2012 LYME DISEASE FAST PEARLS FOR OPTIMAL TREATMENT

PART THREE IN REDUCING TREATMENT FAILURE

By

James Schaller, M.D., M.A.R.

I (Dr. James Schaller; http://www.personalconsult.com) have just completed writing an updated tick and flea infection text to help the many fine healers and patients seeking the newest knowledge and the best tailored care.  It has over 300 pages of references alone. Below is a small sample of the points from this textbook. When one studies emerging infections, it is impossible to finish learning.  I continually update my positions every season.

The link to download entire resource book is at the end of this post.

I stand on the shoulders of at least 500 authors and medical professionals, and while I might not always agree with their positions, they push you to find critical new information.

It should be noted that a negative finding, such as the discovery that a certain type of treatment fails, is always very useful.  A poor treatment leads to increased illness over time, even if in the initial months it appears to be useful.

Please consider these points below.  My goal is not to have you agree 100%, but to have you ponder these issues.

1)     99% of probiotics are very poor. 

Fifteen years ago I clung to a few preferred probiotics, due to the usual seduction—many strains at high colony numbers.  I had health care workers take high doses of these probiotics, after which they stopped for 5 days and I did a stool culture.  Every stool sample yielded the same result: a total lack of the good bacteria required for health.  These brands would not prevent a C. difficile bacterial infection of the intestines—a real problem.  No one should ever be given an antibiotic for any duration, 2 weeks or 2 months, without top probiotics.  I mention this in more detail in my first Babesia textbook, The Diagnosis and Treatment of Babesia.  Simply, if no number or other further designation follows the name of the bacteria, it is a strain with no proof it can bind and proliferate in the 30 feet of intestine.  Also, having only one strain of good bacteria is like having one finger.  Some of this information was available in the 1980’s.

Some probiotics with no specified strains have been used in research to decrease intestinal disease.  For example, they merely refer to an “acidophilus.”  I would see these as possibly of use since in a study of patients in the real world they appear to offer a benefit, even though they may have sub-optimal strains.

In summary, I would suggest antibiotics never be used without top quality carefully selected probiotics—the duration of antibiotic use does not matter.  There is always some unknown risk.

2)     Always start one treatment at a time, and do not add or increase two things in the same day.  Years ago the chairman of a famous Ivy League medical department and the editor of the top pediatric journal asked me to write on dosing medication to decrease side effects.  All treatment of any kind needs to be isolated.  You should typically add only one new treatment at a time, and no more than one new thing in a day.  Further, if you increase a dose, it is regarded as a new treatment.  Therefore, if you start three things and do not feel right, get a rash or cannot work because of the treatment, you have no idea how to tailor it.  Why?  You have three possible causes for your problem.  Being told to “grin and bear” it is not very caring and it is not tailored care.  If we can tailor a suit, we can tailor biochemical interventions.

3)     Being more moral than the DEA.  Some patients need strong treatments to keep their job or function in school.  These may include medicines for sleep, anxiety, focus, pain or depression.  Some options are traditional medications that are controlled substances.  These can all be made into transdermal treatments, or treatments that go through the skin.  Some may reject these as “unnatural” perhaps because they have not been used carefully because some healers do not understand that in an infected or inflamed brain these medications cannot be dosed in “routine suggested ways.”

Further, if a patient has depression, restlessness and trouble with concentration, do you know which of these should be handled first?  I strongly suggest depression is always treated before anxiety, and anxiety before focus defects.  If you do not do this carefully and with close communication between the patient and the healer, you can commit chemical battery.

Other options for depression, anxiety, focus or pain may be called “functional, integrative or alternative medicine.”  Some of these are very effective, but can fail with neurological infection or brain inflammation.  For example, SAM-e is an exceptional anti-depressant, but St. Johns Wort is normally ineffective in serious depression.  No single school of medicine has all the answers.  Therefore, my appeal is to be open to what works.  “Natural” options are often profoundly useful.  However, in some areas we have very limited natural options, and I am not going to lie to a patient and oversell an alternative medicine option that usually is ineffective. Some health care workers are excited about one type of treatment.  I am excited when Mrs. Jones or Mr. Smith experience help from a wide range of possible treatments, and the labs show the treatment is actually working.  Each patient comes before any type of pet treatment.

