https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/can-lyme-disease-cause-leukemia#having-lyme-disease-and-leukemia

Can Lyme disease cause leukemia?

Medically reviewed by Faith Selchick, DNP, AOCNP, Nursing, Oncology
Written by Mathieu Rees
September 8, 2021

Leukemias are cancers that involve certain cells of the body’s blood, bone marrow, or immune system. Lyme disease is a bacterial infection that people can catch from tick bites. Although these conditions are very different, certain connections may exist between them.

As a 2021 reviewTrusted Source explains, leukemias are cancers that develop from certain cells called leukocytes. When someone has leukemia, some of their leukocytes grow and divide in an uncontrolled fashion. Doctors can classify such cancers according to whether they affect myeloid or lymphoid cells. These cells are kinds of leukocytes.

As the review notes, there are many possible genetic and environmental causes of leukemia.

Lyme disease is the resultTrusted Source of Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria. These bacteria can make their way into a person’s body via tick bites. Ticks are small arachnids that feed on blood, and that can carry B. burgdorferi bacteria.

This article will look into the possibility that Lyme disease is a risk factor of leukemia. It will also look into what it is like to have both conditions at the same time, and at whether Lyme disease could mask or be mistaken for leukemia.  (See link for article)

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Summary:

  • some evidence showsTrusted Source that Lyme disease may increase a person’s risk for another type of blood cancer called lymphoma. This may be because of the inflammation that Lyme disease causes in the body.
  • evidenceTrusted Source that Lyme disease is a risk factor of lymphomas. But this risk is small, and the link is not clear.
  • American Cancer Society (ACS)Trusted Source notes that some people with a B. burgdorferi infection, which causes Lyme disease, developed skin lymphomas in Europe. But the ACS emphasizes that most individuals with Lyme disease will not develop skin lymphomas.
  • ScientistsTrusted Source believe that bacterial infections such as Lyme disease could increase a person’s cancer risk by causing inflammation in the body. Up to 25%Trusted Source of cancer causes may include infections and inflammation.
  • The article erroneously states that those with the EM rash are more likely to have a more “developed” form of Lyme.  In fact, I would state it’s probably just the opposite.
  • The article further erroneously states 10-14 days of doxycycline is the treatment, which case after case and study after study has proven this to be insufficient.
  • The article also erroneously states 70-80% get the EM rash when in fact the percentages are highly variable and many never get a rash at all.
  • Some with leukemia develop a skin rash that is different than the EM rash.  See top link for pictures of both.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/  Click on link to see graph

As is clear from the graph above, only 595 children under the age of 17 have died from COVID as of Nov. 10, 2021, and while any death is upsetting, it certainly doesn’t warrant a wide-scale “vaccination” program with an experimental, fast-tracked gene-therapy injection that has caused more harm than for all 70+ vaccines combined since they started tracking adverse events 30 years ago. COVID shots are associated with the following:

  • They are 800 times more deadly than the smallpox vaccine – the previous record holder
  • They have killed more than 150,000 Americans
  • They don’t make sense for anyone of any age
  • The Pfizer 6 month trial showed it can save 1 life for every 22,000 people jabbed, but killed more than it saved
  • A FOIA request showed lipid nanoparticles delivered a substantial dose of mRNA to female ovaries and testes which could cause sterility, the spike protein subsequently produced causes blood clots, inflammation, and scarring leading to cardiovascular and neurological symptoms
  • Fibrin D dimer (blood clots) increased by a factor of over 400x above baseline
  • Tropin (heart damage) increased by a factor of 205
  • death elevated by 96X
  • brain herniation elevated by a factor of 100X
  • Cardiac arrest elevated by 93X
  • Pulmonary embolism elevated by 954X
  • Intracranial hemorrhage 79X
  • Tinnitus elevated by 105X (people have committed suicide over this as it drives you nuts)
  • They are still clueless as to the amount, dose, and duration of the spike protein that is produced
  • Many, many more issues to be concerned with  Source
  • Best-case scenario cost-benefit analysis showed very conservatively that there are five times the number of deaths attributable to each inoculation vs those attributable to COVID-19 in the most vulnerable 65+ demographic. The risk of death from COVID-19 decreases drastically as age decreases, and the longer-term effects of the inoculations on lower age groups will increase their risk-benefit ratio, perhaps substantially.  Source
Further, this Reuters article goes through the research showing the Delta variant does not make children sicker and secondary immune response is stronger after infection than after the jab.

https://www.tmj4.com/news/coronavirus/uw-health-begins-testing-covid-19-vaccine-on-children-6-months-to-4-years-old

UW Health begins testing COVID-19 vaccine on children 6 months to 4-years-old

The trial will last 18 months.
Posted Nov 09, 2021

MILWAUKEE — A new wave of kids 5 to 11 years old are rolling up their sleeves for covid shots in Milwaukee.

