDS Research Isn’t Getting Anywhere

http://projects.jsonline.com/news/2017/3/8/orangutan-death-sparks-fear-about-greater-threat.html   Article by Mark Johnson of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, March 9, 2017

Why Lyme/MSIDS Research Isn’t Getting Anywhere…..

In 2012 a 5 year old orangutan named Mahal died a mysterious death. He had an enlarged spleen and liver overrun with small gray bubbles. This death led to a three year investigation that included intricate pathology work with a full necropsy with microscopy.

The need for this work was seemingly propelled by the fear of zoonotic infection which is a disease that jumps from the primate to humans. According to Johnson 60% of the emerging infectious diseases identified since 1940 are zoonotic accounting for 2.5 billion cases of human illness and 2.7 million deaths.

Veterinary pathologist at UW Madison, Annette Gendron, performed the necropsy. She’s the one who discovered numerous organs were overrun by cysts, as well as the lungs causing an official death of acute respiratory distress syndrome.

Hitting a dead end, she contacted a fellow UW colleague, Tony Goldberg due to his work on hepatocystis, a single-cell parasite transmitted by midges.

For Lyme/MSIDS patients, this is where the story gets interesting….

Six months before Mahal died and after returning home from working in western Uganda, Goldberg struggled with a dull ache in his nose that became excruciating. Finally looking into a mirror, he discovered a fully engorged tick. DNA testing revealed a new species of tick of which Goldberg co-authored, “Coincident Tick Infestations in the Nostrils of Wild Chimpanzees and a Human in Uganda,” published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

Onto the orangutan’s death…

What finally led Goldberg to the guilty pathogen was by subtracting Mahal’s genetic sequence from that of another orangutan’s. What remained was the genetic signature of the culprit – a cestode, or tapeworm, but the sequence revealed it was a brand new tapeworm.

The discovery explained the little gray bubbles – tapeworms in the larval stage.

And the very day Goldberg got his answer he also discovered that scientists found the tapeworm group, Versteria, inside bodies of weasels in Japan and Finland. In 2014 Goldberg and co-authors published that Mahal died from a new species of tapeworm in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

The story didn’t end there – they had to find out how Mahal managed to contract a tapeworm from around the globe. Through a bizarre set of circumstances a student in Colorado (where Mahal came from originally) found tapeworms resembling Versteria in an ermine, and researchers in Oregon found similar tapeworms in a mink. Once again DNA sequencing revealed Mahal likely ingested genetically similar tapeworms in Colorado before he was transited to the Milwaukee Zoo.

Three and a half years after Mahal’s death, Goldberg and colleagues wrote a second paper in Emerging Infectious Diseases telling the origin of the tapeworm larvae.

The Sentinel article shows graphics of the Aedes aegypti mosquito and the various diseases it carries – all of which are rare to nonexistent in Wisconsin. It lists major outbreaks going all the way back to the Spanish flu up to the recent Zika Virus – which WI mosquitos can’t carry. It shows graphics on West Nile with information on transmission, geographical regions, symptoms, and that 44,000 cases have been reported in the U.S. since 1999, but few mosquitos actually carry the virus & 80% of the infected never experience symptoms & the remaining 20% have mild illness
https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/arboviral/westnilevirus.htm. It shows “outbreaks with little attention” including Yellow Fever, Cholera, Measles, and Dengue – all rare to nonexistent in Wisconsin. There were also graphics of tapeworms, diseases they carry, with graphics showing no cases in North America.

But the elephant in the room, Lyme Disease/MSIDS, the most common vector borne illness in the U.S., with Wisconsin 6th in the nation, is only mentioned as an afterthought when a researcher got a tick in his nose.

The Lyme Disease Association is stating that yearly new cases of Lyme Disease are approaching 400,000 in the U.S. That’s new cases. Wisconsin and other states are filled with folks who are chronically infected, yet the CDC denies it all – which means most of these people don’t even make into the statistics.

I love monkeys as much as the next person, but if one-fourth of the resources spent on this monkey were spent on Lyme/MSIDS patients, we’d have some answers.