4)     Bartonella is no footnote and is more common than Lyme.  Many years ago when I first got involved in the super specialty of tick and flea infection medicine, no one took Bartonella seriously.  It was presented as an easy to kill infection, and of no real concern.  It was rarely discussed at infection medicine meetings, in guidelines or infection textbooks.  (I noticed the same thing after publishing four books on Babesia–the parasite books I purchased only had two pages on this serious infection).

When I published the most recent book on Bartonella, it showed that Bartonella did not have two or three skin patterns, but vast numbers.  This was a fully new and massively expanded diagnostic tool based on reading the world literature and examining heavily infected patients.  I was also surprised that no one was looking for the chemicals altered by the presence of Bartonella and the dynamic of these chemicals when both Babesia and Bartonella are present.  You can read this in the latter sections of my textbook, Babesia 2009 Update.

This year a new human Bartonella species was added to the over thirty five Bartonella species publically published in Genetic Data banks.  It was discovered and highlighted by the talented veterinarian researcher Edward Breitschwerdt.  He has said things more clearly than the ideas I was pondering in 2005, while doing most of my Bartonella book reading.  He has said simply, but with devastating and highly useful clarity that Bartonella testing is terrible, the treatments are poor, it is typically found on the outside of red blood cells, and the current research on Bartonella is pathetic—one study at NIH.  If this was not enough, he said in 2011 “Bartonella is carried by more vectors than any infection on the earth.”  So it is hardly a backdoor “co-infection.”  Indeed, this month Bartonella was literally shown to alter human DNA.  The implications of this possibility are staggering, and may support what I reported six years ago—Bartonella is not killed simply or easily.  My appeal is simple: treating it like a footnote infection is outdated and harmful.

Finally, based on the position above that Bartonella has the largest number of vectors in nature, perhaps Lyme is the “co-infection.”

5)     The treatments for Bartonella are based on terribly outdated testing or are very experimental without real proof by indirect and advanced direct testing.  I am embarrassed to admit that six years ago I felt you could rule out Bartonella by a simple antibody test—an IgM and an IgG.  When only one species was being tested for in North America, it was also easy to ignore that other Bartonella species infect humans.  Further, in 2005 I was amazed to learn how much Bartonella suppresses immunity.  It lowers fevers and at times drops antibodies for many common tick and flea borne infections.  Further, we found that most proposed treatments in traditional and integrative medicine at best stun Bartonella, and do not cure or even drop body load much.  Treatments that are promoted because patients “feel better” are not clear proof.  Patients feel better for 100 reasons, and that is not science, it is psychotherapy.  Many healers treating Bartonella are using good treatment options, but they do not know how to use indirect and direct testing to confirm effectiveness.  This means treatment variables are chaotic, and at times treatments are mixed up like a stew.  This approach is very dangerous because Bartonella can cause literal death, in addition to injuring every organ twenty different ways (based on a review of the world literature).

6)     The best treatment for you is not merely one intervention type.  You should never be treated by only one school of healing or one philosophy of healing.  Too many healers are only using the options that are rooted in their training. 

The treatment of tick infections involves many types of medicine and affects many body systems.  Therefore healers need to know many types of medicine.  Many types of healing can be of use.  But I also believe in each school of healing some parts are not of use in treating tick and flea borne infections.  One reason I have had to learn so many types of medicine over the last two decades is that my education was obviously only a starting point as a healer.  I have had to try so many credible treatments of different types because that offered the best help to patients.  No one type of treatment works for all the facets of tick and flea borne infections.  One has to have a broad range of options.

7)     Treatment forever with poor monitoring might be cheap but it is very inadequate care. 

Currently I drive the cheapest car I could find.  If a huge SUV hits me, I am toast.  What is the point of the illustration?  You get what you pay for.  If someone is seeing 20 or more patients a day, that is hardly going to allow them to adjust and tune many facets of your treatment.  Tick infections hit virtually every part of the body.  So a healer has to know many systems of the body—hormones, inflammation, nutrients, improving functionality quickly, compounding medicine, preventing cancer and preventing clots.  Further, they must understand that these infections can impact any organ or human body chemical system.