“I am very, very pleased that already were seeing a very solid positive response from parents,” said Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.

“Every day that we have more people vaccinated, our community is safer,” said Dr. Smriti Khare of Children’s Wisconsin

City officials say since they began offering the vaccine last week, nearly 400 children in that age group have gotten their first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Including the son of Milwaukee County’s top doctor. (See link for article)

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https://healthimpactnews.com/2021/pfizer-secretly-adds-dangerous-ingredient-to-injections-for-5-to-11-year-olds-as-taiwan-stops-pfizer-shots-for-12-to-17-year-olds/

Pfizer Secretly Adds Dangerous Ingredient to Injections for 5 to 11 Year Olds as Taiwan Stops Pfizer Shots for 12 to 17 Year Olds

by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

Excerpts:

Greg Reese of Infowars.com has just published an explosive report about a secret ingredient that Pfizer has added to the shots being given to children under the age of 12 that is not present in their other COVID-19 shots.

It is a drug called “tromethamine” that is used in patients with heart attacks, and like all pharmaceutical drugs, has multiple reported adverse side effects, which includes tissue damage.

It has never before been tested in use with a “vaccine.”

We have put Mr. Reese’s report on our Bitchute and Rumble channels, but please support his work at Infowars.com, as well as his own website, because he does excellent work. (See link for article)

**UPDATE Nov. 17, 2021**

https://www.bitchute.com/video/0CUV7SmJvH0h  Video Here (Approx. 5 Min)

New VAERS Data Reveals Over 300,000 Deaths After COVID Shots

In this alarming video Steve Kirsch, president & founder of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, discusses some of the data points presented in the paper below which he recently presented to the FDA.

https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/new-vaers-analysis-reveals-hundreds

New VAERS analysis reveals hundreds of serious adverse events that the CDC and FDA never told us about

They missed hundreds of serious adverse events that are more elevated than myocarditis. A new VAERS analysis done by Albert Benavides blows the doors off the “safe and effective” narrative.
The CDC and FDA have said the vaccines are “safe and effective.” They haven’t found any serious issues with the COVID vaccines. Zero. Zip. Nada. It was the DoD that found myocarditis.
The evidence in plain sight shows that they are either lying or incompetent. Or both. But of course, the medical community is never going to call them on this.

So that’s where our team of vaccine safety experts comes in; to reveal the truth about what is really going on.

In a brand new VAERS data analysis performed by our friend Albert Benavides (aka WelcomeTheEagle88), we found hundreds of serious adverse events that were completely missed by the CDC that should have been mentioned in the informed consent document that are given to patients. And we found over 200 symptoms that occur at a higher relative rate than myocarditis (relative to all previous vaccines over the last 5 years). All together, there were over 4,000 VAERS adverse event codes that were elevated by these vaccines by a factor of 10 or more over baseline that the CDC should have warned people about.

As of November 1, 2021, there have been more adverse events reported for the COVID vaccines than for all 70+ vaccines combined since they started tracking adverse events 30 years ago. That’s a stunning statistic, nobody can deny it, but nobody in the mainstream medical community (or mainstream media) seems to care much. It’s not even worth noting in passing. Wow.

Here’s what the evidence shows:

