1 The Friday Four

In this week's Friday Four, we'll look at how some bacteria avoid antibiotics by shutting down and hiding until it's safe to come out again,  students who go bacteriophage hunting,  disrupting bacteria's communication or quorum sensing in future antibacterial treatments,  tests which use bacteria's scent to detect not only their presence but species, strain, and their antibiotic resistance profile. CO message to readers: The Friday Four postings will be on hiatus for at least the month of May during Lyme Awareness Month. 1) 'Going...

Read More

4 Top 10 Tips For Doing Your Own Lyme Disease Research

Here are my top 10 tips to share for doing your own Lyme disease research. Pretty simple and straightforward - and if you have any to add, please share in comments below. 1) Use the scientific, Latin terms for everything. You can use common terms, too, but Latin will give you more results and more specific results. Examples: Instead of "Lyme disease" use "Borreliosis". Instead of "Neuro Lyme" use "neuroborreliosis". Instead of "Lyme bacteria" or "infection" use "Borrelia burgdorferi". 2) Find out which terms microbiologists and scientific...

Read More

0 IOM Summary Report: Neuroborreliosis Notes #2

This is Part 2 of part 1, IOM Summary Report: Neuroborreliosis Notes... (Read that first...) After Dr. Stephen Barthold's presentation, the following discussion came up: "Another participant questioned how neurologic symptoms occur if the bacterium is just in collagen,even if it is associated with neural tissue. Barthold noted that mice do not get central nervous system disease, possibly because they don’t have much connective tissue in their brain. However, central nervous system disease is seen in larger mammalian species that have more collagen...

Read More

0 IOM Summary Report: Neuroborreliosis Notes

Well, I said in recent comments that I was going to write my own summary of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) tickborne diseases workshop, but then I thought better of it: This report is a whopping 485 pages. I don't have the focus required to get through the entire thing in one sitting, and it would take me a long time to write up a comprehensive summary that hit on what others may want to hear. Besides, from the patient perspective, the big bullet points about how well the workshop went in terms of advocacy and awareness and the follow-up summary...

Read More

0 Exercise: A Better Lyme Disease Case Defintion

CDC painting by numbers: The numbers need to represent reality - actual cases are much higher than those reported to the CDC.   Since many patients do not like the case surveillance definition for Lyme disease, I have an exercise for my readers. I'm going to provide you with a case definition for Lyme Disease, and see what you have to say about it. Do you think it is better than the current CDC case definition? Or worse? Why or why not? What do you think needs to change, and how would you change it? What do you think is missing? What...

Read More

0 The Friday Four

In this week's Friday Four, we'll look at antimalarial trees that are threatened with extinction but may yet be saved to make natural medicine, how our own bacteria use immune cells to help save us from bad infections, a six-fold risk of death from C. diff in patients with IBD, and genetically engineering mosquitoes so that they have less ability to spread disease. 1) Antimalarial trees in East Africa threatened with extinction Source link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110420211758.htm Olea europaea Africana - African...

Read More

0 Phage Therapy and Borrelia burgdorferi

EDITED February 27, 2012 to include information on specific phages of B. burgdoferi. Earlier this week, we discussed the use of phage therapy - the medical use of viruses found in nature that kill bacteria. Phage therapy has been a part of regular medical treatment in Eastern Europe for over 85 years, but most of the research published has been in the Russian and Georgian languages since the primary former Soviet institution for the research and collection of a huge phage library has been in Tblisi, Georgia. Eliava Institute of Tblisi,...

Read More

34 News: Institute of Medicine Releases Lyme Disease Workshop Summaries

Source link: http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2011/Critical-Needs-and-Gaps-in-Understanding-Prevention-Amelioration-and-Resolution-of-Lyme-and-Other-Tick-Borne-Diseases.aspx?utm_medium=etmail&utm_source=Institute+of+Medicine&utm_campaign=04.20.11+Report+-+Lyme+Disease+%26+Other+Tick-Borne+Diseases&utm_content=New+Reports&utm_term=Media To read the Workshop Summaries, click on the link at the top and look in the righthand column - you'll see gray buttons that say "Download Report" or "Read Report Online For Free". If you want to...

Read More