HARD SCIENCE ON LYME: Straubinger’s New Study Shows How Lyme Bacteria survives

During his interview with NPR’s Terry Gross on Fresh Air, journalist Michael Specter got a key piece of information WRONG: that a tick must be attached for at least 36 hours before it can transmit infection.

Dr. Eva Sapi and colleagues have published an important study today, "Evaluation of in-vitro antibiotic susceptibility of different morphological forms of Borrelia burgdorferi". I have included the link to the article, which is available free of charge at Dove Press, at the end of this post and encourage you to read it. The study is broad ranging, but makes a significant contribution to Lyme research in a number of areas: culturing techniques, cyst and spirochete antibiotic susceptibility, and the role of biofilms in persistence.

I had to post this image and encourage anyone interested in biofilms to go visit the website that hosts this interactive introduction to biofilms. Some of you know that biofilms have been implicated in Lyme disease. Drs. McDonald and Sapi recently published on this topic. The gist of the matter is that biofilms may be one of the ways in which bacteria persist in the body. They can provide a protective covering that antibiotics cannot penetrate. It’s a pretty esoteric subject matter, but this website describing how they work is pretty down home. Give it a visit if you get a chance. And, kudos to the University of Montana for making this available to folks like us who just need simple explanations so we know how things work! The link is after the jump.

The organized medical community doesn’t believe in chronic Lyme disease, said Michael Specter in a recent interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, and he appears to buy into this myth, too. We do know that some people don’t get better after treatment, he said, but the term “chronic Lyme” is vague, Besides, it’s hard to say you have the disease if there’s no evidence of the disease, he said.

When journalist Michel Specter was interviewed by NPR’s Terry Gross on Fresh Air, he got a few things right, but he also repeated some of the inaccurate information he presented in his recent New Yorker article. That information came from the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA) propaganda mill.

It has long been known that ticks harbor Bartonella and that humans who have Lyme disease may also have Bartonellosis. However, the actual transmission of Bartonella from tick to host has not been demonstrated until a mouse study by Drs Reis and colleagues was published in May 2011. The study is available free on line for those interested. “This work represents the first in vivo demonstration of a Bartonella sp. transmission by ticks. It . . . corroborate[s] a prospect that ticks play a role in the natural cycles of some of the bartonellae including those pathogenic for humans. Consequently, bartonelleosis should be included in the differential diagnosis for patients exposed to tick bites.”