8)     The bite you see is rarely the first bite. 

While it is well known that the more common stages of biting ticks are very hard to see, what is not appreciated is that, based on animal studies, any rash may be a sign of a past bite that occurred 1, 5, or 20 years earlier.  Further, more advanced and informed lab tests, showing the biochemical domino effect of tick infections over years, are often very abnormal in people reporting symptoms from a “first bite.”

9)     The diagnosis of tick and flea infections is dirty, confusing and hardly easy.  For example, what do you think when the Lyme ELISA is negative, only the IgG 23 “fingerprint” Lyme infection band on the Western Blot is positive, and a PCR for Lyme is positive?  That does not fit some formulas proposed in emerging infection medicine.  Further, in traditional medicine, a diagnosis is made by an excellent history and interview of the patient followed by a physical exam—labs merely support the diagnosis.  That is one reason I noted the dermatology differences in vast numbers of highly infected Bartonella patients compared to uninfected normal patients.  Bartonella alters blood vessels and skin tissue in perhaps over eighty skin markings.  When I started my discovery on vast numbers of published and unpublished skin signs, only two to three patterns were discussed.  Now, slowly, people are mentioning and posting images of Bartonella that have never existed as “Bartonella images” in the 100 years since its discovery.

The current proposed test for Lyme disease is the ELISA.  Only if it is positive does one consider any further testing.  While the ELISA is a tool, it is not perfect, and the number of clearly sick patients with tick and flea borne infections I have seen with a negative ELISA concerns me.  Even if it were 90% sensitive, or even 97% sensitive, is that safe?  And what do you do when the ELISA changes from positive to negative (or vice versa) without any medical intervention?  As I said, diagnosis is messy in emerging infections, and that is reality.  For a physician to keep their insurance contract, they have to order the least number of tests possible—it is like a source of pride and skill.  Amusingly, medical board members, appointed as a reward for involvement in political medicine, are acting for insurance companies by both an excess dependence on one lab test to diagnose, and they often call more complete lab testing which shows positive findings “wasted labs” and “bad medicine.”

If it is good enough for MAYO, HOPKINS, and the CLEVELAND CLINIC it is surely good enough for any passionate clinician who wants to do a good and thorough job.  No one would dare attack an Ivy League physician for ordering extra labs.

10)   Lyme does not exist alone and never has existed alone inside the main infectious tick, the Ixodes tick. 

Looking for “Lyme disease” is 1980’s medicine.  I will not waste time discussing all the diverse infectious agents that are carried inside the Ixodes tick.  With each year the number of viruses, bacteria and bacteria species, or protozoa discovered increases.  Of course, those labs used as the main diagnostic tools are many years behind the infections inside Ixodes ticks.

11)   The new wave of Lyme disease or Babesia infection mockery is both naive and unkind to patients.

Tick infections are emerging infections.  Emerging means no one has the foundation to be cocky.  Some believe physicians are only useful when they “reassure” patients they do not have any of the hundred possible species and variants of the infectious agents carried in an Ixodes tick.  Since more and more of the population is moving away from traditional allopathic (MD) medicine, perhaps this is not a good issue to mock.  One can suggest a course of action for any infection if they wish.  But the notion of utter mastery shows a lack of insight into the many dirty ways these infection clusters exist after a few bites by the Ixodes tick over a few years.  Amusingly, one researcher mentioned to me she found tapeworm DNA in an Ixodes tick.  I do not think she or I feel you can get a tapeworm from a tick bite, but if you can find tapeworm DNA inside the gut of a tick, you can find virtually anything.

12)   The loss of insight and an increase in rigidity is sometimes the first symptom of a significant infection volume which comes with brain and body inflammation. 

One danger in some people is they have no idea they are losing productivity or insight, because that awareness comes from the higher and more advanced areas of the brain.  Self-reflection is an advanced type of brain function, and it can be impaired if more than a small area of the brain is infected and inflamed.  Once someone has this problem they may never be willing to be examined.

13)   Chronic tick infections over years drop anti-inflammation chemicals and increase inflammation chemicals with serious results.  