  1. The COVID vaccines are the most dangerous vaccines in human history. They are 800 times more deadly than the smallpox vaccine which was the previous record holder. The vaccines have killed over 150,000 Americans and permanently disabled even more. They don’t make sense for anyone of any age. The younger you are, the worse it gets. For kids, it is estimated that we kill 117 kids for every COVID death we prevent.
  2. The Pfizer 6 month trial showed the drug can save 1 life for every 22,000 people vaccinated. It also appeared from the trial that the drug killed more people than it saved (there were 20 deaths in the treatment group vs. 14 in placebo after unblinding). So we are “saving” fewer than 10,000 lives at the expense of over 150,000 deaths. In short, we kill 15 people to save 1. That’s incredibly stupid. But nobody in the Biden administration wants to meet with our team. They basically don’t want to hear the truth. Instead, they focus on deplatforming and censoring us which are techniques that are effective when the data doesn’t work out for you.
  3. Both the FDA and CDC have proven inept in spotting safety signals. They can’t even compute the VAERS URF which is a number that is required for any serious risk-benefit analysis. So the FDA and CDC outside committee members are all flying blind in approving the vaccines. Even after this deficiency is pointed out in the public comments by yours truly (and direct emails to the committee members), it makes no difference. We are ignored. The CDC safety monitoring is so bad that they even admitted at the last ACIP meeting that it was the DoD that spotted the myocarditis signal. So the FDA and CDC have basically been batting .000 in terms of spotting safety signals that have been sitting in plain sight the entire time.
  4. They can’t admit that they missed the signals now because that would be an admission they missed them before. So they will try to discredit this article with ad hominem attacks (this is a technique used to win an argument when you cannot win on the evidence).
  5. The serious events we highlight below are all consistent with the mechanism of action that Robert Malone and I first described in the Darkhorse podcast. Namely, that the spike protein that is produced in response to the delivery of the mRNA is cytotoxic and results in blood clots, inflammation and scarring throughout your body which then creates a wider range of severe adverse events than any vaccine in human history.
  6. The medical community is trained by the CDC to believe the vaccines are safe, so they interpret all the adverse events as not vaccine related. But if it wasn’t the vaccine that caused all these events, what was it? What’s worse is they tell their patients, “this is all in your head” or that “your baby died because you had a genetic defect.”
  7. In general, patients believe their doctors and never figure out where to get a cytokine panel to discover that they are vaccine injured (go to www.covidlonghaulers.com to get the cytokine panel and IncellDx to get the spike protein assay). So people never learn how to rid their body of the spike protein either (see my article on vaccine treatment for the drugs they use to do this) which is the first step in the road to recovery.
  8. The high adverse event rates aren’t “excess reporting.” It is due to excess events. For example, one neurologist had 0 cases of vaccine adverse events in her entire career, but this year, she has 2,000. Another physician I know has had 0 events in 29 years in his 700 patients. This year he needs to report 25 events. Physicians themselves have experienced stunningly higher incidence rates of reproductive, neurological, and cardiac events since the vaccines rolled in 2021. We couldn’t find a single cardiologist who actually had fewer cases of myocarditis after the vaccines rolled out as the members of the FDA and CDC claim.
  9. The serious events are primarily centered around menstruation, blood clots, inflammation and scarring, cardiovascular damage, and neurological damage, just as we predicted in the podcast in June of 2021.
  10. There are hundreds of serious adverse events that are caused by these vaccines. This of course is shocking to people since the CDC has repeatedly said you can’t ascribe causality to data in VAERS. Not true. The VAERS data analysis (temporal data, the dose dependency, and the elevated reporting rates compared to baseline) provide ample signal to enable us to show causality on all of these events using the five Bradford-Hill criteria applicable to vaccines.
  11. Nicki Minaj was right to complain about elevated rates of testicular swelling, impotence (erectile dysfunction), and orchitis. Every world authority who opined on the matter belittled her and said she was wrong, but all the symptoms she talked about are strongly elevated as you’ll see from the data below. None of these so-called experts of course ever looks at the data; it’s all based on arguing from their belief system rather than the scientific evidence. And even if those authorities disagreed with the VAERS data, it was irresponsible not to have pointed out the raw data to people and then explain why they totally ignored the elevated signal in the VAERS data. Today, we do science based on our belief system rather than the old-fashioned way of looking at what the data actually says. Our team is old-fashioned.
  12. There is a pretty good chance that the vaccines don’t really work at all and never did. We know the Pfizer Phase 3 trials were gamed in many ways. There is no doubt that the vaccines elevate antibodies, but it seems that it is quite possible that the immunity they confer is actually the result of killing off (or excluding as in the case of the trials) people with weaker immune systems. The people who are left are thus more resistant to the virus. Mathew Crawford will be coming out shortly with an analysis that makes a compelling case for this novel hypothesis. Subscribe to his substack here.
  13. It is unlikely that anyone in the world will want to debate us publicly on any of the claims above (or on any of my articles or on any of Mathew’s articles), but if you are a prominent supporter of the false narrative and want a public debate, we are here for you. Our team would be thrilled to accept the challenge as we have no desire to spread misinformation. If we got it wrong, we are happy to correct our mistakes if you can explain to us clearly the mistake we made and the correction you suggest (e.g., the “right” answer). Yet even with multiple million dollar incentives (listed in this article), nobody seems to be interested in showing how we got it wrong. Everyone talks about how bad the vaccine misinformation problem is, but nobody is willing to do anything to show that we got it wrong. For example, I’ve asked any prominent scientist in America who disagrees with my analysis (showing eight different ways to validate that over 150,000 Americans have been killed by the vaccines) to let me see their “correct” analysis showing the “correct” number, but nobody will. They won’t even come on a recorded call to show us how we got it wrong. It’s baffling. They all want to do it in slow motion via documents because that way it’s easier to obfuscate the truth and they can avoid answering questions. The latter is key.
  14. It’s really easy to tell who is telling you the truth here. John Su is the CDC expert on VAERS. If he’s wrong, the entire narrative falls apart. I personally attacked Dr. Su in a widely read article accusing him of being corrupt. I offered to publish his response in the article. He said nothing. I offered to debate him. No dice. TrialSiteNews tried to interview him. He refused to reply. Seriously? If the CDC gave us 2 hours to ask John Su questions, we would destroy his credibility and the credibility of the CDC. That’s why he’s not talking and that’s why the CDC will never let him talk to anyone on our team. Because we don’t ask softball questions like what John gets at the ACIP meetings. We play hardball.

