I have decided to post all 4 of Tom Grier's lectures which give us such an insight into what Doctors are not being told about Borrelia infections commonly referred to as Lyme Disease.
Lyme Disease is considered The Great Imitator not just presenting with Arthritis but neurological, psychiatric, heart block and digestive symptoms such that patients can be diagnosed with a whole range of illnesses Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson's, Motor Neurons and many other neurological illnesses as well as fibromyalgia, ME/CFS, Arthritis, muscle weakness, Polymyalgia Rheumatica, Musculo skeletal disease, Crohn's disease and a host of other diagnosis.
Understanding your health problems is key, your doctor does not always know best if he isn't aware of all there is to know and hasn't the time or inclination to find out.
“Lyme on the Brain”
part 1 of 4
by Tom Grier
August 25, 2010
Introduction
Lyme disease was first recognized in Old Lyme, Connecticut, CT, in 1973 by two concerned mothers.
Judy Mensch and Polly Murray felt there were too many diagnosed cases of Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis in their neighborhood children.
Judy and Polly Murray who had backgrounds in public health collected over 200 local case histories and presented them to the CDC and CT health department.
Dr. Alan Steere, MD investigated the local cases of JRA and coined the misnomer "Lyme Arthritis" in his 1975 publication that first described Lyme Borreliosis as an arthritic disorder.
Although the actual cause of Lyme arthritis that was sometimes associated with a bull's-eye rash was not yet known, a treatment protocol of two weeks of tetracycline was already being recommended.
The infectious etiology of Lyme disease was not known until 1981 when Dr. Willy Burgdorfer, PhD from Rocky Mountain Labs in Colorado isolated the new species of Borrelia bacteria from a tick from Shelter Island.
The fact that "Lyme disease" was caused by a spirochete should have been a real concern and everything we thought we knew about Lyme disease should have been reevaluated at that time.
Borrelia was a family of bacteria not only associated with relapses and antibiotic treatment failures, but also is part of the same family of bacteria that causes [b]Tick-Borne Relapsing Fevers, a group of over 300 variant diseases that can be deadly within months:[/b]
(Borrelia duttonii and Borrelia crocidurai of Northeast Africa), or considered mild and often mislabeled as "self-limiting"; such as, Borrelia recurrentis found in the Southwest USA.
(Ron Ferris of Canada was diagnosed with Borrelia recurrentis and was sick for years despite treatment right up until the day he died).
In 1982 the Lyme bacteria was isolated from the "Lyme Bull's-Eye rash" from patients from New England.
With this new discovery causing so much excitement and demanding large sums of monies to investigate, no one wanted to admit that "Lyme" was just a new subclass of a larger world-wide disease spread by ticks that was well known for a century as tick-born-relapsing fevers.
We need to stop calling this disease Lyme disease and recognize that it is part of a worldwide problem called Borreliosis.
If we don't recognize Lyme disease as a larger worldwide health problem caused by bacteria that have a built in mechanism for variation, our health departments will define the disease out of existence.
Technically, the MS/Lyme patient that recently died in Australia (a high ranking tennis player) may not have had Lyme disease even though he tested positive on two serology tests. Why?
Because if he had Borrelia in the brain that causes relapsing fever and that variant Borrelia lacks the Sop-A DNA sequence and we use a PCR Osp-A test to test his brain tissues:
he may test negative for Osp-A, but still have Neuroborreliosis that is an Osp-A deficient variant.
The report would say it is not "Lyme Disease" but is any Borrelia in the brain acceptable?
Ask his widow who had to fight this case to the Supreme Court just to get an autopsy.
But what good is an autopsy if they look for a species unlikely to be in Australia?
If a murderer kills you with a 44 caliber or a 38 caliber you’re still just as dead.
But our CSI people looking at Lyme need to be doing a better job if all they are going to look for is Borrelia burgdorferi (stricto sensu).