When one’s body is chronically inflamed, some other things start to happen.  One’s vulnerability to autoimmunity increases and depending on which type of autoimmunity, one can become disabled or die.  Further, one can have an increase in allergies.  These can be allergies to foods, synthetic medicines, and at times even herbs.

Finally, one can also become highly sensitive to volatile chemicals, and it requires immense work to maintain a work, school or living location free of synthetic chemicals.

14)   Routine treatments to reverse systemic and deeply entrenched inflammation are generally trivial and ineffective. 

If you read a book on lowering inflammation you will see the same twenty options that are listed in other books or journal articles.  Unfortunately these do not work when dealing with immense long term chronic inflammation secondary to a series of missed tick and flea-borne infections.  We have some options for this problem, but they are outside the realm of this short article.

15)   The dose that causes misery is not required for effective killing.  

Some healers feel you should never feel an effective antibiotic, and others feel you are not getting any benefit unless you feel terrible.  As the Greeks and Calvin said, perhaps the best position is the middle way.  If a medication seems to be having an effect that causes discomfort which is not a side effect, what is wrong with lowering it to a dose just below the level of discomfort?  I am almost embarrassed to raise this issue, but do so because it is a common issue.

16)   Very advanced pharmacology is needed to address depression, irritability, anxiety, rage, fatigue, insomnia, cognitive deficits and agitation which are hardly rare with tick and flea infections left untreated for a significant period of time. 

This is very important and few physicians are familiar with the dosing for these infections and the common presence of inflammation in the brain which causes these problems.  For example, we suggest all capsules and tablets should never be started over the 1/4^th mark of the smallest option.  But the end effective dose may be profoundly high.  These are not primary psychiatric disorders, but disorders secondary to infections, infection debris and inflammation of the brain.

James Schaller is a full-time study/research physician who treats hard to help patients from almost every state, Canada, Europe and all Continents but the polar ice caps.  He has been voted by physicians as a Best Physician in the top 5% and rated similarly by patients in an award given November/2011.

He is the author of seven tick and flea infection books, 31 books in total and 27 peer-reviewed top journal articles.  Some of these articles and infection textbook entries are on Babesia, Lyme and Bartonella.

Copyright © 2011 James Schaller, M.D.  All rights reserved (version 18).  This may be posted for free only if in a supportive positive manner.  No one may profit from this material or sell it unless it is a minimal fee to cover copy and print costs.  It can be translated into any language for free with no need to seek permission from the author.

 Download Dr. Schaller’s resource book here.

The Lyme disease epidemic continues to rage world-wide in addition to the frightening explosion of confirmed cases in the US, and yet the CDC (Center for Disease Control) and the IDSA continue to publish the clearly untrue statement that Lyme disease is hard to contract and easy to treat.

What many people do not understand is that the western blot was never meant to be a diagnostic authority but a tool to support clinical diagnosis.  The test measures antibodies, not the actual bacteria so if you have any positive bands on the western blot it means you have been exposed to Lyme disease.  It is the controversial (although why there is controversy is confusing in the extreme) amongst any intelligent mind, perhaps even more so with trained medical minds, why a western blot with any positive bands be considered a “false positive” or worse yet “negative” when the patient exhibits all of the symptoms of Lyme.

Add to that puzzle the requirement of a bulls-eye rash when researchers know that some viral strains of borrelia do not cause bulls-eye rashes (and even when they do, the rash is easily hidden in hair where tiny ticks could easily hide as they take their meal) and we must wonder if the CDC is purposefully dropping the ball.

Now, as science around Lyme and other tick-related diseases become more precise, the question begs to be asked: “Why isn’t the western blot more accurate?”

Furthermore, the proteins evaluated within the test are purposefully limited – in fact originally the test evaluated more proteins, some of which were much more indicative of the presence and activity of Borreliosis burgdorferi.  The extra bands were later removed along while at the same time the criteria for positive results was raised to demand more positive bands (five), even though one positive band should be enough to confirm a clinical diagnosis keeping in mind the CDC’s own instructions to use the western blot as a confirmation tool NOT a diagnostic tool.