Please, I beg, start doing meaningful research on a disease(es) you can get in your backyard that is causing thousands of Wisconsinites untold pain, suffering, and yes, even death.  

Forbidding Forecast For Lyme Disease In The Northeast

https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/20170306_me_forbidding_forecast_for_lyme_disease_in_the_northeast.mp3

March 6, 2017, 5:00 AM ET  Heard on NPR Morning Edition

http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/03/06/518219485/forbidding-forecast-for-lyme-disease-in-the-northeast

by Michaelleen Doucleff & Jane Greenhalgh

Last summer Felicia Keesing returned from a long trip and found that her home in upstate New York had been subjected to an invasion.

Rick Ostfeld and Felicia Keesing have been studying Lyme disease and ways to stop it for more than 20 years. The couple has come up with a way to predict how bad a Lyme season will be a full year in advance.

“There was evidence of mice everywhere. They had completely taken over,” says Keesing, an ecologist at Bard College.

It was a plague of mice. And it had landed right in Keesing’s kitchen.

“Not only were there mouse droppings on our countertops, but we also found dead mice on the kitchen floor,” says Keesing’s husband, Rick Ostfeld, an ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y.

The Hudson River Valley experienced a mouse plague during the summer of 2016. The critters were everywhere. For most people, it was just a nuisance. But for Keesing and Ostfeld, the mouse plague signaled something foreboding.

“We’re anticipating 2017 to be a particularly risky year for Lyme,” Ostfeld says.

Keesing and Ostfeld, who have studied Lyme for more than 20 years, have come up with an early warning system for the disease. They can predict how many cases there will be a year in advance by looking at one key measurement: Count the mice the year before.

The number of critters scampering around the forest in the summer correlates to the Lyme cases the following summer, they’ve reported.

The explanation is simple: Mice are highly efficient transmitters of Lyme. They infect up to 95 percent of ticks that feed on them. Mice are responsible for infecting the majority of ticks carrying Lyme in the Northeast. And ticks love mice. “An individual mouse might have 50, 60, even 100 ticks covering its ears and face,” Ostfeld says.

So that mouse plague last year means there is going to be a Lyme plague this year. “Yep. I’m sorry to say that’s the scenario we’re expecting,” Ostfeld says.

Mice and ticks get along swimmingly. Other animals, such as possums, groom away ticks — and sometimes kill them. But white-footed mice tolerate ticks covering their faces and ears. Blacklegged ticks, like the adult female on the right, are tiny — about the size of a sesame seed.

He’s not exactly sure which parts of the Northeast will be at highest risk.

But wherever Lyme exists, people should be vigilant, says epidemiologist Kiersten Kugeler at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Whether it’s a bad season or not, there’s still going to be a lot of human cases of tick-borne diseases,” she says. “What’s important for people to know is that the ticks are spreading to new areas — and tick-borne diseases are coming with them.”

Back in the early ’80s, the disease wasn’t that big a problem. Cases were confined to two small regions: western Wisconsin and the area from Connecticut to New Jersey.

Did You Get Bit By a Lyme-Infested Tick? Here’s What To Do
Since then, Lyme cases have shot up in number and spread in all directions: “The only place that they haven’t really spread is into the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean, for obvious reasons,” says biologist Rebecca Eisen, who’s also at the CDC.

Now Lyme is present in more than 260 counties, the CDC reported in 2015. The disease shows up in Maine, swoops down the East Coast into Washington, D.C., and southern Virginia. Then it hops to the Midwest into northern Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota. There are also small pockets of Lyme on the West Coast.

Since the early ’90s, reported cases of Lyme disease have tripled, to about 30,000 cases each year. The CDC thinks the actual number is 10 times higher.

“We think the true burden of Lyme disease in the U.S. is about 300,000 cases,” Kugeler says. “Lyme disease is quite a big public health problem.”

The reasons for this Lyme explosion are many, Ostfeld says. Climate change is part of it. The surge in deer — which feed ticks and spread them around — has also been a factor.

