TIGECYCLINE

My illness of 6 1/2 years was diagnosed as Fibromyalgia, ME/CFS, Arthritis, Muscle weakness, Polymyalgia Rheumatica and then finally Lyme Disease. On long term antibiotics all my symptoms got better.

Many of the Lyme Disease patients I am in touch with suffer serious neurological symptoms, I was lucky to have just a few Peripheral Neuropathies.

Tygecycline has been much talked about of late as an antibiotic for the treatment of Lyme Disease.

Here blog Spirochetes Unwound posts an interesting discussion on Barthold's very useful study
http://spirochetesunwound.blogspot.com/2010/03/tigecycline-fails-to-eradicate.html

Would prolonging antibiotic treatment eventually eliminate the spirochetes? Curiously, tigecycline was administered to the mice for only 10 days.

Still so many questions.

In the Loop recently posted about the Margulis and Brorsons' study
http://www.umass.edu/loop/talkingpoints/articles/99534.php

What the Brorsons’ work shows is that, unlike other antibiotics, Tygecycline administered at the correct dosage and timing destroys the bacterium even when it has protected itself in this quiescent stage. Other antibiotics, if they do anything at all, simply cause B. burgdorferi to enter its RB propagule state and wait out the treatment. “Tigecycline is, so far, the only known antibiotic that destroys the Lyme disease spirochete in both the growing and the quiescent RB stages of its life history” Margulis notes.

If you enter Brorson in the search in my right hand column you will find I have posted before about their research but I thought these latest articles very interesting.

For an infection that IDSA says is sooo simple to cure on a couple of weeks antibiotics there's an awful lot of research articles proving it is a far more complex bacteria than IDSA or our health authorities will acknowledge.

It is nearly two years since IDSA agreed to review their guidelines and still no result.

How many thousands of patients Worldwide have been infected in those two years and refused adequate treatment?

How many thousands of patients Worldwide have never been properly assessed to see if it could be Lyme Disease and continue to struggle with chronic illness when simple antibiotics could help their condition?

How lucky was I to have two very pioneering doctors who have successfully treated me.