Currently, Lyme disease tests in the United States are geared to detect a strain or two of a single species: Borrelia burgdorferi sensu stricto (SOURCE:GALDA – Georgia Lyme Disease Association.)  Even though we know there are many more strains capable of causing illness. (Some strains do not cause illness in humans, and some do not cause a rash.)

Another reason for negative results with Lyme infected specimens is due to differing proteins found among numerous strains of various B. burgdorferi species which provide further explanation for the reason some suspected Lyme patients may only show a positive band or two instead of the CDC’s required five.

A Chinese study found that changing western blot criteria to detect the prevalent strain of Lyme bacteria in their region increased the accuracy of the tests. Another study in the United States proved that mixing two infectious Borrelia strains in a western blot assay increased the test’s sensitivity. If simply adding other strains of the same Lyme species increases the western blot’s sensitivity, the changes needed in order to detect various Lyme species may be incredible.

“Up to now, the only species in the complex Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato known to cause Lyme borreliosis in the United States has been B. burgdorferi sensu stricto. However, some atypical strains closely related to the previously designated genomic group DN127 have been isolated in the United States, mostly in California. [...] we analyzed the nucleotide sequences of the rrf-rrl intergenic spacer regions from 19 atypical strains (18 from California and one from New York) and 13 North American B. burgdorferi sensu stricto  strains (6 from California). [...] A heterogeneous group comprising strains belonging to the previously designated group DN127 clustered separately from B. burgdorferi sensu stricto. Within this cluster, the deep branches expressing the distances between the rrf-rrl sequences reflect a high level of divergence. This unexpected diversity contrasts with the monomorphism exhibited by B. burgdorferi sensu stricto. [...] We conclude that the taxonomy and phylogeny of North American B. burgdorferi sensu lato should be reevaluated. For now, we propose that the genomic group DN127 should be referred to as a new species, B. bissettii sp. nov., and that other related but distinct strains, which require further characterization, be referred to as Borrelia spp. ” (SOURCE: Journal for Clinical Microbiology: “Expanded Diversity among Californian Borrelia Isolates and Description of Borrelia bissettii sp. nov. (Formerly Borrelia Group DN127)” December 1998

For excellent information to better understand the current process for diagnosing Lyme and specifically the western blot, please read http://www.lymenet.de/labtests/brenner.htm

Following are recently published medical abstracts courtesy of Journal of Clinical Microbiology:

“Genetic Heterogeneity of Borrelia burgdorferi Sensu Lato in the Southern United States Based on Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism and Sequence Analysis”

T. Lin, J. H. Oliver Jr.,L. Gao,.T. M. Kollars Jr., and K. L. Clark

Finally, a test to ask for (unless you live in Europe)! This revolutionary new test determines the existence of acute and chronic Borrelia burgdorferi (Lyme) by evaluating the specific immune response in patients. The NEI (Neuro-Endo-Immune) Connection published the following information by Sirid Kellermann, Ph.D. in November 2010.

Not another Supplement!  Please!  Have you seen the boxes of supplements I already have for the 142 symptoms I suffer with daily?  And paying for these “critical” supplements is impossible because I am far too sick to work.  The doctors are all on payment plans that I am barely managing to cover and now there is another “MUST HAVE” supplement.

Thankfully Propax NT is a high-quality combination vitamin/mineral supplement designed to be completely absorbed into the body replacing many of the individual vitamins you may currently buy.

In fact it started out (and continues to be) a “super-food” or meal replacement given the unique combination of nutrients.  It includes many of the supplements you are already taking along with special ingredients that have been shown to increase energy by 40%!

Another aspect of Propax NT is that it actually repairs cellular damage and helps reverse the process of aging.

Whether you want more energy to keep up with everyday life, or simply the great feeling that comes from better health, you won’t get there without serious, proven nutritional support. Propax with NT Factor® is a unique formula clinically validated to reduce and eliminate fatigue, providing optimal support for every organ system of the body. How? By helping to keep and recover functions essential to energy production.

Extensive research has shown Propax nutrition supplements to improve quality of life for both healthy individuals and those people undergoing serious health challenges. Encouraging clinical trials have also shown Propax to be successful in reducing some of the unpleasant effects of some medical therapies.

