FACT VERSUS OPINIONS - LYME DISEASE

Thomas Grier Executive Director
Dr. Paul H Duray Pathology Research
902 Grand View Ave
Duluth MN 55812
(218)728-3914

TO: Editors of Arts and Patient magazine

Dear Editors: I am writing to express a concern about the article you recently published, written by Professor Jan Keppel Hesselink. The article was a position paper about how patients and the lay-public have exaggerated concerns or misrepresented the seriousness of Lyme disease and modern vaccines.

As someone who has been involved with Lyme disease and Lyme disease research since 1990, I have concerns about academics who express strong opinions on this subject, but offer little or no scientific support or research of their own to support that patients are trying to influence medicine in a negative direction.

Since 1991 I have fought for pathology based Lyme disease research to put certain myths and misinformation about Lyme-Borreliosis to rest. For over 25 years the lay-public has been told facts about Lyme disease that quite frankly are not true and were never true. Many of these untrue facts are still being propagated by major physician groups and medical institutions; but lets look at the facts from a position of human pathology. Then decide who is misleading whom?

We were told that only the Ixodes dammini tick could carry Lyme disease and that it was only found in the NE USA therefore Lyme disease was only in the NE USA. The truth is there never was an Ixodes dammini tick, Dr. Andrew Spielman of Harvard misidentified the Black Legged tick which is found throughout North America and several close cousins of this tick all carry the Lyme spirochete and B. burgdorferi is found all through the Northern Hemisphere.

We were told that Borrelia burgdorferi was never intracellular. In truth Lyme disease is very much an intracellular disease and I have attached our own research photos to support that Lyme disease enters the brain and then enter both glial cells and human neurons. We urge every country to do human-brain autopsies as we have done, to see the whole truth of this disease.

We were told for over two decades that Lyme disease is not transferred from mother to fetus. (2006 Dr. Gary Wormser Yale in Under Our Skin documentary.) Once again we have the pathology evidence from 1989 of eight fetal autopsies showing Borrelia in the umbilical fluid, in the placenta, and in almost every fetal organ at necrotopsy. (See attach images)

What else did they get wrong? (When I say they I generally mean in my opinion that the misinformation about Lyme was most damaging from those that had the most influence on the Medical Community which includes the CDC, Yale, SUNY, Harvard and Mayo Clinic, the ACP and the IDSA)

Another untrue truth we were told was that only one species of Borrelia causes Lyme disease. Did they learn nothing from Relapsing Fevers? Borrelia changes and evolves like no other bacteria. It is constantly changing and evolving. We now have 12 species that cause Lyme disease and several species that we call Lyme-Like.

Another non-fact is that we were told that there was only one reservoir host – the white footed mouse. Of course now we know many rodents and birds are carriers of the disease and transmit it to feeding ticks. The range of these animals is far beyond the NE USA where we were told was the only place Lyme disease could exist.

In the Yale medical Report by Marc Voortman it says that patients with a positive ELISA test but a negative western blot can ignore symptoms like a bull’s-eye rash, Bell’s Palsy, and swollen joints and no treatment is necessary, but if the Western Blot test is positive you can treat up-to 2 weeks with doxycycline. I have attached pathological proof that two weeks is not sufficient for late Lyme symptoms.

The list of misinformation shows that the medical experts from the very discovery of this disease got over a dozen major-critically important facts about Lyme Borreliosis completely wrong, and perpetrated misinformation long after pathology had proved them wrong.

The most damaging untruth about Lyme disease was the insistence that Lyme disease does not persist in the human body after antibiotic treatment.

Attached are photos from a patient that lives just a few miles from me. He was a logger who was sick for 30+ years. He was diagnosed with Lyme disease and treated with aggressive antibiotic combinations for over seven years. When he died we found both Borrelia burgdorferi and Borrelia miyamotoi in his brain, and we found live B.burgdorferi and B. mayoni in his testicle.

Lyme disease does persist. It gets into the brain and inside brain cells. (Attached pathology photos from brain autopsies) In addition we have cultured B. burgdorferi out of Alzheimer’s brains.

It is unfortunate to see a position paper like this in 2016 considering that this is the year that many major Universities are clamoring to be the first to publish that they have found an infectious etiology to Alzheimer’s disease, and Borreliosis is the front running contender as a brain pathogen. While we have been using pathology for over twenty-years to prove Borrelia and Alzheimer’s are related, others are just now waking up to the fact that having both a cause and a potential treatment for Alzheimers, is worthy of major recognition.

2016 is the year that the race for the Nobel Prize has begun in earnest, and the group that gets accepted recognition of Borrelia in human brain causes Alzheimer’s pathology will most likely win the prize. You will see papers by Harvard and other major Universities vying for the pole position to prove Alzheimer’s has an infectious etiology.

While others live in the past and criticize patients for their efforts to use pathology to prove their illness has been mismanaged, the medical community has moved on and accepted that the facts they once thought were true are now part of history, and that the Lyme patients were in fact more right than the experts.

Lyme disease persists in the brain, the serology tests are missing brain infections, pregnant mothers can transmit the disease to their unborn child, sexual transmission is likely now that we documented Borrelia in human testicles even after antibiotics, and Lyme disease is found through-out the Northern hemisphere caused by more than a dozen species of Borrelia and carried by many ticks, and Lyme disease can kill as it did in the New York man who had Borrelia in his heart.

So when a patient disagrees with their doctor and explains that they are still sick after treatment. Who is right? The doctor citing 30 year old dogma, or the patient that died and had a brain-autopsy done that revealed a persistent brain infection despite years of antibiotics?

Thomas M. Grier (Exec Director)

Dr. Paul H. Duray Pathology Research Foundation

To read further on the work done by The Dr.Paul H. Duray Pathology Research Foundation go to this link :- https://durayresearch.wordpress.com/about-2/7-provocative-findings-intro/