"... the depth of ignorance is staggering." Alasdair Crockett(1968-2006)
BIG NEWS! Over 1000 blogs on LymeBlog Congratulations to elr1227 for posting the 1000th blog on LymeBlog
YOU ARE NOT ALONE Tell Your Story
Start your own Lyme Web Log (LymeBlog)
If you have Lyme or are close to someone who does
Click Here to start a free LymeBlog journal
"When wealth determines access to the public forum, it causes distortions."
"To take just one of many examples, for the past several years , the need to eliminate the inheritance taxes on the wealthiest 1/100 of 1 percent of the families in America (the only taxpayers who are still subjected to it) has been treated as a much more important priority than the need to provide at least minimal access to health care for tens of millions of families who currently have no access to health care coverage at all." From "The Assault on Reason"
Talk Back to ABC News about Reforming U.S. Healthcare
ABC's Good Morning America wants to know what problems-- or solutions-- you may have for the U.S. healthcare system. Click Here
Talk back to them by sending your video or e-mail questions and comments and you just might get them aired on Good Morning America or ABC News Now! Click Here
Is your brain actually swelling, or does it just feel like it? If it's the marathon migraine thing you have going on right now, I'm right there with you. Did you recently "overdo it," too, is it the heat, or are you just in a bad part of the month? Hope you feel better soon.
Carol, as of now I'm still off the cat's claw. I am currently trying to determine just what, exactly, I need to be doing to maintain optimum health, with all things considered.
The biggest benefit I got from the cat's claw was increased cognitive clarity. I have been in a minor fog ever since I went off of it, and I find myself too mentally tired to take on a lot of what I'd like to be taking on right now. I enjoy writing, but as of late all that I get down, beyond online posting, just reads back as confused, incomplete, and uninspired, which is just frustrating because I've been at this point before and I know that the fog is responsible. I noticed that I have once again become more blunt and relatively apathetic in my online posting, which only adds to my booming popularity. You can call me "House," for the time being.... The cat's claw also decreased the severity and frequency of the fatigue, keeping me out of bed for a month or two straight without a "crash;" I have already crashed a few times, now, since going off the herb.
In the long run, it seemed to increase my large joint problems, however, as well as the nausea. Off the cat's claw, I'm getting the return of finger and toe swelling/joint pain, whereas on the cat's claw I seemed to get more knee blow-outs. My eyes are starting to give me a lot of problems again, too.
Going off the cat's claw, initially, was difficult. I don't know if my body had just become dependent on it or if the bacteria load was trying to increase suddenly because the "coast was clear," but I did notice after about two weeks (other than feeling foggy) that I was feeling better than I had in months. Right now I'm fighting the dull remnants of last night's migraine headache.
My hypothesis? I think that all of the months of cat's claw kept the bugs in remission (that the antibiotics started), and all of the other healthy stuff I was doing helped to build my immune system back up. When I went off the cat's claw the bugs came back out of hiding, only to be bombarded by my rehabilitated immune system. I think this ensuing battle significantly reduced my overall germ load, and what I'm experiencing right now is a combination of whatever lingering bacteria are still fighting it out, as well as a continued autoimmune reaction to various outer surface proteins put off by the bacteria ... I believe in molecular mimicry, but I also believe that the pathogens involved, or at least remnants of their nasty proteins, need to be actively present for the autoimmune response to perpetuate.
I'm just waiting things out, now, to see of what kind of outcome my body is capable. If the Bb win out, then obviously I'm right back at square one. If my body wins out, the Bb will go back into hiding and I'll only have to deal with the autoimmune effects of their ever-hibernating presence. I'm willing to see it through in the name of science. We'll see....
Research: Lyme Disease Bug Came From Europe Before Ice Age
European roots of Lyme disease bug revealed Welcome Trust
Researchers at the University of Bath have discovered that a bacterium that causes Lyme disease originated in Europe, rather than in North America as previously thought.
The bacterium responsible for Lyme disease, Borrelia burgdorferi, originated in America, or so researchers thought. Now, however, a team from the University of Bath has shown that this bug in fact came from Europe, originating from before the Ice Age.
By understanding the origins of the bacterium and how it has evolved so far researchers hope to be able to predict how it will continue to develop, and so find ways to prevent its spread.
Photo: CDC/ James Gathany; William Nicholson
The blacklegged tick Ixodes pacificus, a known vector for Borrelia burgdorferi, the pathogen responsible for Lyme disease
In the study, researchers from the University of Bath and colleagues from the UK and USA studied the evolutionary history of the bacteria by looking at the sequences of eight so-called 'housekeeping genes', which evolve very slowly. They analysed 64 different samples taken from infected humans and ticks in Europe and America.
In all, 33 different combinations of the housekeeping genes were found. The study's findings appear to show that Borrelia burgdorferi originated in Europe but that the species has been present in North America for a long time. The researchers suggest its re-emergence there in the 1970s occurred after the geographic territory of the tick that carries the bacteria expanded, for example through the restoration of woodland.
Lyme disease is a growing problem in Europe, Asia and - in particular - North America, where it is now the most common vector-borne disease. The disease was named after Old Lyme, Connecticut, the site of a number of cases in the 1970s. There is no vaccine for the infection, which can cause arthritis and problems with the nervous system and heart if left untreated.