Propax nutrition supplements contain a powerful group of nutrients, called NT Factor®, specifically designed and clinically validated to enhance cellular energy. NT Factor is made up of food components and a nutrient that most closely matches the primary nutrient found in the cell membranes throughout our bodies (lipids). This unique formula provides a complete daily supply of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fatty acids, and probiotics.

In order to understand the role of Propax with NT Factor® has on your system, you should first understand the importance of health at the basic cellular level. Each of your cells converts food into energy by means of a process that is insulated by your cell membranes.

The major components of the cell membrane are lipids, which are naturally occurring molecules that act as energy storage. The proper function of this energy conversion process is fundamental to preventing loss of energy and chronic disease. Healthy cell membranes may degrade because lipids have become damaged (often due to poor diet, disease or drug medication). When your cell membranes degrade then so does energy production.

Propax with NT Factor®® acts to reverse this damage by replacing damaged lipids with healthy lipids, resulting in a restored function of cells, and ultimately reversing loss of energy. This delivery of healthy lipids is known as Lipid Replacement Therapy (LRT).
I get my Propax NT at Amazon (free shipping) and have been able to discontinue five seperate supplements that amounted to well over the cost of Propax.

I have found that Propax NT gives me energy I can count on – except perhaps on my worst days – but I finally feel like these pills that I am constantly taking are helping!

Recovering from Lyme disease requires an effective killing protocol, but it also requires proper meal and snack choices, as well as extra nutrients to help our bodies get rid of neurotoxins and boost the immune system.  Propax NT fortifies our cells with the right balance of nutrients enabling us to have more energy, more stamina, and more life to counteract the crippling pain and disabling symptoms of Lyme and/or other tick-borne diseases.

 Read more about Propax NT here or at http://www.propax.com/propax-with-nt-factor/.

Neurotoxin effectively means “nerve poison”. Neurotoxins act directly on neurons, or nerve cells, by interfering with membrane proteins and ion channels in the central nervous system.  Common external substances that cause neurotoxins in the body are: venom from poisonous insects or reptiles, carbon monoxide, mercury and other heavy metals, ethanol and various other chemical substances. Chemical weapons make use of neurotoxins to impair or kill their enemies.

The destruction of spirochetes also creates neurotoxins which flood the body causing all Lyme symptoms to flare up.  This event is known as a “Herxheimer reaction” or more commonly a “herx”.  The problem is easy to see…if you want to destroy Lyme disease and reclaim your life, it means you have to find the courage to actually feel worse before you can feel better.  And not all people handle neurotoxins the same way.  Some bodies eliminate neurotoxins more easily than others, but regardless of the relative “ease” with which we rid ourselves of these poisons; pain on top of pain equals more pain.  Killing Lyme is very different than getting rid of mucous after a bad cold.

The following is taken from: Cleansing Neurotoxin Overload by Victoria Bowmann, PhD

“In Lyme disease, the bacteria is a “smart” bug which wants to maintain its life within the person. It actually hides itself from the immune system. The Lyme bacteria is neurotoxic and, in order to survive, clogs up the lymphatic system and causes the blood to thicken. This leads to poor blood flow through the liver and a stickiness to the interstitial fluid.

The interstitial fluid is the fluid that bathes and nourishes the tissue cells. It also picks up microorganisms, foreign particles, enzymes, proteins, and hormones for processing through the lymphatic system. In addition to the lymphatic system, Lyme prefers to travel through the collagen more than the blood.

Lyme disease is a systemic infection and it can invade and damage any and all organs, glands, and systems of our body. Lyme patients are also challenged by other co-infections that are often overlooked.

I am sorry to say that I missed it.  But thanks to Kettmann.com,  we are all able to watch it, and download it to share with friends and family.

Please watch it now or later  (the video is 40 minutes long.)  Just follow these simple steps – courtesy of Channel 5, Boston Massachusetts, ABC-TV WCVB.

For Windows click here to watch streaming download.

For Apple click here to watch streaming download.

Click on SAVE FILE, and then OPEN after the file has been completely downloaded.

The file is large and will take some time to download.  When it is finished, double-click on the GOM icon and the movie will open in a new window.

There is a button on the top right with 4 little boxes which will open the movie in full screen.

Enjoy!