Despite documented case histories of Lyme patients still being in the rash stage and yet progressing on to serious late stage complications while on tetracycline class antibiotics, the use of cyclines for 2 weeks is still the recommended Lyme treatment.
This has to change.
When Lyme was found to be caused by a spirochete, no serious reevaluation of treatment protocols ever took place.
Instead major medical institutions and universities made a mad rush to register patents for Lyme tests, Lyme vaccines, and patents on the bacteria's DNA sequences for PCR testing.
But what no one did including the CDC and NIH, they didn't do pathology studies to see if treatments were successful.
"Today when Lyme patients are told that they are cured, and that their continuing symptoms must be caused by something else:
I would like to know what is out there in nature that defies antibiotic treatment better than a spirochete?
Also if we keep discovering new infectious disease causing organisms like anaplasmosis, why do we assume that a patient with continuing symptoms that still responds to antibiotics is "cured"?
Are we so arrogant to think we have to keep our options limited only to diseases that only appear on a hospital lab-order test check-list?
Are we so sure Lyme is so easily curable?
Just one brain-autopsy that finds spirochetes post antibiotic treatment, can disprove the misguided position that a few weeks of antibiotics is sufficient to "cure" Lyme disease, and that work has already begun.
But my question is:
Who do we hold accountable? The answer has to be whoever it is that is withholding or restricting antibiotic treatment from symptomatic patients.
Who has signed their guidelines in the blood of dying Lyme patients?"
Tom Grier
Lyme Lecture
Amery, Wisconsin
August 2010
Early on doctors and scientists seemed to want to talk about Lyme disease in absolutes.
Absolutes that changed:
Lyme was absolutely transmitted by a new tick species called Ixodes dammini.
Then it was discovered that this new species was the same as Ixodes scapularis ticks which had been around centuries and had a wider range than we first thought that Ixodes dammini had.
But in California, three major mountain ranges away from New England, Lyme was transmitted by Ixodes pacificus.
In Missouri, the Lonestar Dog Tick had a new Borrelia that caused Bull's-eye rashes and Lyme.
In Europe, it was the Sheep Tick, or the Sea Bird Tick that transmitted Lyme, and their host reservoirs were different from America's white-footed mouse thought at one time the only reservoir of Borrelia burgdorferi, and now just one of many rodents and possibly bird species.
Length of Tick Attachment:
A tick must be attached for at least 36-48 hours. WOW! How could you ever make that conclusion on the sparse veterinary and human data we have?
In fact the data suggests this is not true. Studies that looked at improper removal of a tick showed much shorter attachments are possible.
What child removes a tick properly?
Dr. Elizabeth Burgess, DMV, in Madison, Wisconsin: her work has been overlooked for decades.
Her preliminary work showed that the Borrelia species of spirochete possessed some mechanism and ability to penetrate mucous membranes suggesting transmission in cattle could be through urine to mouth contact putting cattle at a risk besides just ticks.
Dr. Burgess' veterinary work was harshly and unjustly criticized without investigation or inspection.
A decade later we see that Borrelia is a champion at penetrating mammalian blood vessels and endothelial cells that line the blood vessels.
How hard is it to imagine mucosa capillaries in cattle are exposed targets for Borrelia to penetrate on contact?
Since the introduction of the veterinary Lyme vaccines, we hear little about entire herds of cattle and horses being infected.
Absolute treatment:
Two weeks of doxycycline is adequate despite persisting symptoms: I am curious: Has two weeks of tetracycline ever cured a case of acne??
Let YALE defend their own position:
A synopsis of this view point can be found in the Yale Medicine
Report, May 15, 1996, in an article by Marc Woortman states that: (Excerpts from page 11, Yale Medicine, May 15th, 1996)
• If you suspect the tick was attached for at least 36 hours, observe the site of the bite for development of the characteristic skin rash, erythema chronica migrans (sic), usually a circular red
patch, or expanding "bull's eye," that appears between three days and one month after the bite.