What we found in the VAERS analysis below can be verified by anyone because it is all publicly accessible. Albert spent only a few hours to produce the tables. So the CDC should have been able to do the same work Albert did.

You can easily verify any entry yourself via manual queries to any VAERS interface (my favorite is MedAlerts, but others such as openvaers and the HHS site give the same results).

Before we get to Albert’s analysis of the VAERS data, let’s do a little background.

The Darkhorse Podcast

On June 10, 2021, my friend Robert Malone and I appeared on Bret Weinstein’s Darkhorse Podcast to tell the world what we had learned about the COVID vaccines. You can watch the 3 hour version here or the condensed 1 hour version here if you haven’t already seen it. I highly recommend the whole thing; I know a lot of people who watched it multiple times and raved about it.

Basically, we said the COVID vaccines were super dangerous, they had killed a lot of people at the time, the Pfizer bio-distribution data that Dr. Byram Bridle obtained from the Japanese government using a FOIA request showed the lipid nanoparticles delivered a very substantial dose of mRNA to female ovaries, and that the spike protein that is subsequently produced causes blood clots, inflammation, and scarring leading to a large number of cardiovascular and neurological symptoms, a number of which would be irreversible. Robert in particular noted that we had no clue about the amount, dose, and duration of the spike protein that is produced (we still don’t) because this testing was never done in animals (they looked only at the distribution of the nanoparticles which is not the same thing). Bret referenced a very long article I had written on May 25, 2021 for TrialSiteNews entitled “Should you get vaccinated?”

For reference, here is the bio-distribution graph that Bret showed in that podcast:

See anything wrong? Note that we deliberately omitted areas of the body where the vaccine was expected to accumulate in order to highlight areas of the body where it wasn’t supposed to go. Naturally, those supporting the mainstream narrative that the vaccines are safe and effective went into overdrive to suppress the episode and discredit what we said. They said we were dishonest not to include everything in the chart. YouTube censored the video after nearly 1M views. Wikipedia accused both of us of spreading misinformation and then blocked me when I tried to point out that the scientific evidence supported what I said. Wikipedia relies on fact checks for science.

We were right about everything we said in the podcast, and now, thanks to the work Albert did, it’s now easier to see we were telling the truth: the top elevated events were neurological, cardiovascular, and related to the female reproductive system, just like we said. I was stunned at the sheer number of menstrual events that made it to the very top of the list. That was a surprise to me.

Openvaers has been highlighting the damaging effects on both male and female reproductive systems for months with a page dedicated to reproductive health, but the medical community, Congress, and mainstream press wasn’t paying any attention at all. These event counts are not normal, but nobody really seems to care. President Biden not only doesn’t care; he wants to force all our kids to be vaccinated with the most dangerous vaccine in human history.

With the new analysis, the counts are much easier to interpret because instead of being just raw counts, they are no numbers relative to a baseline rate so we can instantly see what symptoms are “abnormal” meaning 10X or more higher than “expected.” The answer: over 4,000 adverse events.

The X factor analysis (November 7, 2021)

Before I give you the link to the spreadsheet of VAERS symptoms sorted by X factor, you need to know a few things to properly interpret the data.

First, let’s address the myth that is promoted by the FDA that the VAERS database is “over reported.” As we said above, there are more events this year than any previous year, so that’s why the events are up. But there still could be a component of overreporting as well, i.e., that people this year are more likely to make a report on an event compared to last year since everyone is so “highly aware” of the vaccines. Nice theory. No data to back it up. Nobody making that argument has ever included any data to back up their assertion. We call that a hand-waving argument. Doctor surveys we’ve done show that, if anything, they are less likely to report an adverse event this year for a variety of reasons (hospital frowns on it, no time, still too frustrating, too many events to report). The other way we can tell is to look at the rates of events that are not comorbidities or causal. We find that events like Musculoskeletal pain, Screaming, Head banging, Local reaction, Diet refusal, Croup infectious, Hepatitis A, Eyelid oedema, and more occur at pretty much the same rate this year as in previous years.

Now let’s tackle the columns:

Symptom
This is the VAERS symptom name. These are coded by HHS upon receipt of the report based on the contents of the report. Some of these symptoms are tests that are ordered. An elevation of a test is a good signal something is amiss. Other symptoms are not causal, but are comorbidities. For example, it might be that diabetes is there more often not because it makes diabetes worse, but because diabetic people are more likely to report symptoms. So for these symptoms, we have to be careful about the analysis. But for many of these symptoms such as cancer, herpes zoster (shingles), diabetes and more, these are all exacerbated by the vaccine as we know from talking directly to doctors. Finally, some symptoms like “rib fracture” or “suicide” are elevated because they are caused by the vaccine. For example, the vaccine can make you lose consciousness and fall and fracture your hip. The vaccine can give you tinnitus which is so bad that you want to kill yourself. So we have to be extremely careful to examine each one of these symptoms carefully because in most cases, we’ll find that they are indeed caused by the vaccine. I’ve coded a bunch of symptoms red that I thought were serious/interesting. I’m not done yet, so the redness coding was only methodically done on the first 100 symptoms and sporadically after that. When I get more time, I’ll go through them and update the file. Note that myocarditis is located on row 274, i.e., way way down.

Also, when looking at deaths, we never look at a “symptom” of death since death is coded in a separate field. So the event count for the “death” symptom (6,487) is lower than the over 8,000 domestic deaths.

Guillain-Barre syndrome is only elevated by a factor of 6 from baseline, likely because other vaccines also elevate GBS; this vaccine elevates it even more.

C19 count
This is the raw number of VAERS events in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID vaccines for that symptom. The key here is that this count should be multiplied by 41 (known as the underreporting factor or URF to estimate the absolute number of events that occurred). See this article for how that is computed.

Baseline count
The baseline rate is the # of incidents occurring in a 5 year period from 2015-2019 for all vaccines given in that time period.

X-factor
The X-factor is the (C19 count*5/Baseline count). This is because the baseline is 5 years so we compare the COVID counts in a year vs. the average count in a typical year. So an X-factor of 10 or more would mean that the symptom is very likely to be caused by the vaccine since it is highly elevated from the “normal” rate.

Now let’s tackle the tabs. There are two tabs:

match tab
On the match tab are symptoms where the baseline count !=0

no match tab
On the “no match” tab are symptoms where the baseline count=0. So these are quite extraordinary since these symptoms are not typically seen even once in 5 years. So here, even a small value in the “count” field is very significant, e.g., 2 or more would be comparable to a 10X or more on the “match tab.”