People with Lyme: Lyme disease to be featured on ABC's Good Morning America Thursday
LymeBlog News Lexington, KY USA By LymeBlog News Staff
According to an announcement from Dr. Robert C. Bransfield, the ABC network show in the USA, Good Morning America, will be showing a news story on the Lyme disease controversy Thursday morning, July 3, 2008 between 7:30 and 8:30 AM EST.
Over the past few years the ABC network has carried a number of stories about Lyme disease including stories about affiliate reporters Noreen Turyn in Lynchburg, VA and Brooke Landau in San Diego, CA.
This most recent interest in Lyme disease coverage by ABC News seems to have been spurred by the recent release of the movie "Under Our Skin" and the release of the book "Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic" (St. Martin's Press) by science journalist Pamela Weintraub.
An interview with Dr. Bransfield was recorded by ABC earlier this week for the segment on Thursday.
Note:This segment was moved to the Friday morning show.
Unfortunately, several diseases out there still don’t have a cure. Most of them have symptoms which will affect people’s lives to a certain (sometimes extreme) degree. Some of them can be very annoying, crippling, or simply terrifying. Some of them, for example, are sarcoidosis, tinnitus, genital and oral herpes, asthma, myasthenia gravis, menopause, and so on. People with such conditions are especially vulnerable and more willing to be gullible, since they often feel that the medical world “fails them”.
Photo: lymediseasecured.com
60 Year Old Swinger Reveals
The Internet made available an amazing wealth of information about those conditions. However, a lot of people out there are in for the quick buck, at the expenses of those exhausted sufferers who are sometimes willing to believe anything.
This article will give you simple advice which will help to make it easy to find out if the information you are reading on the Internet is genuine or not.
Google is your friend
Google is a fantastic search engine. Unfortunately, it works well for everybody—including for those people who tend to provide information on “magic cures” for $19.95. On the other hand, Google is your best weapon to understand if you really can trust the information you find online. Google won’t decide for you. However, it will give you a chance to make an informed decision.
So, here is how to use Google as a weapon against untrustworthy sites.
Technique #1: text fingerprinting
Suppose you have genital herpes, and you find this site: http://www.genitalherpescured.com/. While the site doesn’t look extremely professional, it does give anybody with herpes at least some hope. Suppose that you want to find out if the site is genuine or not. The first step is to look for a sentence in the site’s content that is very unlikely to be in other sites out there.
In this case, I will take the sentence “60 Year Old Swinger Reveals”. This will be your “fingerprint”: something that distinguishes this particular page from others online.
Search this sentence in Google. It’s absolutely crucial that you search it with the speech marks around it.
Google fingerprinting in action
The results for “60 Year Old Swinger Reveals” are shown in this figure:
Here are the sites:
http://www.genitalherpescured.com/
http://sclerodermadefeated.com/
http://ganglioncystcure.com/
http://www.laryngitiscured.com/
Clicking on those sites will give you a very strong deja-vu effect: they all seem extremely similar, based on the same template. More disturbingly, the woman in the photo (who is supposed to be the author of the document) seems to change her name from one template to the other:
Photo: ganglioncystcure.com Here she is Amy Archer…
Photo: sclerodermadefeated.com …and here she is Maria Menendez!
Once you have found more sites, you can use other parts of the documents (which seem to stay the same) as your next fingerprint. For example, you could take “you are about to Learn the easy 3 Step” as your next fingerprint, and find:
http://www.hivescure.com/
From there, you will notice that the text at the top has changed: it now has “Sex Crazed 60 Year Old Reveals” etc. Using that as your fingerprint will reveal more sites:
http://www.lymediseasecured.com/
http://www.anemiadefeated.com/
http://www.menopausedefeated.com/
The list goes on and on. They all look incredibly alike, and there seem to be one of them for each annoying and hard-to-treat condition. This is a semi-complete list for ...
In the war of information on Lyme disease, patient activist groups have started from a marked disadvantage to the medical establishment in terms of visibility and credibility. That might be changing, and science journalist Pamela Weintraub's new book, "Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic" (St. Martin's Press), could be one reason.
Weintraub, a senior editor at Discover magazine, uses her family's protracted Lyme odyssey as the jumping off point for an exploration into the history, politics and, predominantly, the patient experience of the tick-borne disease.
In 1993 Weintraub and her family moved to woodsy Chappaqua, N.Y. Soon after, she writes, she, her husband and their two sons all developed persistent fatigue and joint pain that worsened over time. The hardest hit was her older son, who took a medical leave from high school and saw a slew of specialists before one diagnosed Lyme disease in 2000. An infectious-disease expert confirmed the diagnosis, then challenged it later when the boy failed to respond to standard antibiotic treatment.
Other patients she interviewed described similar frustrations.
Weintraub explains what she considers the failings of commercial tests for Lyme and attacks the divisiveness in the medical community that she says interferes with finding better treatment.
For 15 years, Pursifull says her joints felt like someone was searing them with a blow torch. Several years ago, she started to lose her memory and language comprehension. "There were times when my friends would talk to me and I couldn't even understand them," she says.
Doctors finally discovered she had Lyme disease, a bacterial infection passed on by ticks, specifically a small tick about the size of a pin known as a deer tick.
So small that Pursifull, and others, don't even realize when they have been bitten.
"If you miss it, it could be fifteen years down the road before you get treatment and get better," she says.