Not all rashes at the site of the bite are due to Lyme disease. Allergic reactions to tick saliva are common.
Preventative antibiotic treatment is not necessary, is costly, and may cause side effects.
• If symptoms of later-stage Lyme disease develop, such as arthritic swelling of a joint, most often the knee, or facial nerve palsy, have a test done.
If the test is positive, have a more precise test done.
Only if this test proves positive should a course of antibiotic therapy begin.
Expect some symptoms to linger up to three months. No further antibiotic treatment is necessary.
His article suggests that treating a symptomatic patient with a negative Lyme test with antibiotics, may be more harmful than treating Lyme disease based on a single positive test and late stage symptoms.
It is clear that the Yale perspective on diagnosing Lyme disease is that late stage Lyme symptoms, including a swollen knee and Bell's Palsy, do not warrant antibiotic treatment despite a positive ELISA test!
It is suggested that delaying treatment in a
symptomatic Lyme patient with these late stage symptoms is better than risking antibiotics.
The statement from the second paragraph tells us the
intentions, "Only if this [second] test proves positive should a course of antibiotic therapy begin."
This statement tells us that Yale puts more faith in serology tests than in a patient's symptoms.
Even symptoms that include an expanding EM rash after a known tick bite, a swollen knee, Bell's Palsy, and a positive blood test must all be ignored because antibiotics are costly and could cause side effects!
(Apparently no one told this to dermatologists who often prescribe tetracycline for acne for years at a time at a cost of about $10 a month.)
I have to ask: What motivates these doctors to deny treatment to a symptomatic patient who has a rash and a positive ELISA serology?
(For full article and reference see canlyme.com)
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What happens when a tick attaches?
This is the essence of the pathogenesis of Lyme disease:
if you understand this concept of infection, you begin to understand why the conservative viewpoint of Lyme is causing latent morbidity and mortality.
In several mammal studies in the late 1980s, it was shown in many species including dogs that within hours of tick attachment that the Lyme organism is with every beat of the heart circulating through the entire body.
The spirochete's motility allows it to position itself into the cracks and folds of a blood vessel wall.
Borrelia burgdorferi has a tropism or an attraction to attach to the endothelial cells lining blood vessels.
Once the bacteria has attached, it traps tissue plasminogen that converts to plasmin and this begins the process of inflammation.
This irritation causes the endothelial cells to release digestive enzymes; such as,
basement membrane laminose, hyaluronidase, lipases, proteases.
White blood cells join in at the site releasing Metal-Matrix- Protease that facilitates cell penetration, and Tumor Necrosis Factor Alpha, and Il-1, Il-6 and TGF beta, all which play a role in cell communications and begin inflammatory cascades to begin.
The net result is within 24-48 hours we can measure the breakdown of the blood-brain-barrier in dogs that peaks at 48 hours and lasts for up to 14 days!
So are we really going to say that a tick has to be attached 48 hours?
This animal model suggests that the infection is potentially already established within the brain.
This study was done by tagging normal blood albumin with radioactive Iodine and tracking it into the CSF of the dogs.
(1989 Immunological Methods of Borreliosis Cold Spring Harbor).
If the Borrelia bacteria, which as a family has been known to be neurogenic and deadly since 1910, can penetrate blood vessels, then why do physicians who should know better still make public statements in the media that Lyme disease is not transmitted transplacentally to the fetus during pregnancy.
Nine published fetal autopsies since 1987 suggest otherwise, so what is their agenda for pretending to be ignorant of the facts?
END of Part 1 of LYME on the Brain by Tom Grier
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The above is posted by permission of Tom Grier the author. Tom requested that I make available the supporting references, these total over 100 pages. I can't seem to add links to this post but should anyone wish these references I will e mail them with attachments so contact me, my e mail can be found in my profile in the right hand column of this blog.
Thanks to Madison Area Lyme Support Group for posting here
and thanks to Betty G for contacting me with details on MD Junction here
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