Now here are some screenshots of the first page of the two tabs:

And the no match tab:

What the data tells us

Here are a few quick observations from the complete data set (see next section for downloading):

  1. Female reproductive issues top the list. These are strongly elevated by these vaccines. Many of the top symptoms are all related to the menstrual process.
  2. There are an enormous number of cardiovascular and neurological events that are strongly elevated, many of them serious.
  3. Fibrin D dimer increased is #53 on the list, elevated by a factor of over 400x above baseline. Charles Hoffe discovered D-dimer was elevated in over 60% of the patients he measured. This is very serious as D-dimer is a lagging indicator of blood clots.
  4. Troponin increased was #130, elevated by a factor of 205. Troponin indicates heart damage and it is elevated to extreme levels (10X heart attack levels or more) and can stay elevated for months at a time (with a heart attack, the levels start returning back to normal immediately after the incident)
  5. Death as a symptom (which is pretty unusual coding since it isn’t a symptom), is #433 and elevated by 96X. Hardly a “safe” vaccine.
  6. Brain herniation at #405 is elevated by a factor of 100X over baseline. However, this is not considered a big deal at the CDC (perhaps because many people there don’t use their brain).
  7. Cardiac arrest at #450 is elevated by 93X. This is when your heart stops. This is a relatively serious condition since you don’t last for too long after that. It’s a bit surprising that the CDC missed that one. Perhaps because they don’t have a heart?
  8. Pulmonary embolism #24 is elevated by 954 times normal. How the CDC can miss that one is simply astonishing! This was the cause of death of 2 of the 14 kids that the CDC looked at in their death analysis. Mainstream press will never ask them that question as to why the CDC would not find causality here. They wrote: “CDC reviewed 14 reports of death after vaccination. Among the decedents, four were aged 12–15 years and 10 were aged 16–17 years. All death reports were reviewed by CDC physicians; impressions regarding cause of death were pulmonary embolism (two), …” 954 times normal is hard to explain, isn’t it? So no causality? That’s hard to explain, so they didn’t. They just moved on as if there is nothing to see.
  9. Intracranial haemorrhage (their spelling) is at #604 and is elevated by 79X. Two of the 14 kids from the CDC analysis died from that. How could that not be causal? They never explained that.
  10. Tinnitus at #362 is elevated by 105X. This can be so bad that people can kill themselves from this alone. One of the people who work at Vaccine Safety Research Foundation (VSRF) had to talk a friend out of suicide.
  11. There are many many more issues to be concerned with, but I wanted to get the list out quickly so there can be more eyes on this.
  12. For months, I’ve offered to discuss our data and analyses to both the FDA and CDC outside committees as well as the CDC and FDA themselves, but nobody wanted to see it. Most hit delete on my emails. A few told me to wait for the public comment period and submit it then (which I’ve done). Nobody followed up.

The Excel file with the full results

I’m trying to increase the number of paying subscribers I have as this supports the substack community. All proceeds will go to paying the salaries of people working for the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation (vacsafety.org) as well as buying ads so we can get the message out.

You can find the full Excel file and Albert’s analysis in this article.

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For more:

https://www.lymedisease.org/life-lessons-chronic-lyme/

Career and life lessons from survivors of chronic Lyme disease

By Fred Diamond, Nov. 9, 2021

We all know that Lyme disease can cause major career disruption. But what if overcoming the disease can help you find your life’s purpose and mission?

I host The Sales Game Changers Podcast for sales professionals around the globe. I interview sales leaders about tactics, strategies, and ideas. Because someone in my life has chronic Lyme disease, I became interested in learning more about how survivors could transform their lives.

I recently hosted an episode called, “How These Leaders Discovered Their ‘Why’ After Conquering Chronic Illness and How It Applies to Sales.”

I sought out people to interview who had overcome their disease, or at least contained it, and found a more purposeful way to focus their careers and lives.

Great sales professionals are always looking for ways to find their purpose and mission so they can better serve their customers. I knew these lessons would resonate with my audience.

I’ve met some amazing leaders who have battled chronic Lyme and have shifted their career paths and life efforts to helping others suffering from chronic illness. I am inspired by them all.

You can listen to the episode or read the complete transcript. This episode was one of our most listened to ever.

Guests

The guests included:

  • Gregg Kirk, a digital sales support marketing director who switched career paths after his decade-long struggle with Lyme disease. After reaching remission, he wrote the book “The Gratitude Curve” and founded a nonprofit Lyme patient fund called Ticked Off Foundation.
  • Tanya Hoebel, vice-president of The Lyme Center in Chico, California, as well as the co-host of the Integrated Lyme Solution podcast.
  • And JP Davitt, founder of Lymefriends and the author of “LYME BOOK: A Journey to Becoming One Day Better.” After overcoming chronic illness, he’s been focused on helping others make one day better.

All three have found their life’s purpose in helping others who are struggling with Lyme disease.

The shift to recovery

I asked when the shift to recovery took place and then how did this define their mission.

Gregg Kirk said, “The shift started when I was at my worst, I was at the point where I wanted to die. It was one of these weird situations where I wanted to die but I kept hanging around. Then I started looking inward. Why am I still here and why have I gone through this? Is this some kind of weird karma thing? Did I deserve this? Did I kill someone in a past life? Why am I going through all this mental and physical punishment? Then after I had that night, I let everything go. I just felt like my life had burnt to the ground and I started looking at my life in a different way.”

“I started thinking, maybe this disease is pointing me in a direction. Maybe I was going in the wrong direction in my life, as much as I liked my life at the time. I just started to let it happen. And the less I resisted, the more things started changing in very unexpected ways,” he said.

Tanya Hoebel said, “When I was nearing the end of my treatment, that was about 9 years into my illness, I could for the first time see the light at the end of the tunnel. I really had some faith that I was going to get better. I didn’t let it physically or emotionally ruin me because I continued to fight back. I thought, how can I possibly allow another human being go through even one day of what I’ve gone through over the last 9 years? My life changed at that moment.”

JP Davitt said, “When I was sick, I dreamt of a platform that would allow sick people to connect more easily with one another. I imagined a social platform that was more like online dating for wellness. I created an interactive health and wealth advisory practice, and my passion became my niche.”

Mission and meaning

I then asked them specifically what they created to further their mission and how it’s put more meaning into their life.

Tanya said, “I’m so thankful that I found another resource to end my suffering. It proved to me also, that someone on top of the world emotionally, financially, and at the top of their career like I was prior to Lyme can in one moment lose it all. I could have been one of those people homeless on the streets that you see roaming around and you often wonder why they’re there. That is what Lyme disease does physically, emotionally, and financially.”

“Because this positive person, me, contemplated suicide at one point, I thought I’ve got to do something, I’ve got to make a difference. That is when I became so involved in advocating for Lyme. I run a nonprofit organization, it’s called The Lyme Center, it’s based out of Chico, California and our mission is to educate and advocate for Lyme.”

“I’m also the co-founder of an incredible mentoring group on Facebook. This group has proved to be more than I ever dreamt it to be in such a short amount of time. We offer lots of treatment options and help educate them on so many different levels of Lyme because there are so many facets of it. I even managed to find time to cohost a weekly podcast, Integrative Lyme Solutions.”

JP said, “Lymefriends is a platform that acts like a dashboard for people with Lyme disease to go to, a one-stop-shop for all of the resources. I collect resources without worrying about any competition bringing everything together to help them finance sooner.”

“Whenever I was sick and having to streamline my efficiency with my body, it really taught me a lot about processes. Learning a lot about this process as I carried that over to healthcare and I was able to them form a goal to not just help with Lyme disease, but my goal really in the grand picture is to change the literacy and vocabulary of healthcare using technology.”

Gregg said, “There is a patient care problem. People have no money and they’re not getting diagnosed properly. When they finally are, they’re not getting the proper care.”

“I thought, if I had a billion dollars, what would I do? I thought I would create a healthcare system, like an insurance system that funded treatment because most of the treatments that worked for me were not covered by insurance, the herbal treatments and so forth. I thought, I don’t need to wait until I’m a billionaire, I can start a foundation, a nonprofit that people come to us, they get qualified through some documentation, and we give them monthly stipends. We’ve been able to help many people get the treatment they need.”

It was very inspiring to hear from some people who have overcome Lyme disease and have been able to give back in a big way and to give their lives more purpose.

The same can happen for you.

Fred Diamond is based in Fairfax, VA and can be contacted via Facebook. For a living, he runs the Institute for Excellence in Sales and hosts the Sales Game Changers Podcast. Someone close to him is a chronic Lyme survivor, which led to his Lyme-related advocacy.

https://www.lymedisease.org/advocates-call-for-idsa-retraction/

Advocates call on IDSA to retract false information on congenital Lyme

Nov. 9, 2021

Mothers Against Lyme, a group of advocates concerned about the impact of Lyme disease and its co-infections on pregnant women, children and families, is calling for retraction of a statement in the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), American Academy of Neurology (AAN), American College of Rheumatology (ACR) 2020 Clinical Practice Guidelines for the Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Lyme Disease that contributes to misdiagnosis and harm to pregnant women and children who are congenitally infected.

