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Lyme disease bacteria eradicated by new drug in early tests

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Re: Lyme disease bacteria eradicated by new drug in early tests

#161

Post by y-c-o-m-b »

zxexz wrote: post #140
hinkley wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lyme disease talk just makes me think of Nicholas Zakas and then I get bummed out. I know there's a guy, or maybe he represents a group of researchers, who thinks that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is caused by inflammation in the brain, either due to some undetectable infection, or just a misfiring that is a lingering effect of some other insult (sounds to me like a histamine response aka allergy). If your body thought y…

I think you raise an excellent point, that many don't really think about. Detection is hard, and research on microbes is hard if you can't grow them in-vitro. There is research in this space. A few years ago, I had a lecture from Slava Epstein, a professor who has made some major inroads in this space[0]. [0] https://experiments.springernature.com/articles/10.1038/npro...

Detection is hard indeed. Here is an interesting research on patients with neurological disabilities though normal imaging (MRI) results, but abnormalities found when inspected using diffuse tensor imaging: https://nn.neurology.org/content/5/3/e456

Re: Lyme disease bacteria eradicated by new drug in early tests

#162

Post by Technetium »

hinkley wrote: post #36
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

Note that they're carefully dancing around the elephant in the room: As far as I know, no one has ever demonstrated that Lyme spirochetes survive a course of standard antibiotics (Emphasis mine): > Standard treatment of Lyme disease is oral antibiotics, typically doxycycline, in the early stages of the disease; but for reasons that are unclear, the antibiotics don't work for up to 20% of people with the tick-borne il…

Lyme disease talk just makes me think of Nicholas Zakas and then I get bummed out. I know there's a guy, or maybe he represents a group of researchers, who thinks that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is caused by inflammation in the brain, either due to some undetectable infection, or just a misfiring that is a lingering effect of some other insult (sounds to me like a histamine response aka allergy). If your body thought y…

Thank you for this comment. It prompted me to look into Nicholas Zakas and his story. I've decided to make my way to a Lyme disease specialist based what his information lead me to think about co-infection.

Re: Lyme disease bacteria eradicated by new drug in early tests

#163

Post by wkearney99 »

loeg wrote: post #88
jnbiche wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think most of us realized that. It's still not OK for the CDC to lie to the public, regardless of motive. For a public health organization, the end doesn't justify the means. Even more concerning are the number of doctors I've seen blatantly lying about the effectiveness of masks. Most people aren't idiots - if the masks help protect medical professionals from Covid-19, they can also help non-medical profession…

> For a public health organization, the end doesn't justify the means. Why not? This is a classic trolley problem and throwing the switch is absolutely the correct answer.

For those of you casually tossing that around: https://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2020/03/25/the-trolley-and...

Re: Lyme disease bacteria eradicated by new drug in early tests

#164

Post by megous »

mrfusion wrote: post #45
megous wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The page says that: "Positive IgM results should be disregarded if the patient has been ill for more than 30 days." The reason may be this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1198743X1...

Thanks for responding. But that study says they assumed the results were false positives. Maybe for the purpose of that paper that’s fine. But I’m not sure if it supports your statement.

They also list a few reasons for the assumption.

Anyway, the study itself is not the reason for the quoted statement on the CDC page. I was just trying to find some relevant basis for the statement, and this study has some reasons listed in the dicussion/conclusion.

Re: Lyme disease bacteria eradicated by new drug in early tests

#165

Post by jacobr1 »

stainforth wrote: post #147
matthewdgreen wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t doubt everything you’re saying, and that unscrupulous physicians are genuinely taking advantage of their patients. However, as someone with a family member who was recently diagnosed with a (largely untreatable) autoimmune disease, I want to explain why patients become so desperate that they’re willing to try anything. The basic problem here is that anyone who goes online and reads about their condition (eg P…

Doctors are being empathetic when they restrain from pushing the nonsense quacks do, just to satisfy a patient's anxiety, no?

In this case we aren't talking about the remedy, but rather the diagnosis.

If the doctor doesn't even acknowledge the syndrome is "real" or even further implies it is psychosomatic, it may drive people away from the more rational establishment to the fringe. On the other hand, empathizing with the patient, catching up on the latest research, taking the time to explain it to the patient and their options, is time consuming and hard to do with billing constraints and electronic medical records TPS reports and such. Much easier (for this class of doctor) to dismiss it all as patient self-diagnosis of quackery and move on to the next patient.

My mother has lupus and when she first started showing systems her (prior) GP dismissed them out of hand and point symptoms and then started to treat her as somewhat of a malingerer. Ironically, it was her acupuncturist that drove her to see a rheumatologist - who took the time to go through a variety of diagnostics (and recommendation to a new GP and other specialists) to identify the problem and a treatment that let her return to life with things in a more managed state.

