National Geographic – What Is Lyme Disease? New Findings Deepen the Mystery
Says National Geographic commenting on Canadian researcher Marianne Middelveen’s recent findings,
“A new study that points to sexual transmission has added to the controversy.
Part of our weekly “In Focus” series—stepping back, looking closer.
Rampant disagreement over what constitutes Lyme disease—in particular, who may have contracted it and how, and how long it lasts—has spawned the larger question of how best to treat it. A new study pointing to the possibility of sexual transmission of the pathogen adds fuel to the fire.”
I have read the abstract to this new study, and contrary to the press release, which is quoted without critical appraisal, there were not three groups; there were three patients. There is no significance to the many articles now being posted which are copy-and-pastes of a press release which cites three groups of patients, and spirochetes in 100% of the women and 50% of the men. In fact, there was one man and two women, all positive. So he says. The paper is unpublished and unreviewed. Only the abstract is available, and the author hired a publicist who clearly misreported the entire thing. And it’s viral.
Methods
Used: Three North American patients with a history of Lyme disease, one male and two female, were selected for the study after informed consent was obtained.Serological testing for B. burgdorferi was performed on all three subjects.Blood and semen or vaginal secretions were used to inoculate BSK-H medium forBorrelia culture. Motile spirochetes were detected in cultures by light and/ordarkfield microscopy, and cultured spirochete concentrates were subjected to Dieterle silver staining, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and anti-B. burgdorferi immunohistochemical staining for further characterization.
Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing was performed by two independent
laboratories for specific identification of the cultured isolates. Positive and
negative controls for immunohistochemical staining and PCR were performed in
all experiments.
Summary of Results:
Serum
antibodies to B. burgdorferi were detected in all three patients. Motile
spirochetes were observed in culture fluid inoculated with blood and genital
secretions from the three subjects. Morphological features of spirochetes were
confirmed by Dieterle staining, SEM and immunohistochemical staining of culture
concentrates. PCR testing confirmed that the spirochetes isolated from blood
and genital secretions were strains of B. burgdorferi, and PCR subtyping
indicated that the strains were B. burgdorferi sensu stricto.
The fact is that those government bodies responsible for looking into the important question of sexual transmission have done nothing in 40 years. The Lyme bacteria is a spirochete, just as it’s cousin syphilis. One would have thought that as a major public health safety matter, definitive research would have been done, however, amazingly nothing was done of any significance.
Getting this particular study’s information out in the fashion it was promoted perhaps was intended to interject the notion of sexual transmission immediately into the conversations at every level of government, medical bureaucracy, and in the minds of the public who will demand better of those who dole out tax dollar funded research money annually. This public announcement should be seen as the gateway to much more aggressive research into sexual transmission.
What has been so striking about the last 40 years of government funded research into Lyme Disease, more appropriately termed Lyme Borreliosis, is that only a small group of people were funded and were able to access funding whenever they wanted, and most of those same people have produced absolutely nothing of value and quality. They have intentionally avoided the very obvious questions like sexual transmission and prevalence of the organism in tissues of chronically ill humans.
Millions of dollars have been directed at chasing the tick and host reservoirs of the bacteria, or trying to find a unique property of the bacteria to make a drug. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of people are left ill or die because no research is looking at the patient. We could be decades away from having any meaningful drugs and we have already spent 4 decades avoiding human prevalence research of this organism in the very large and growing chronically ill population.
Farming sickness to pharm symptoms is a very good business model in that it creates a lifelong reliance on pharmaceuticals to mask the symptoms while doing nothing to address the cause. The more people who become chronically ill, the larger the profits, and the more tax dollars they take from us to do their drug research so they can make more profits until the breaking point where governments are bankrupt under the weight of health care expenditures. Countries are now beginning to understand, that much of which has been the status quo of the past decades is rapidly sucking up tax dollars with no return in value.
Lyme Borreliosis is a disease spread randomly by migratory birds so it is an impossible task to to determine with any diagnostic credibility whether a person has Lyme Disease or not based upon where they live, yet the small group of well funded self annointed researchers devised a risk ratio based upon the balance of probabilty of the pateint having been exposed to the bacteria or not depending upon where they live, or may have traveled to. They then determine whether the patient’s positive test was a true positive or a false positive based upon this mathematical ratio. The major flaw of course is that less than one percent of the entire country is field studied annually for signs of Lyme Borreliosis in the ticks and animals, and, even if they did look in an area and found nothing what does that mean when they have been intentionally not looking for all Borrelia. Mostly, it is passive surveillance meaning that pet owners, veterinarians and physicians are sending in ticks or case reports and that is how they determine the risk for any given area. The gaping hole in that method is that they only report on Borrelia burgdorferi lab strain B31. The infection rate in animals and peoiple of Borrelia miyamotoi, hermsii, bissettii, kurtenbachii, andersonii, americana, and many more have not been looked for and reported.
This small group of self-proclaimed, US CDC/NIH supported ‘experts’ apply this risk ratio based upon ‘no evidence’ from 99% of the country, and ‘no evidence’ of other Borrelia because they have closed their eyes to a known situation affecting humans. They determine that those unstudied or understudied areas to be ‘low or no risk’ even though they haven’t looked, so the vast majority of positive tests are deemed false positive as revealed in Freedom of Information searches, and this determination is made by the medical microbiologists and Infectious Disease doctors throughout North America and beyond who must follow this small group of powerful experts whose power was granted to them by the UN CDC/NIH to the exclusion of true scientists. This potentially could be the largest fraud in the history of medicine, and governments are starting to realize that point thanks only to public outcry, hence the admission by the US CDC last year that, “oops” they have been slightly off in there estimates of the disease numbers… not 30,000 cases per year, but more like 300,000 cases per year, almost all of which would be deemed ‘false positives’ by the medical microbiologists and Infectious Disease doctors using their mathematical deception.