Jenna’s Lyme Blog

If you see a rash that looks like a bulls-eye and you feel poorly, you have Lyme disease. It is one of the defining symptoms that the CDC allows when diagnosing Lyme disease.

The “Bulls Eye Rash” or EM (erythema chronicum migrans is the technical name) can be quarter sized or it can cover most of the chest, it can be perfectly round or appear like an island with ragged lines and more oblong than round. It can be solid red with a dark spot in the center or it can have rings (as pictured in this post.)

However, in spite of the fact that the EM is recognized as a criteria for diagnosis by all doctors following the CDC guidelines or the IDSA (Infectious Disease Society of America), and as evidence amongst Lyme-literate doctors, hard facts revealed though recent research at Stony Brook Medical Center has eliminated this qualifying symptom completely.

For years there has been a heated debate about using the EM rash as a requirement for diagnosis. Dr. Joseph Burrascano states in hie Treatment Guidelines that fewer than half of his patients ever had the rash (or noticed it).

Yet that figure is one of the pillars of Dr. Steere’s argument for over-diagnosis of Lyme disease. In fact proof of the EM rash was insisted on for selection of participants in every Lyme “study” in the recent years.

Now it appears there will be extra pie in the face of those doctors who clung to the authority of Dr. Steere and his IDSA treatment guidelines. (To be fair, there are thirteen additional authors of the IDSA.)

Approximately ten years ago Wei Gang Qui, a graduate student at SUNY requested to work with Dr. Benjamin Luft on Lyme disease. He was then given the glamorous job of collecting ticks!

Studies on what eventually turned out to be twenty strains turned up surprising evidence. Of the twenty, ten strains of ticks did not infect humans.

That might not be very surprising when you think of how many hundreds of strains of ticks exist in our country. However, a more interesting fact emerged showing that ten strains of the twenty caused the EM rash.

Well, based on the CDC and IDSA’s criteria we would expect that those ten strains all caused infectious Lyme disease, right?

Wrong!

Of the twenty strains of ticks studied, only four strains caused infectious Lyme!

The implications of this discovery are enormous.

First, all of the studies requiring the EM rash as proof of infection have been discredited and will need to be taken again.

For medical researchers, the challenge continues to grow, but at least we now know that one of the four infectious strains, called B31, is the strain that is most virulent.

Pamela Weintraub writing in “Cure Unknown” has presented many more scientific consequences of this discovery (see pages 342 – 346).

A most hopeful breakthrough from these findings relates to more effective treatment for Lyme disease with the powerful antibiotic tigecycline. Tigecycline kills Lyme in twenty-four hours in a test tube!

Dr. Luft says this is 100 times more active against the spirochetes than Doxycycline, a universally preferred drug at the moment. Unfortunately it has not yet passed the human testing process it needs to be dispensed.

So spread the word. We have one less thing to worry about, and many more to be excited about!

Thank you Dr. Luft and Wei Gang Qiu !

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Posted on October 9th, 2008 under Chronic Lyme Disease, Research and Development • Tags: Bulls Eye Rash, Chronic Lyme disease, EM rash, New Treatment for Lyme Disease. • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback