LYME DISEASE THE WORST MEDICAL DISGRACE OF ALL TIME.

Dr. Joe Burrascano talking on ILADS video.

Listen and weep for all the thousands of patients that our Governments have deliberately turned their back on and left untreated, despite having tools available to diagnose and treat for Chronic Lyme Disease. The worst medical disgrace of all time.




History of Lyme Disease by Joseph J. Burrascano, Jr. MD. from ILADS on Vimeo.


"Back in 1990/1991 the NIH developed their famous Gold stain and believe it or not, for the first time in history and also the last time in history the government agreed with what we(ILADS) were doing.

So the Gold stain was a method for detecting Borrelia, they used Borrelia specific antibodies that were bound to gold nanoparticles and they incubated that with the specimen and using electron microscope they photographed the result and they could actually see the aggregates of gold  under the  electron microscope and that would be a positive test in fact some of them actually showed whole spirochetes coated with gold, I have some beautiful photographs of shadowed spirochetes on electron microscope from them.

So they did ( I had to look this up to give you the exact thing.) They discovered that Borrelia even when in their dormant state were secreting what they called bio products, membrane bound vesicles they called them blebs and some of them were empty but some of them contained Borrelia DNA. Now we know that these are plasma fragments that allow Borrelia to communicate one to the other they also secreted what they called an S layer the letter S , S stands for slyme and the terminology today S is what a bacteria produces to make a biofilm. So there it was back in 1990 agreeing with what Alan MacDonald said in 1985- Borrelia do make biofilms. So here they found it.

So what did NIH do with this gold stain, well first they studied in animals, they studied dogs and mice and of course ticks. They found that in infected animals they could detect these gold stained spirochetes in the bladder, heart, brain, liver and spleen and blood of these infected animals, urine and tears as well as in the ticks themselves. Em! and then they started to do studies in humans and doctor Ken Liegner, myself, Paul Lavoie, Dorothy Pietrucha and others all contributed to that, a total of 73 patients were studied and again we had samples of tears, totally 50 samples of tears were collected - they found Borrelia in 47 or 48 samples of those 50 tears, that's how amazingly sensitive this test was.

With mouse urine they could dilute it 10 fold and still get a positive test, the test was 100% specific for Lyme borrelia. It did not pick up Relapsing fever Borrelia or Leptospira or other spirochetes that they tested, they did a lot of negative controls in animals and humans and never had a false positive, so it is a really solid test.

So then they got patient specimens from us, there were 73 patients these were all chronic Lyme patients whose treatments were ranged from many months upto 3 years and the mean duration of treatment was 13 1/2 months and 53% of these patients were still spilling living Borrelia antigens, these bio products that they could see. The other thing that they found, if you tested people who were still symptomatic -ok-em- and then you stopped the antibiotics and let at least 3 or 4 weeks go by and then tested them 100% were positive for Lyme. Exactly what I found in my studies five years earlier with IV therapy, if someone is still symptomatic when treatment ends and you let several weeks go by, by culture and this gold stain you can show they are still spilling Lyme living organisms. That's pretty cool.

So what ever happened to this great Gold stain - you know what, Nothing! When this whole thing came out the NIH stopped the funding for the gold stain, they made them close the whole thing down and never again did they ask front line Lyme doctors to contribute specimens to their studies. So there's some politics one more time."

https://www.ilads.org/dr-burrascano-happy-holidays/?fbclid=IwAR1f5tiputP9shjUtJeeOE5q14QSrZ4e3j8J4t6SpTKywrojpFdOi8EcBCQ

The above extract starts at 27.45 mins but listen to the whole presentation.

International Lyme and Associated Diseases ILADS website can be found - 
https://www.ilads.org/ 

LYME DISEASE LESSONS NEEDED FOR INFECTIOUS DISEASES SOCIETY OF IRELAND AND MANY OTHER DOCTORS.

On November 28th, 2018, the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health, heard evidence from patients, patient advocates and professionals about Lyme disease. The Infectious Disease Society of Ireland (IDSI), submitted a statement authored by twenty eight of its members.

 Vector-borne Infection - Research, Analysis, Strategy (VIRAS) has written an excellent and detailed response to the IDSI challenging many points, this can be viewed at -

http://counsellingme.com/VIRAS/VIRAS_response_to_IDSI.html?fbclid=IwAR0nqSTyYa9pG-NWk3n506AgX6JpXZUCEB2qH_TVievKKyqtHzuOq_5qOe0

A copy of the IDSI statement 'had not been provided to Dr John Lambert, who gave evidence in person at the hearing, even though he is a member of the IDSI. Dr Lambert is knowledgeable and experienced regarding Lyme borreliosis and its coinfections, having had years of first-hand experience in diagnosing and treating patients. This exclusion was discourteous - to put it mildly. 

Before reading from sections of the IDSI statement during the hearing, Senator Colm Burke remarked, “Other than the Chairperson, none of us are qualified medical practitioners, so we have to rely on advice given to us by medical practitioners.”

 (Video: https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/oireachtas-tv/video-archive/committees/2131/?fbclid=IwAR2FzW3-pqsCL_Jkzytcv_fA_abMfIG9RpXO8IIl_xriwfvRAt90NlwLwGc at 1:49:30) 

This statement had implications for those providing evidence to the committee, especially those who are ‘qualified medical practitioners’. Evidence should provide government committees with information which they can weigh to inform policy and professional witnesses have an obligation to give evidence which is reliable and balanced. 

The IDSI statement showed that the authors had adopted wholesale, the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA) position on Lyme disease. The IDSI statement endorsed the outdated IDSA guidelines and repeated IDSA opinions on important aspects of the disease and patient care. 

When second-hand opinions are submitted as evidence, the onus to verify the reliability of those opinions rests with the witnesses. As Senator Burke’s comment made clear, it was not for the committee to discern the veracity of the evidence because, “we have to rely on advice given to us by medical practitioners”. Therefore the twenty eight authors of the IDSI statement were severally responsible for verifying the opinions which they submitted as evidence to the committee.

The following quotes are from the IDSI Statement to the Health Committee which were presented as bullet-points in the Introduction section of the document.
 “We seek to ensure that all patients under our care, including those with Lyme disease, receive the highest quality of evidence based care” 

“Evidence based care” does not exist for Lyme borreliosis. The National Institute for Clinical and Care Excellence (NICE – England) guideline for Lyme disease was published on April 11th 2018. The development of the guideline included a comprehensive literature review. Published research was rated according to its quality and risk of bias. NICE found that almost every piece of evidence was of ‘low’ or ‘very low quality’ or at ‘high’ or ‘very high’ risk of bias. NICE found no good quality evidence to inform any aspect of patient care. See Table 1 for the source and ratings of evidence used for various sections of the guideline.
It is misleading for the authors of the IDSI statement to claim that they provide, “the highest quality of evidence based care”, because there is no good quality evidence available - not that NICE with all their resources could discover. In the absence of any good evidence, the NICE guideline committee made recommendations “Based on the experience and opinion of the Guideline Committee”. One problem with opinions is that they could be swayed by the influence of vested interests. These interests could include associations with  patent holders, vaccine developers, test-kit manufacturers and investors, research sponsors and funding, medical insurance and reinsurance companies. The value to interested groups in controlling the narrative and perceptions around Lyme borreliosis, could run into billions of dollars over time. In view of the interests involved, uncritical adoption of opinions which could be influenced by these sources would be a dereliction of the duty that doctors owe to their patients."



I don't propose to copy and paste the whole VIRAS response as the link to the original is provided above and below. It is full of very interesting points, with references, that are frequently overlooked or ignored by Infectious Diseases Consultants and doctors who are all too happy to parrot the outdated IDSA guidelines. One of those is the misuse of the term (PTLDS) Post Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome - who decides when testing is reliable, when treatment is sufficient, and whether patients are sick? are questions as patients we often ask.  

I was particularly pleased to read VIRAS response "We can assuage the IDSI’s concerns about “non-accredited diagnostics” because there is no such thing. It is laboratories which gain accreditation to perform a test, if they have demonstrated that they can manage the test materials and protocol properly. This does not validate or make any judgement about the quality or accuracy of a test – only the competency of the laboratory to follow procedures. 

On the topic of “unvalidated, exploratory diagnostics”, it appears that the authors of the IDSI statement are unaware that the two-tier (ELISA, Western Blot) test is not a validated diagnostic protocol and was not designed to be used as such. The two tier test is hopelessly insensitive. E.g., Cook and Puri (2017) report that two-tier Lyme borreliosis testing produces around 500 times more false-negative results than test protocols for HIV. The company which supplies test kits to the Lyme borreliosis Reference Laboratory for England, published figures showing that Two-tier testing had only 55.3% sensitivity for ‘all Lyme disease patients’ and it detected only 41% of culture-positive patients." (read on)  

VIRAS also propose a little research experiment the IDSI could do to try and solve some of the controversy.

http://counsellingme.com/VIRAS/VIRAS_response_to_IDSI.html?fbclid=IwAR0nqSTyYa9pG-NWk3n506AgX6JpXZUCEB2qH_TVievKKyqtHzuOq_5qOe0

BORRELIA AND BIOFILM - LYME DISEASE

The Emerging Role of Microbial Biofilm in Lyme Neuroborreliosis
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2018.01048/full?fbclid=IwAR07DmqiRuCZpUSOeFx9S1GZ8J-Y59JdRa4AVAywKS5kBPulXHPiF0CnjZk#B184

"LNB is the most dangerous manifestation of Lyme disease. Although the early antimicrobial treatment is effective in the majority of patients, persistent forms are relatively common. The mechanisms underlying chronic LNB and other persistent forms of Lyme are unknown. Patients who have late manifestations of LB generally show a slower response to therapy with incomplete resolution. Persistent Borrelia infection requires prolonged antimicrobial treatment, with limited and controversial clinical efficacy. Recent evidences suggest that the antibiotic resistance and the reoccurrence of LB are associated with biofilm-like aggregates, which allow Borrelia spp. to resist to adverse environmental conditions. Several promising FDA-approved drugs have been shown to have excellent anti-persister activity when used in combination while their use in monotherapy regimens showed a poor effectiveness. This notion should be taken into careful consideration for the clinical management of Lyme Disease in order to prevent long-term complications.

In preliminary studies by the clinical Biofilm Ring Test® (cBRT), we found that Borrelia is able to readily produce biofilm within 24–48 h. Diagnostic procedures such as the cBRT, which allow for a rapid biofilm measurement may represent very useful tools for clinical applications (222, 223), since the rapid identification of biofilm-producing Borrelia strains, may help identify forms of LB which are at risk of chronicity (224). Further, characterization of Borrelia biofilm as well as the ensuing inflammatory process will likely provide novel insight to better understand the mechanism(s) concurring to LNB pathogenesis and may offer new therapeutic targets for intervention."

A very useful study with many links to important research.