On October 20, Mothers Against Lyme sent a retraction request letter to the editors of the journals that published the guidelines and the leadership of the sponsoring organizations. Copies were sent to the clinical practice guidelines committees of the sponsoring organizations and the co-authors of the guidelines. The guidelines were published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, Neurology, Arthritis Care & Research, and Arthritis & Rheumatology.

Page e12 of the guidelines “Treatment of Lyme Disease” section states:

“To date, Lyme disease in pregnancy has not been found to result in congenital infection or a syndrome of congenital abnormalities, and no additional treatment or monitoring of the mother or infant is recommended beyond the standard of care.”

According to the letter, the statement “To date, Lyme disease in pregnancy has not been found to result in congenital infection” is not true.

40 peer-reviewed articles

The letter cites more than 40 peer-reviewed articles, including a systematic review co-authored by a CDC epidemiologist, that provide evidence of congenital infection with Lyme disease.

The letter also cites studies and review articles that show adverse birth outcomes are common for both treated and untreated pregnant women with Lyme disease.

Adverse outcomes include fetal death, newborn death, and newborns with an abnormal outcome (e.g. birth defects, hyperbilirubinemia, respiratory distress).

According to Mothers Against Lyme Chair Isabel Rose:

“Correction of this error is vital and warrants an expedited review and notice of correction. The potential harm to mothers, children, and families from the inaccurate information in the IDSA, AAN, ACR Guidelines is significant. Providers who rely on the guidelines will fail to diagnose and treat Lyme disease in pregnancy and fail to recognize the offspring of women with Lyme disease as infants and children at risk. Countless tragic births and fetal losses will result, with a lifetime of harm to the children and their families.”

Authors contradict their own work

The letter also cites eight articles co-authored by IDSA, AAN, ACR Guidelines authors that “clearly contradict what they’ve written in the guidelines, and which address the issue of intrauterine transmission and fetal abnormalities head-on.”

Following are examples.

“It is clear that B. burgdorferi can be transmitted in the blood of infected pregnant women across the placenta into the fetus. This has now been documented with resultant congenital infections and fetal demise.”

“The precise risk to the developing fetus of maternal Lyme disease during pregnancy is unknown, although it is well documented that fetal infection can occur and may have deleterious outcomes, including malformations and death.”

“The aim of treatment of early Lyme disease during pregnancy is not only to treat the infection and prevent long-term sequelae but to eliminate the infection as quickly as possible so as to prevent congenital transmission to the fetus.”

Ignoring their own research

According to Rose:

“It is disheartening and alarming that the authors of medical guidelines that direct the care of pregnant women with Lyme disease are ignoring their own research to put forward guidelines based on ‘expert opinion’ rather than their own discoveries. Their own work conclusively proves that perinatal transmission of B. burgdorferi during pregnancy does occur and may have dire consequences for the pregnant mother and her fetus.”

The IDSA, AAN, ACR Guidelines say that “no additional treatment or monitoring of the mother or infant is recommended beyond the standard of care.”

Instead of denying the existence of congenital Lyme, the letter says “the Guidelines should acknowledge that Lyme bacteria can cross the placenta, both infecting and causing harm to unborn children, and describe the manifestations of Lyme in pregnancy that the research has uncovered and advise screening and treatment according to the knowledge we have to date.”

Research funding

Rose points out that researchers who depend on the IDSA, AAN, ACR Guidelines for information will be less likely to submit grant applications for much needed research if they rely on the statement that congenital Lyme disease does not exist.

She notes that this is especially important since more than $29 million in new annual funding for NIH has been appropriated that could support this type of research. NIH has also issued several notices of special interest to encourage research on Lyme and other tick-borne diseases. A recent notice includes a section that calls for research on “gestational Lyme disease” and the impact on pregnancy on immune response.

Rose says, “Correcting this error does not undo the harm. In addition to making this correction in a timely manner, the sponsoring organizations should encourage their members to conduct research on congenital Lyme that will improve health outcomes for pregnant women with Lyme disease and children who are congenitally infected.”

About Mothers Against Lyme

We’re a group of mothers and mother-advocates who are concerned about the impact of Lyme disease and its co-infections on pregnant women, children and families. Our focus includes awareness, education, advocacy and community building, as we promote research that advances diagnosis, treatment and prevention.

SOURCE OF PRESS RELEASE: Mothers Against Lyme