People who are sick with Lyme disease and treating the disease for years with antibiotics and/or alternative treatments – sometimes with a single protocol and sometimes using several protocols at once – are beginning to wonder, “…maybe I don’t have Lyme, maybe it is something else.”

The  problem continues to rest with inadequate testing for a clear diagnosis. Researchers in Italy and subsequently in the UK have recently (October and November 2011) published findings that demonstrate Bartonella heslslae transferring DNA to human endothelial cells. Endothelial cells are the thin layer of cells that line the interior of blood vessels.  It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to consider the impact of this information with respect to the neurological aspect of our disease(s).

According to Dr. James Schaller (who actively researches and collaborates with doctors from around the world), Bartonella is far more common than Lyme and is spread not only by ticks but by just about every other biting insect you can think of.  He writes in his soon-to-be-published textbook on human infections spread by flea and ticks:

Bartonella is no footnote and is more common than Lyme.  Many years ago when I first got involved in the super specialtyof tick and flea infection medicine, no one took Bartonella seriously.  It was presented as an easy to kill infection, and of no real concern.  It was rarely discussed at infection medicine meetings, in guidelines or infection textbooks.  (I noticed the same thing after publishing four books on Babesia–the parasite books I purchased only had two pages on this serious infection).

When I published the most recent book on Bartonella, it showed that Bartonella did not have two or three skin patterns, but vast numbers.  This was a fully new and massively expanded diagnostic tool based on reading the world literature and examining heavily infected patients.  I was also surprised that no one was looking for the chemicals altered by the presence of Bartonella and the dynamic of these chemicals when both Babesia and Bartonella are present.  You can read this in the latter sections of my textbook, Babesia 2009 Update.

This year a new human Bartonella species was added to the over thirty five Bartonella species publically published in Genetic Data banks.  It was discovered and highlighted by the talented veterinarian researcher Edward Breitschwerdt.  He has said things more clearly than the ideas I was pondering in 2005, while doing most of my Bartonella book reading. 

Dr. Breitscwerdt has said simply, but with devastating and highly useful clarity that Bartonella testing is terrible, the treatments are poor, it is typically found on the outside of red blood cells, and the current research on Bartonella is pathetic (referencing one study at NIH.)

 If this was not enough, he said in 2011 “Bartonella is carried by more vectors than any infection on the earth.”  So it is hardly a backdoor “co-infection.”  Indeed, this month Bartonella was literally shown to alter human DNA.  The implications of this possibility are staggering, and may support what I reported six years ago—Bartonella is not killed simply or easily.  My appeal is simple: treating it like a footnote infection is outdated and harmful.

The symptoms of Bartonella are very similar to Lyme but may include other more specific symptoms such as swollen lymph glands, sore throat, painful soles of feet especially in the morning and hyperacusis (sharp pain from sound).  See more on Bartonella.

Watch ILADS Lyme disease conference lectures as leading professionals examine the cutting edge research and state-of-the-art clinical applications in the treatment and diagnosis of Lyme disease.

We will be restreaming select presentations on December 17, 2011 that were not seen due to technical difficulties on October 27th & 28th, 2011 free of charge.

http://www.ilads.org/emails/livestream_online12172011.html

See the December 17, 2011 video streaming schedule below:

1:00pm-1:30pm (EST) or (10:00am-10:30am PST) Understanding
Symptoms Related to Visual Dysfunction following a
Tick-Borne Event — William V. Padula, OD

1:30pm-2:15pm (EST) or (10:30am-11:15am PST) Borrelia
Infections- diagnosis and treatment — Joseph J. Burrascano,
Jr. MD

2:15pm-3:00pm (EST) or (11:15am-12:00pm PST) Lyme Disease &
Babesiosis: Updates on Diagnosis and Treatment 2011 —
Richard I. Horowitz, MD

3:00pm-3:45pm (EST) or (12:00pm-12:45pm PST) Pregnancy and
Tick-borne Diseases: Gestational Lyme — Charles Ray Jones, MD

3:45pm-4:30pm (EST) or (12:45pm-1:30pm PST) Overview of
Integrative Patient Care in Tick-Borne Diseases — Steven
Bock, MD

