BIOFILMS = CHRONIC INFECTIONS: BORRELIA BIOFILMS = CHRONIC LYME DISEASE.

So New - A retrospective on Biofilms of Borrelia and future

Post by inmacdonald » July 24th, 2013, 5:22 pm

In the Original Release of UNDER OUR SKIN [ UOS]
MacDonald's parting remarks are about the exciting future of Biofilms of Borrelia. (earlier posting about Dr MacDonald from UOS here )
At the time of filming, we already had the proof in hand, but we had to get it Published.
We had to get it past an Editor in Chief of a Journal with good academic standing in the world of Medical publishing.
We knew that we would not succeed with the Journal of Infectious Disease
or Clinical Microbiology and infectious Disease or with the newsletter to the membership of the IDSA.

The most important Milestone happened in November 2012 with the long awaited publication of

the PLOS ONE article on In Vitro Biofilms of borrelia burgdorferi.

[We had long since discussed in video interviews, in the year 2006 , and in the film UOS that Biofilms would be the Next Big thing.]

It took 6 years of tedious and politically gut wrenching work to get

THE article into a Prestige journal, PLOS ONE,

The acceptance for the article to be published was, like some births, not an easy delivery.

The original manuscript reviews required mandatory revisions.
Non-negotiable revisions.
The most onerous of these was the directive by the Editorial staff to REMOVE any and All language from the manuscript which connected the significance of Biofilms of borrelia ..... to Human medicine, Human disease, and to Lyme disease ,in specific , and to attitudes toward the proper treatment of Lyme disease and related Borrelia infections.

These demands were acceded to.

Why would PhD reviewers be at all interested in MD type Stuff?

Here the existing politics provide an answer.

None of the 3 reviewers were IDSA aligned persons.
All of the Reviewers, from best that we could determine, were European Microbiologists with special life experience in Biofilm biology of other non-borrelia microbes.

The sticky wicket about biofilms is that Biofilms of the Infectious type are
ALWAYS a marker of CHRONIC INFECTION.

Chronic Lyme borreliosis was then , was in 2006, and is in 2013 a much disputed entity.

Allowing Biofilms of Borrelia to attain academic respectability , by allowing publication of the Sapi et al In Vitro Borrelia biofilm article, the conceptual link by a microscopic structure {biofilm of borrelia community}
overturned all of the objections to the impossibility of Chronic borreliosis
as a Validated Entity.

So , ....did we ask a good question,..... as the Nobel laureate Izzy Singer once remarked...?

Yes!

And So, the next "good question" was .....Are there borrelia biofilms in living organisms or,.....are borrelia biofilms just a Test tube curiosity?

Two weeks after the PLOS ONE publication of the Sapi biofilm In vitro Paper,
came the announcement from the Sapi Group in West Haven Conn at the University of New Haven, that INDEED, Borrelia biofilms were detected under the microscope in a human skin biopsy from Europe from a patient with cutaneous borreliosis.

And, Sapi's group started to look into the Tick gut, to see if Borrelia biofilms are there in the living tick, as a measure to maintain the borrelia through a period of starvation, before it bites its next human victim. This work has also been Paradigm Shifting.

Now to look ahead to the Paradigm shifts yet to come.

MacDonald has announced that the PLAQUES of Alzheimer's disease are Biofilm communities.
That is about as chronic and in the human Body and Disease associated and disease producing as any biofilm professional could ever want to have on a Resume.

How do we Attack and remove biofilms?
That is another tough question.

Biofilms are fortress like communities which are from inception designed to
survive all manner of attack, including high dose long term antibiotic therapies through IV lines surgically sewn into the veins of sick patients who require long term antibiotic therapy.

So Antibiotic Therapy is not a panacea for eliminating biofilms of any microbe
But,
Just before Dr. Bill Costerton passed away from Pancreatic cancer in 2012,
he recorded a video interview on You Tube. In that interview he discussed many things about biofilm biology. Costerton,as the author of many peer reviewed articles on biofilms of many species of microbes, was ideally situated to Editorialize about ALL THINGS BIOFILM>

One of the last topics which he introduced at the end of the video was the concept that Ultrasound energy , correctly administered to Test tube biofilm communities actually breaks up the protective Matrix [Green goo] and opens up the heretofore protected Bacteria to the action of antibiotics, which can then get to the bugs and kill them.

So there is more than a "vague new direction" for killing Biofilm infections.
Costerton has built us an 8 lane highway.

More about this later.

I made the promise in UOS that biofilms would be the Next Great Thing.
That promise has been kept, and more great things will accrue to Lyme borreliosis patients because of Basement laboratory investigations.

Best to you, as always,

Alan MacDonald MD  
July24,2013

website Alzheimerborreliosis

PS: This Week the Lancet Infectious Disease Journal 2013: 13:(8) :719-724hasa manuscript which discusses [b]Streptococcus Gallolyticus[/b] andCancer.
Strep Gallolyticus is a Biofilm former which is highly associated with
setting up its communities on the surface of Malignant Tumors and Premalignant tumors in the human Colon. Some of these biofilm communities send off Showers of the [b]Strep Gallo[/b] biofilm community into the bloodstream, and some of these microbial "emboli" infect the human Cardiac Valves causing Bacterail endocartitis of the Strep Gallo Type[Formerly Strep Bovis endocarditis]

Endocarditis is, and always has been, a BIOFILM infection of the human heart valves.
So a timely "so new" in the world of infectious disease, brought to you by
Biofilm [always chronic] Infections.
Think about it!