These are spirochetes in the brain/spine of a dead patient who had proven lyme diagnosis, has been given the standard treatment in the past, never recovered, developed dementia, died.
Full study: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2021.6280...
The wikipedia article you are quoting is outdated misinformation, please stop spreading it.
the wiki article is indeed misinformation.
https://eu.delawareonline.com/story/sponsor-story/nemours/20...
Myth #5: Lyme disease can have debilitating, lifelong effects.
Fact: When treated with antibiotics, Lyme disease, at any stage of presentation, is curable.
Myth #6: My child will be at risk for chronic Lyme disease once he’s infected with Lyme.
Fact: Although some people report lingering or recurrent symptoms after Lyme disease, there is no evidence that chronic Lyme disease exists. Prolonged courses of antibiotics are not needed and can do more harm than good. Follow the recommendations of trusted sources such as the Centers for Disease Control and the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society.
Myth #7: Alternative therapies are valuable treatment options for my child’s Lyme disease infection.
Fact: Lyme disease is a hot topic on the internet with many people sharing both successes and horror stories about alternative treatments, but keep in mind that it is hard to verify the legitimacy of internet sources. Instead, talk to your child’s pediatrician, or consult with a pediatric infectious diseases physician at an academic medical center.
Simply saying this doesn't make it true. This is not true and that Wikipedia article is outdated.
once YOU read that paper, please post YOUR peer review summary here.
enough with appeals to authority. wikipedia is not even an authoritative source to begin with.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7jk9q/rick-sponaugle-pots-c...
Edit: Is Lyme-literate another term you and your internet friends use?
Look at the case against him: https://mqa-internet.doh.state.fl.us/MQASearchServices/Healt...
Scam Dr's like this are causing the FUD you are spreading.
These are spirochetes in the brain/spine of a dead patient.
She had proven lyme diagnosis in the past, has been given the standard treatment and had good response(!), only to relapse, never recover and went on to develop neurological issues years later, and died.
The brain was donated and autopsied.
Full study: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2021.6280...
Are you saying the lead scientist on this paper, from the Tulane National Primate Research Center is a scammer? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulane_National_Primate_Resear...)
Seems like a big accusation.
While it's interesting that the treatment was "successful" and that symptoms continued, this isn't really a strong statement of support for something like Chronic Lyme Disease or at least its widespread presentation - much more likely a statement of support for Lyme Disease bacteria not always being treated by the regimen, or potentially even that it's easy for someone to get a second infection and have no significant immunity.
I guess the hope for promoters of CLD would be that it's possible to treat the currently irreversible PTLD symptoms using antibiotics, rather than accept something akin to a fibromyalgia diagnosis.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2021.6280...
Pretty damning.
Myth #5: Lyme disease can have debilitating, lifelong effects.
Fact: When treated with antibiotics, Lyme disease, at any stage of presentation, is curable.
The fact provided in response assumes that people are getting antibiotic treatment, which is not always the case. If you go untreated, then you can have lifelong debilitating effects. I don't think even the author of the article would dispute that. So why is the author using weaselly arguments to imply that you can't? Seems like an attempt to confirm a biased judgement.
BUT I really did do my own research with respect to Lyme, reading deeply into the peer-reviewed literature, and I came to the conclusion that the "scientific consensus" was formed by people too lazy or misguided to read it themselves.
For example, the consensus was that Lyme couldn't persist in humans after antibiotic treatment. But it DOES persist in other animals including primates. They could easily discover that because they could euthanize those other animals to see if it was there in their tissues, and it was. They couldn't do that with humans. The conclusion is OBVIOUSLY not that it can't happen in humans, but rather that we haven't proved it could. The "scientific consensus" got those outcomes confused, and assumed it couldn't.
But consider this quote from the OP article: "In May, her research team published their strongest evidence to date of persistent Lyme symptoms. In a unique finding, they discovered Lyme bacteria in the tissues of a deceased 69-year-old woman who contracted the disease, was treated multiple times with antibiotics, and still couldn’t clear the infection from her body.”
I was impressed by related evidence a couple years ago, such as an examination of the brains of people who had died of Alzheimer's. I don't remember the exact number, but something like 25% of those brains contained Lyme spirochetes. Note that there is a theory gaining traction recently that Alzheimer's is caused by the brain's attempts to manage active infections.