4:30pm-5:15pm (EST) 0r (1:30pm-2:15pm PST) Identifying
Environmental Illness and Mold Exposure in Patients with
Persistent Lyme Disease. — Lisa L. Nagy, MD

5:15pm-6:00pm (EST) or (2:15pm-3:00pm PST) Management of
Ixodes scapularis bites. — Elizabeth Maloney, MD

6:00pm-7:15pm (EST) or (3:00pm-4:15pm PST) Coinfections And
The Opportunistic Groupies — Christine Green, MD

For complete information about the ILADS Live Streaming
Conference Presentations, December 17, 2011:
http://www.ilads.org/emails/livestream_online12172011.html

The following two studies (see summary here) demonstrate that Bb spirochetes can persist in the mouse after ceftriaxone therapy.  This supports the claims of chronic Lyme sufferers who maintain that they still have the disease after antibiotic treatment – even IV antibiotics.

The Finish study was remarkable in that the culture and PCR were negative after ceftriaxone, but after additional treatment with anti-TNF-alpha, viable spirochetes were recovered.

TNF is a pro-inflammatory cytokine (cytokines signal molecules in our immune system) which, when blocked, typically results in a reduction in clinical inflammation; for this reason, such treatment is used for patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

To the surprise of the authors of the study, viable spirochetes were recovered in these PCR- and culture-negative mice after TNF blocking treatment was given.

Also interesting is that anti-TNF treatment did not result in the expected finding of a reduction of joint swelling.

The Finnish study was the first study to demonstrate that immuno-modulatory treatment of animals infected with Bb could convert them from culture negative to culture positive.

The California study was remarkable in that only tick-feeding was capable of extracting infectious but non-replicating attenuated spirochetes; without having done that step of xenodiagnosis of (xenodiagnosis refers to the process of exposing a sterile tick to the tissue suspected of infection and then examining the tick afterwards…in this case finding the evidence of spirochetes which otherwise would not have been found) and then transferring the tick to feed on naïve SCID mice, the authors’ conclusion would have been that infectious spirochetes do not persist in the mouse model as culture was negative.   The authors further concluded that negative culture and PCR can not be relied upon as markers of treatment success.

We do not know the extent to which these findings can be translated to the human situation.

Nevertheless, the activation of infectious spirochetes after anti-TNF therapy in mice should alert clinicians to the possibility that anti-cytokine therapy may result in a similarly increased risk of activating latent infection among patients with a history of treated Lyme disease.

At this point, we do not know whether attenuated spirochetes are capable of inducing illness-symptoms in mice or humans; while it is possible that spirochetal mRNA may be producing surface lipoproteins that stimulate systemic symptoms, this hypothesis needs to be tested in the next phase of this important research.

SOURCE: Columbia University Lyme Research and letter from Dr. Brian Fallon the Director of the Lyme and Tick-Borne Disease Research center at Columbia University.

In a vast section of the Maine Wilderness there were one hundred and forty-two (142) moose found dead according to a recent article in the Bangor Daily News (December 2, 2011). These apparently healthy moose are found dead covered with ticks which points to the astronomical increase in tick population, and fuels the raging epidemic of Lyme disease and other potentially fatal tick born diseases. (Article link at end of post)

The moose were unmarked and dead for no apparent reason other than the fact that they were completely covered in ticks.  Their natural predators will not eat the moose in this condition,but the ticks will.  The ticks fill their bellies and hop off to breed more – up to three thousand youngsters each.

Do the math.

It isn’t just the moose in trouble.

This alarming news travels fast in a state that depends greatly on tourists and hunters who bring revenue into the state when they venture north to view the beautiful Maine wilderness and hunt in the vast forests.  And with Lyme and other tick borne diseases spreading like wildfire, people are hesitating to risk the exposure.

Is an enjoyable week-end worth the very real possibility of ending up as a tragic statistic – out of work and painful suffering for who knows how many years?  In New England the epidemic is common knowledge, even in Maine there are very few people who don’t know someone stricken with the disease.

I won’t be surprised to see legislation asking for pesticide drops to push back the dangerous infestation (as hinted in the article.)

When it was just humans suffering with tick born diseases we were told that we were crazy.  Now that the moose are endangered something must be done.

To read the article click here.