But Ostfeld has found another reason, something that happened more than 200 years ago.

Today the Hudson River Valley in upstate New York is gorgeous. The hills are covered with oak forests, and the valleys are patchworks of hayfields and farms.

But Ostfeld says the area didn’t always look like this. When the Europeans came here hundreds of years ago, they clear-cut nearly all of the forests to plant crops and raise livestock.

“They also cut down trees for commercial use,” Ostfeld says, “to make masts for ships, and for firewood.”

Since then a lot of the forest has come back — but it’s not the same forest as before, he says. Today it’s all broken up into little pieces, with roads, farms and housing developments.

For mice, this has been great news.

“They tend to thrive in these degraded, fragmented landscapes,” Ostfeld says, because their predators need big forests to survive.

Without as many foxes, hawks and owls to eat them, mice crank out babies. And we end up with forests packed with mice — mice that are chronically infected with Lyme and covered with ticks.

So all these little patches of forest dotting the Northeast have basically turned into Lyme factories, spilling over with infected ticks.

Then people come along and do the darndest thing, Keesing says: They build their dream homes right next door. “So we see that humans are putting themselves in these areas where they’re most at risk,” she says.

To figure out why Lyme has become more prevalent, researchers at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y., have trapped hundreds of thousands of rodents in the woods over the past 20 years. Research assistant Francesca Rubino checks a squirrel for ticks.

And that means people, in some areas, may be putting themselves at risk for Lyme every single day without even knowing it, says the CDC’s Kiersten Kugeler. “In the Northeast, most people catch Lyme around their homes,” she says. “People out gardening. People playing in their backyard. Mowing the lawn.”

So what can you do to keep from getting infected? Add a tick check to your daily routine, Kugeler says. When you’re in the shower check your body for tiny ticks, especially the places they like to hide.

“That’s the scalp, behind the ears, the armpits and in the groin area,” she says.

If you do find a tick, get it off as quickly as possible. The longer an infected tick stays on your skin, the greater the chance it will pass the Lyme bacteria on to you. Generally, it takes about 24 hours for the tick to infect a person after it starts biting.

Then be on the lookout for Lyme symptoms — like a red rash or a fever. It anything crops up, go see a doctor immediately. Don’t wait: The earlier you get treated, the better chance you’ll have for a full recovery.

Petition: 2017 Lyme Case Definition

First, the new 2017 Lyme Case Definition as defined by the CDC below, then the petition started by Carl Tuttle who rightly has an issue with the fact that the following is missing:

“This surveillance case definition was developed for national reporting of Lyme disease; it is not intended to be used in clinical diagnosis”

https://wwwn.cdc.gov/nndss/conditions/lyme-disease/case-definition/2017/

Lyme Disease (Borrelia burgdorferi)
2017 Case Definition
CSTE Position Statement(s)

16-ID-10
Clinical Description

A systemic, tick-borne disease with protean manifestations, including dermatologic, rheumatologic, neurologic, and cardiac abnormalities. The most common clinical marker for the disease is erythema migrans (EM), the initial skin lesion that occurs in 60%-80% of patients.

For purposes of surveillance, EM is defined as a skin lesion that typically begins as a red macule or papule and expands over a period of days to weeks to form a large round lesion, often with partial central clearing. A single primary lesion must reach greater than or equal to 5 cm in size across its largest diameter. Secondary lesions also may occur. Annular erythematous lesions occurring within several hours of a tick bite represent hypersensitivity reactions and do not qualify as EM. For most patients, the expanding EM lesion is accompanied by other acute symptoms, particularly fatigue, fever, headache, mildly stiff neck, arthralgia, or myalgia. These symptoms are typically intermittent. The diagnosis of EM must be made by a physician. Laboratory confirmation is recommended for persons with no known exposure.

For purposes of surveillance, late manifestations include any of the following when an alternate explanation is not found:

Musculoskeletal system . Recurrent, brief attacks (weeks or months) of objective joint swelling in one or a few joints, sometimes followed by chronic arthritis in one or a few joints. Manifestations not considered as criteria for diagnosis include chronic progressive arthritis not preceded by brief attacks and chronic symmetrical polyarthritis. Additionally, arthralgia, myalgia, or fibromyalgia syndromes alone are not criteria for musculoskeletal involvement.
Nervous system . Any of the following signs that cannot be explained by any other etiology, alone or in combination: lymphocytic meningitis; cranial neuritis, particularly facial palsy (may be bilateral); radiculoneuropathy; or, rarely, encephalomyelitis. Headache, fatigue, paresthesia, or mildly stiff neck alone, are not criteria for neurologic involvement.
Cardiovascular system . Acute onset of high-grade (2nd-degree or 3rd-degree) atrioventricular conduction defects that resolve in days to weeks and are sometimes associated with myocarditis. Palpitations, bradycardia, bundle branch block, or myocarditis alone are not criteria for cardiovascular involvement.
Laboratory Criteria for Diagnosis

For the purposes of surveillance, laboratory evidence includes:

A positive culture for B. burgdorferi, OR
A positive two-tier test. (This is defined as a positive or equivocal enzyme immunoassay (EIA) or immunofluorescent assay (IFA) followed by a positive Immunoglobulin M1 (IgM) or Immunoglobulin G 2 (IgG) western immunoblot (WB) for Lyme disease) OR
A positive single-tier IgG2 WB test for Lyme disease3.
1 IgM WB is considered positive when at least two of the following three bands are present: 24 kilodalton (kDa) outer surface protein C (OspC)*, 39 kDa basic membrane protein A (BmpA), and 41 kDa (Fla). Disregard IgM results for specimens collected >30 days after symptom onset.

2 IgG WB is considered positive when at least five of the following 10 bands are present: 18 kDa, 24 kDa (OspC)*, 28 kDa, 30 kDa, 39 kDa (BmpA), 41 kDa flagellin (Fla), 45 kDa, 58 kDa (not GroEL), 66 kDa, and 93 kDa.

3 While a single IgG WB is adequate for surveillance purposes, a two-tier test is still recommended for patient diagnosis.

*Depending upon the assay, OspC could be indicated by a band of 21, 22, 23, 24 or 25 kDA.

Criteria to Distinguish a New Case from an Existing Case

Case not previously reported to public health authorities.

Exposure

Exposure is defined as having been (less than or equal to 30 days before onset of EM) in wooded, brushy, or grassy areas (i.e., potential tick habitats) of Lyme disease vectors. Since infected ticks are not uniformly distributed, a detailed travel history to verify whether exposure occurred in a high or low incidence state is needed. An exposure in a high-incidence state is defined as exposure in a state with an average Lyme disease incidence of at least 10 confirmed cases/ 100,000 for the previous three reporting years. A low-incidence state is defined as a state with a disease incidence of <10 confirmed cases/100,000 (see https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/stats/tables.html). A history of tick bite is not required.

Case Classification

Suspected

A case of EM where there is no known exposure (as defined above) and no laboratory evidence of infection (as defined above), OR
A case with evidence of infection but no clinical information available (e.g., a laboratory report).
Probable

Any other case of physician-diagnosed Lyme disease that has laboratory evidence of infection (as defined above).

Confirmed

A case of EM with exposure in a high incidence state (as defined above), OR
A case of EM with laboratory evidence of infection and a known exposure in a low incidence state, OR
Any case with at least one late manifestation that has laboratory evidence of infection.
Case Classification Comments

Lyme disease reports will not be considered cases if the medical provider specifically states this is not a case of Lyme disease, or the only symptom listed is “tick bite” or “insect bite.”

https://www.change.org/p/the-us-senate-calling-for-a-congressional-investigation-of-the-cdc-idsa-and-aldf/u/19051457

Federal Public Law 107-116 passed by the Senate and House and signed by President Bush on January 10, 2002; Wording on that bill states that the CDC’s case surveillance definition is “misused as a standard of care for healthcare reimbursement, product (test) development, medical licensing hearings, and other legal cases.” It also instructs the CDC to correct this misuse.

Please sign petition at the change.org site above.