There is much, much more to say, and a LOT of research that goes in the opposite direction of what you're assuming in your post.
An anecdote: researchers tested hundreds of FDA-approved drugs in test tubes to see which ones worked best at killing Lyme spirochetes. Disulfiram won. My wife, who had lost her career as a retinal surgeon and researcher due to a chronic illness we thought might be chronic Lyme, took disulfiram under the care of her doctor who had treated Lyme patients for decades, and who was one of the first to try disulfiram in patients.
After the treatment, her illness disappeared. Our older son also had the same illness, which led to him taking a year off from school because he just couldn't function. He had been taking antibiotics for a couple years. At one point we stopped the antibiotics, and he felt great for a week, worse the next week, and in week 3 he was all the way back to being pretty nonfunctional with the symptoms attributed to "chronic Lyme". He, too, took disulfiram and was cured.
Note that we had long spent summers on Little Deer Isle, Maine, known for its deer and deer ticks.
It should be noted that while there is some evidence that Disulfiram has effectiveness against Lyme, it's not yet well-studied and the incidence of significant side effects, particularly neurological side effects, during treatment is high enough that I wouldn't risk it. Both the risks and benefits haven't been studied enough to quantify, though I'm glad it worked well for your family.
Source on high incidence of side effects: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7184924/
Oh man, don't I know it. My post was about the question of whether chronic Lyme actually exists, not whether taking disulfiram is a good idea.
Both my wife and son had a VERY difficult time with the disulfiram treatment. My son, in particular, ended up in the ER one night, basically having a psychotic break. That was the day he stopped taking the disulfiram.
BUT it happens that he was almost at the end of the recommended treatment duration anyway, and EVERY indication is that both he and my wife were completely cured by it. This was probably about 2 years ago, and so it's very encouraging that there is no evidence of any recurrence.
As I mentioned, my wife and son were early in the treatment experiments, and they had high doses. The doctor who treated them has now treated a good number of people and has much more experience with different doses. With a lower dose for the same amount of time, cures are less reliable. But there are experiments with low doses for longer times.
I worry that you may have Lyme spirochetes in your brain that may predispose you to Alzheimer's. So it might not be a bad idea to look into more treatment even if you can deal with your current state.
If you do, I'd recommend talking to my wife and son's doctor, https://lymediseaseassociation.org/blogs/lda-guest-blogs/ken...
I think it's always been noted that Alzheimer's risk can increase significantly after certain infections. I don't think this really takes out the genetic component and other environmental components to be contributors, though, and I've not heard much on the front of it being the primary contributor of Alzheimer's risk.
> These results however do not clarify whether the Borrelia infection had anything to do with her progressive neurodegenerative disorder
This study set out to prove chronic persistence of the pathogen despite standard treatments, which is rather hard to dispute.
Doesn't prove that it is lyme, but it shifts the balance of probablities considerably.
No doubt the language in that wikipedia page is pretty triggering if you already believe chronic lyme disease is a thing though.
It's quite disgusting and begets further questions as to why such attitudes towards Lyme exist in the first place.
You're not wrong, but they continue to lean on the "evidence doesn't support" angle. At some point that looks like bias.
Now we have human brain autopsies. Plenty of denial right in this thread.
And then people wonder why people don't trust physicians and do not vaccinate.
They are funded by their antiscience movement: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4489928/
The Frontiers paper is a single case report that admits that the woman's Lyme ELISA (and hence total antibodies to Lyme) was negative when she started experiencing dementia. Without antibodies against Lyme, it would be a mistake to claim that she had "chronic Lyme" (which isn't real regardless.) The paper is consistent with someone who had lyme disease (a not-uncommon illness) and then years later was diagnosed with dementia, but you can't say Lyme caused the dementia.
There is a scientific consensus against chronic Lyme based on decades of research.
It's disturbing that chronic Lyme has become a dangerous social phenomenon based on conspiracy theories, fake diagnoses, and fake treatments.
https://www.thecut.com/2019/07/what-happens-when-lyme-diseas...
Seems your assertion here is that a professor of immunology at Tulane has committed fraud.
That is a very serious accusation and the onus is on you to prove that. Do you have any evidence? Can you point me to any histology experts that have disputed these findings?
1. Was the slide image in the study real? 2. Was pathogen visible in the slice? 3. Why is there a pathogen in the brain several decades later?