Saturday 28 June 2014

CDC WEBINAR ON LYME DISEASE PERSISTENCE




On May 22, 2014 the Department of Health and Human Services - including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration - held a "Special Webinar on Lyme Disease and Borrelia Persistence" that proved to be very interesting. They invited folks to listen in and people could send in questions, too. There were some really great questions submitted.

Speaker lineup was:

Dr. Stephen Barthold, University of California, Davis
The Comparative Biology of Borrelia burgdorferi Persistence

Dr. Linda Bockenstedt, Yale School of Medicine
Design of Animal Studies to Assess Borrelia burgdorferi Persistence

Dr. Monica Embers, Tulane University
Studies of B. burgdorferi Persistence in the Nonhuman Primate

Dr. Adriana Marques, NIH, NIAID
Searching for Persistence of Infection in Lyme disease

Dr. Linden Hu, Tufts University
Borrelia burgdorferi Persistence: Consensus and Controversy – where do we go from here?

If you missed it, here are links to the transcript and the coordinating slides:

http://www.cdc.gov/lyme/pdfs/PersistenceWebinarSlides.pdf

http://www.cdc.gov/lyme/pdfs/PersistenceTranscript.pdf


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Lyme disease


Ear­lier this year, the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion pro­jected 
the number of undi­ag­nosed cases of Lyme dis­ease to be 10-​​fold higher than
pre­vi­ously believed. Of the newly iden­ti­fied 300,000 people infected each 
year, between 30,000 and 60,000 fall into the cat­e­gory of having chronic 
Lyme, where symp­toms per­sist despite zero evi­dence that the pathogen 
remains in their bodies. With the sup­port of a Lyme Research Alliance grant, 
Uni­ver­sity Dis­tin­guished Pro­fessor of Biology Kim Lewis in the
Col­lege of Sci­ence is exploring alter­na­tive approaches to curing chronic 
Lyme dis­ease. We asked him to explain his research goals and why now is 
the per­fect time to find a cure.
- See more at: http://www.northeastern.edu/news/2014/04/lewis-3qs/ 



Sunday 1 June 2014

LYME DISEASE - PATHWAY- PUBLIC HEALTH ENGLAND. TESTING PROBLEMS - PROF PERRONNE

PUBLIC HEALTH ENGLAND - intend reviewing their Guidance on Lyme disease as discussed at a meeting in October an earlier post here 

PHE have made a start by publishing a -

Suggested referral pathway for patients with symptoms related to Lyme disease 
http://www.hpa.org.uk/webc/HPAwebFile/HPAweb_C/1317141297288

Some useful progress has been made provided doctors follow this guidance.

PHE have worked with charity Lyme Disease Action in producing this pathway and LDA discuss this here 

This may be helpful for patients outside the UK too.




The Norvect Conference sounds to have been very successful a number of slides were posted on Twitter so for Twitter users #Norvect will find the tweets. My understanding is that videos of the conference will be available. 



Prof. Christian Perronne who presented at Norvect just recently published a paper 

Lyme and associated tick-borne diseases: global challenges in the context of a public health threat. Running title: Global challenges of Lyme disease


This is an excellent paper discussing various problems with testing here 



May was Worldwide Lyme Disease Awareness month UK website here 

Alongside these Worldwide protest was a Protest outside the IDSA headquarters in US -this was reported on by Jessica Bernstein Truth out here

Irate Lyme Disease Patients Storm "Dinner Party" at IDSA Headquarters


An excellent well written article but also some rather interesting and informative comments on that article.


We really need the media to do so much more to bring this disease into the forefront although it was good to see The Daily Mail picked up on this - here 

The bacteria that has been around longer than humans: Lyme disease discovered in 15 million year old ticks

sometimes the devil is in the detail and often overlooked - Poinar said -
'They can carry bacteria that cause a wide range of diseases, affect many different animal species, and often are not even understood or recognized by doctors.
'It’s likely that many ailments in human history for which doctors had no explanation have been caused by tick-borne disease.'

Dr Horowitz was in an recent radio program with Andy Abrahams-Wilson Documentary film maker of  Under our Skin  this is the link to the program here during the interview the CDC figures for Lyme Disease were discussed - this year CDC upped their figures to 300000 a year but recently Yale  released further information and Dr Horowitz says this could mean that between 2 and 3 million people could actually be infected with Lyme Disease a year. Not really a surprise as a couple of years ago Germany reported 1 million cases for Lyme Disease a year here .

Also this month - 

LYME DISEASE A SILENT EPIDEMIC PRODUCED BY FRANCE 5 PUBLIC NETWORK AND GRAND ANGLE DIRECTED BY CHANTAL PERRIN


I will let the reader draw their own conclusions from all the above, which are only a few of the many interesting things I read about related to Lyme Disease, to read more follow me on Facebook which is proving to be a useful place to hear about emerging developments.