MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS AND LYME DISEASE?

Local Lyme Disease Researcher to Speak in Hermantown

For the past 20 years since he was diagnosed with a MS-like disorder and treated for Lyme disease, Duluth resident Tom Grier has taken a special interest in Lyme patients that present with symptoms similar to Multiple Sclerosis.

Mr. Grier’s interest in investigating his own disease goes far beyond what the average patient would do.

You see Mr. Grier created an organization that registers symptomatic patients for tissue collection and brain autopsies at the time of their death.

His main interest is to find formerly treated Lyme patients that have gone on to be diagnosed with either MS or dementia.

“Since 1975 when Lyme disease was first described in the medical literature, it has always been an assumption that the organism that causes Lyme disease mostly an arthritic disease and easily eradicated with the traditional and current treatment protocols of antibiotics.”

Explains Mr. Grier. “The truth is no serology test or spinal fluid test can accurately detect the sequestered infection within the human brain.

The only way to know for sure is to do brain autopsies, and look directly at the brain tissue with special dyes and stains.

Without special immune-antibody stains developed by the NIH, the bacteria would remain completely invisible under the microscope.’’

“Sadly no one is doing this kind of Lyme research; oddly the medical community seems to be strangely resistant to this kind of medical research and I’d like to know why? ” asks Mr. Grier.

“Pathology is far more definitive than assumptions, and much of our current understanding of Lyme is based on a very flimsy foundation of facts most of which turned out to be completely wrong.”

Something that Mr Grier points out in his talk are the ten facts about Lyme that the experts got wrong.

As examples, Mr. Grier cites that shortly after Lyme disease was first described in 1975 but before we knew what actually caused Lyme in 1981; that the public was told many things as absolute facts about Lyme disease that all turned out to be untrue.

Grier continues, “We were told by the experts of the time that Lyme was only transmitted by a new species of tick found in the NE USA (Ixodes dammini discovered by Andrew Spielman of Harvard) so Lyme was supposed to be a regional and isolated illness.

We were told it was mainly an arthritic disease and it turns out it can cause severe neurological damage.

We were told it was not transmitted transplacentally but several fetal autopsies have dispelled that myth.

We were told by some Lyme experts that the Lyme disease rash has to be the size of a basketball or it isn’t Lyme disease.

The truth is many Lyme rashes are only a few centimeters or not even seen.

We were told that the Lyme organism isn’t an intracellular organism which can help infections hide and remain dormant and safe from the immune system.

But as it turns out Lyme disease most definitely is an intracellular disease of the brain and we have local brain autopsies that prove this to be true despite their being treated aggressively with antibiotics.”

“The basis of our work is the idea that the bacteria enters the brain early in the infection and is trapped in brain tissue and even trapped inside individual brain neurons.

This happens after the protective barrier called the blood brain barrier is broken down by the infection in the first two weeks before the Lyme tests can even detect the infection.

Then after the infection has been cleared from the blood stream either by our immune system or by antibiotics, the blood brain barrier reseals itself weeks later trapping the infection within the brain.”

Mr. Grier explains that the end result is that the immune system stops making antibodies that the Lyme tests are looking for.

All our Lyme tests are indirect tests and have many many pitfalls.

The infection in the brain remains relatively silent for years or even decades until it results in an MS-like condition.

Explains Mr. Grier, “It isn’t a matter of if this happens because we already have individual pathologies that reveal this to be true.

Following these patients for years doing frequent brain MRIs reveals long-term treatment results in a shrinking of the white-matter lesions that look similar to MS lesions in the brain.

The question is how often is it occurring and what kind of treatment strategies do we need to create to detect brain involvement earlier, and how do we best treat longstanding spirochetal infections within the human brain?”

One of the reasons Mr. Grier has decided to do this talk in Hermantown was because of a Lyme disease documentary being filmed in Twig MN by local Duluth videographer Ben Barneveld who uncovered numerous disabled patients in the local area with a history of Lyme disease.

Unexpectedly a large percentage of these treated Lyme patients progressed on after treatment to having such conditions as:

MS, ALS, Parkinson’s, Rheumatoid Arthritis, and enlarged hearts.

Most of these patients only became aware that their neighbors were also sick like themselves, after local Lyme patients organized a showing of a Lyme disease documentary at the Twig town hall.

Now several of those patients from the Twig-Hermantown area have since registered for brain autopsies and have authorized their remains for Lyme disease research.

The lecture is titled: “Lyme On The Brain” and is a talk based almost entirely on autopsy data and pathology.

Mr. Grier’s lecture is

FREE and open  to the general public

Saturday, April 28th

10 AM

Grace Lutheran Church

5600 Miller Trunk Highway

HERMANTOWN, MINN.

All questions should be directed to

donatebrain@gmail.com

Tom Grier 218-728-3914

2000 (Poland): Lyme borreliosis and Multiple sclerosis: Any Connection? PDF here 

 

A Seroepidemic study. Ann Agric Environ Med. issue 7, 141-143

Synopsis: 

10 out of 26 MS patients tested positive for Lyme borreliosis. Notes how it is virtually impossible to make a distinction between late stage Lyme disease and Multiple sclerosis, not even with MRI. Diagnosis of MS vs. late stage neuroborreliosis are guesswork – there are no reliable tests for either. Conclusion: Multiple sclerosis may often be associated with Borrelia infection.

Ann Agric Environ Med. 2000;7(2):141-3.

Lyme borreliosis and multiple sclerosis: any connection? A seroepidemic study.

Chmielewska-Badora J, Cisak E, Dutkiewicz J.

Source

Department of Occupational Biohazards, Institute of Agricultural Medicine, Jaczewskiego 2, 20-090 Lublin, Poland.

Abstract

A total of 769 adult neurological patients hospitalised in clinics and hospitals situated in the Lublin region (eastern Poland) were examined during the years 1997-2000 with ELISA test for the presence of anti-Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato antibodies. A statististically significant (p=0.0422) relationship was found between the clinically confirmed diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and the positive serologic reaction with Borrelia antigen. Ten out 26 patients with multiple sclerosis (38.5%) showed positive serologic reaction to Borrelia, whereas among the total number of examined neurological patients the frequency of positive findings was twice as low (19.4%). The result suggests that multiple sclerosis may be often associated with Borrelia infection

PMID:

 

11153045

 

[PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] 

Free full text

'What is interesting here Adam is that they were not looking for MS, they gave ELISA tests to 769 neurologically impaired patients over a 

3 year period and the ones that tested positive for Lyme was only 26 patients but 1/3 of the time they were  MS patients from that group of 769

That is a high correlation considering the 50 % failure rate of ELISA tests.'