Nobody, in the article or otherwise, is suggesting that you can take manganese to fight Lyme. I don’t know where you got that, but I hope nobody thinks to try it.

The idea would be to look at all of the components that regulate manganese in B. burgdorferi and then look for drugs that might disrupt how they operate.

Any solution would act indirectly by disrupting manganese balance in a targeted manner directed at B. burgdorferi, not by flooding the whole body with manganese. The cells regulate their internal manganese anyway, so supplementing manganese wouldn’t force it to go into those cells anyway.

This is a PR release for some research that tries to stretch it into a promising treatment, but it's really more of an interesting discovery than a path to a new treatment.