Copying entire article and breaking
up for us who have NEURO lyme and
can not read or comprehend long,
solid blocks of text.

The right column has come into my text
area so I'm making this shorter lines
to read what I have typed! Don't
know why this is happening of
overlapping areas; no area
to mark X to close that window!

uffda! BettyG, Iowa lyme activist
-----------------------------

Tick menagerie: Lyme isn't the only
disease you can get from a tick

By Pamela Weintraub

on February 28, 2009 - 10:24am

in Emerging Diseases

From the time National Institutes
of Health medical entomologist
Willy Burgdorfer first sliced open
deer ticks from Shelter Island
(off of Long Island) and studied
them under the microscope in his
Montana lab, he observed a glut
of microbes.

He traced just one of them--
B. burgdorferi, the spirochete
named after him-to the disease
studied in Connecticut and called
Lyme.

But right from the start he suspected
that as far as the patients went,
different organisms could be involved.

Sitting next to Burgdorfer in a
sun-drenched conference room at the
Rocky Mountain Laboratories, I
watched him remove from his ancient
briefcase a handwritten chart that
had withstood the test of time.

Yellowed and creased, the paper
listed microbes, six in all.

"These," he told me, "are what I
found in the Shelter Island ticks."

He would not give me a copy, but he
let me look.

I saw the spirochete B. burgdorferi
on his chart, of course, but I also
observed an organism, larger than a
bacterium, called a nematode worm.

(The worm's potential for disease,
said Burgdorfer, was unknown.)

I took definite note, therefore,
when Richard Ostfeld, an animal
ecologist at the Institute for
Ecosystem Studies, in the Dutchess
County town of Millbrook, New York,
told me he'd found nematode worms
in deer ticks, too.

I paid even more attention when the
finding was confirmed in Connecticut
by University of New Haven
microbiologist Eva Sapi and
announced at the school's Lyme
symposium in 2007.

Neither scientist knew what to make
of the worms, nor that they'd been
observed by others before.

Whether nematode worms living in
ticks will ever be implicated in
human disease has yet to be seen.

But if they are, says Sapi, then
treating that infection could make
all the difference in the world for
a subset of patients who remain sick.

The take-home message is this:

Ticks that carry the pathogen of
Lyme disease harbor many other
organisms, some known to cause
serious human disease, others not
traced to human infection or still
undiscovered and unexplored.

Over the next few weeks, look to
this space for coverage of the
coinfections accompanying or mistaken
for the common epidemic disease called Lyme.

Pamela Weintraub is the author of
Cure Unknown:
Inside the Lyme Epidemic and senior
editor at Discover Magazine.
****************************

Pam, another good article this time
involving WORMS. I've been reading
alot from folks who DO have the worms
and have even taken photos of them and
sharing with other lyme patients to
open their minds that the WORMS have
made it harder to get well with chronic
lyme disease!

I look forward to your continued
series educating ALL of us on lyme
disease and co-infections!

Pam, thanks for a job well done! :)

Bettyg, Iowa lyme activist

Antifungal's are medication used for extensive infections, infections that are not cleared with a topical medicine, or infections in people with weakened immune systems.

Examples include itraconazole (Sporanox), terbinafine (Lamisil), fluconazole (Diflucan), ketoconazole (Nizoral), and griseofulvin (Grisactin). Some newer tinea infections are resistant to oral griseofulvin and require the use of oral itraconazole or terbinafine.

Many Lyme patients have been prescribed fluconazole (Diflucan) to reduce the risk of yeast infection from antibiotics-- as well as research showing that it can inhibit a specific enzyme that Lyme needs to reproduce.

Maybe those that take this are also being benefited by the antifungal killing of nematode worms.

It's unfortunate that physician and medical groups have not taken action on the many parasites that ticks carry and can transmit to humans.

As usual, your writing leaves us on the edge of our seats. In this entry, you describe how esteemed bacteriologist Willy Burgdorfer, PhD at NIH Rocky Mountain Laboratories took out a list he made of organism he observed within Shelter Island ticks. Yes, the presence of a nematode is highly provocative. But before we go onto that, what were the other four?

Thank you for your continued publication of thoughtful and thought-provoking articles!

Lynn Shepler MD JD

Once again Pam, I am so grateful for your work!

I am one of the chronically ill from this disease. I do well on an antibiotic and antifungal cocktail, but decline into oblivion when these meds are stopped.

There is something almost encouraging to hear that there are other microbes in the tick that may be the link to the chronicity of the disease in my case, because knowledge usually leads to treatment down the line.

I know of other Lyme patients who have had real improvement on Alinia, a strong antiparasite med. Another clue perhaps.

I had a wish when I finished your recently published book... I know that you probably have REEMS of research and interviews that you were unable to fit into a book for average public consumption. I wish I could read it all!!!!It's one of the reasons I watch your blog closely - I am always hungry for more information extracted from your mountain of knowledge and experience!

Thank you so much Pam,

Theresa

Ms Weintraub- Even though I think I have read everything about Lyme I keep learning more from your articles. Thank you mucho. Have you have checked out wikipedia's Lyme article lately? Too too many people use this website as their key source of information and end up so terribly misinformed.

Ms. Weintraub hit on an emerging theme that is actually part of the picture for all of microbiology - that scientist's know very little about which pathogens cause disease, not just mortality, and that new forces are being discovered all the time. It is unfortunate that these promising areas are often severely underfunded.

Questions of latency, reactivation, and new tests designed to ferret these culprits out and elicit evidence of the damage they wreak are all part of the picture.

As far as as 19th century bacteriologist Robert Koch's findings go, scientists are now finding that one pathogen may cause many different diseases OR many different pathogens may cause the same or overlapping diseases.
Read more about Koch here: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/contagion/koch.html

Also part of the picture is evidence that many microbes and toxins may actually be the sustaining forces of chronic disease as well as possible lifestyle factors.

Although he doesn't work specifically with Lyme Disease, readers may find Vincent Racaniello Ph.D., Professor of Microbiology at Columbia University Medical Center, blog of interest as he explores many different, but essentially relevant areas in virology. He also twitters and does podcasts.
http://www.virology.ws/

you just scared me with the above facts ;-)
anyways thanks for informing us about it.

I've had Lyme since Jan 1989 (at least I can trace symptons to then - it could be much longer). I wasn't diagnosed properly until Aug. 2005. I'm now at the end of 3 years of treatments for Babesia, Bartonella, and Borrelia burgdorferi. I'm struggling with getting the dead bugs out of my system, so still suffer aches and pains, but the brain fog and fatigue are mostly gone.

I am working with a naturopathis doctor who is not only well-versed in Lyme treatment, but knows the human body well enough that he's been able to prescribe treatments to help my body heal itself. I'm sure that my positive recovery has everything to do with the extra support of my body's systems while fighting this war.

If anyone out there is struggling and making no progress, I would recommend you call Gordon Medical Associates. They are located in Santa Rosa, CA and the phone is 707-575-5180. My doctor is Wayne Anderson.

I'm amazed beyond belief at my recovery so far, though I still have a long way to go.

This sounds eerily similar to my mother's situation. She had Lyme with a co-infection of Morgellons and probably Bartonella.

I wish all these researchers could research together!