Re: Lyme disease bacteria eradicated by new drug in early tests

#166

Post by sudosysgen »

bregma wrote: post #128
wetpaws wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Surgical masks are not effective at preventing infection. They are effective at spreading infection. This is a common misconception, for which CDC is also partially the one to be blamed. Laboratory tests find that improvised cloth masks block 60 – 80% of virus particles Most experts in the early 2000s agreed that these masks were probably better than nothing. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/5/4/e006577.full.…

> Laboratory tests find that improvised cloth masks block 60 – 80% of virus particles How many virus particles do you need to become infected? Is 20% of the load in a typical aerosol droplet from an asymptomatic infected person above or below that critical number?

It's a numbers game. There is a certain probability that each virion can spur and infection, so the less you get the better. If virions had a 100% infection chance then sure, but it's much lower than that.

Re: Lyme disease bacteria eradicated by new drug in early tests

#167

Post by Metacelsus »

Reading the actual paper (the journal is Scientific Reports, which will publish anything: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-59600-4) does not inspire confidence. In vitro killing is definitely not the same as in vivo efficacy. Furthermore, the authors try to build a homology model of a putative target protein and then dock the antibiotic. However they provide no evidence to show their model is correct, and speaking as a biochemist, they use completely inappropriate techniques. Their structural analysis is meaningless. And this casts doubt on the competence of the authors.

(Also, the numerous grammar errors show that the paper wasn't edited or reviewed at all!)

Re: Lyme disease bacteria eradicated by new drug in early tests

#168

Post by krisn »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

Note that they're carefully dancing around the elephant in the room: As far as I know, no one has ever demonstrated that Lyme spirochetes survive a course of standard antibiotics (Emphasis mine): > Standard treatment of Lyme disease is oral antibiotics, typically doxycycline, in the early stages of the disease; but for reasons that are unclear, the antibiotics don't work for up to 20% of people with the tick-borne il…

I wrote up the blog for this study, and I agree it was poorly written and an incremental finding at best. To me, the most important point is that the IDSA/CDC has been recommending doxy for decades knowing that other drugs are more effective. To PragmaticPup: There is, however, lots of evidence supporting the point that Lyme spirochetes easily survive 2 to 4 weeks of doxy through the formation of blebs. Look up the primate studies by Monica Embers @Tulane and the mice studies by Barthold @UCDavis. Borrelia, like Syphilis, is notoriously hard to culture, and Barthold says that persistence is the "rule rather that the exception." I think there have only been 7 randomized double blind clinical treatment trials on humans since the 1981 discovery, and they all tested single drugs, rather than the drug cocktails, which might address both the spirochete and bleb forms of the bacteria. Michal Tal at Stanford is doing groundbreaking work on ways the Lyme bacteria evades the human immune system. I don't want to steal her thunder, but we definitely need new approaches to treating this formidable disease.

Re: Lyme disease bacteria eradicated by new drug in early tests

#169

Post by krisn »

lymeeducator wrote: post #61
vimy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Persistent Borrelia Infection in Patients with Ongoing Symptoms of Lyme Disease. >RESULTS: Motile spirochetes identified histopathologically as Borrelia were detected in culture specimens, and these spirochetes were genetically identified as Borreliaburgdorferi by three distinct polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based approaches. Spirochetes identified as Borrelia burgdorferi were cultured from the blood of seven subje…

Lyme has three known forms of existence in mammals: 1) spirochete reproductive form and susceptible to a number of antibiotics (vitro/vivo) 2) round body "starvation forms" which are resistant to most antibiotics (vitro/vivo) 3) biofilm colonies which harbor many pathogens, metals and mycotoxins are resistant to antibiotics (think immunosuppression here) I've gone through a shit ton of tests in the last few years goi…

Insert applause here. I second this.

Re: Lyme disease bacteria eradicated by new drug in early tests

#170

Post by krisn »

AndyMcConachie wrote: post #114

I heard a great interview with the author, Kris Newby, concerning her recent book, Bitten. I haven't read her book, but it sounded good, and she definitely knows what she's talking about. Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons, By Kris Newby.

Thanks. I've spent 3.5 years on research for the Lyme documentary UNDER OUR SKIN, and 5.5 years of research for the book. I believe that some of the 20% of treated patients who go on to have chronic symptoms have undetected co-infections. The book explains the reasoning behind this. I'm giving a 20 minute online presentation on this Sat. at 11EST: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/6715850012795/WN_KUIbToN3S_... Tick Talk
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