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Comment by jacksonkmarley | Hacker News Reader

From that study:

> These results however do not clarify whether the Borrelia infection had anything to do with her progressive neurodegenerative disorder

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Impossible to do this reliably on a single patient with multiple conditions and advanced age. One could take a guess, but the error bar would be 0.0-1.0

This study set out to prove chronic persistence of the pathogen despite standard treatments, which is rather hard to dispute.

Being able to detect Borrelia Spirochetes is not equivalent to linking them with chronic symptoms.

I think the key thing is that it disproves the idea that the bacteria which cause the disease are reliably eliminated by antibiotics, which is typically a key point that those in the "it's not cause by lyme" camp rely on.

Doesn't prove that it is lyme, but it shifts the balance of probablities considerably.

I don't have an opinion on what the "it's not caused by lyme" camp rely on, but the wikipedia page complained about above actually already references another study that found spirochetes in animals after antibiotic treatment.

No doubt the language in that wikipedia page is pretty triggering if you already believe chronic lyme disease is a thing though.

The human study was literally done because denial of chronic lyme persisted despite multiple reliable studies in animal models.

It's quite disgusting and begets further questions as to why such attitudes towards Lyme exist in the first place.

Most CDC / IDSA folks will tell you that a course of antibiotics will rid the body of Lyme in all cases. The presence of spirochetes here should be enough for them to stop using that language. But it likely won't because there appears to be a systemic organizational bias against Lyme as a chronic condition, and I'm not sure why.

Presence 4 years or so later. So, maybe the patient was infected again some time after initial treatment?

Occam's Razor applies.

You're not wrong, but they continue to lean on the "evidence doesn't support" angle. At some point that looks like bias.

The study is a follow-up study on primates that confirmed the exact same thing, only to be dismissed "because not in humans duuuuh"

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.

Kind of reminds me of Alzheimer's disease and the pervasive insistence that it's cause by misfokded protiens even though so many treatments following that assumption failed to cure it. Sometimes an idea is just hard to introduce or root out in academia

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