posted
I saw this on a yahoo group today: thanks to Kris Newby for getting the original info via her FOI requests, and to Elena Cook for her insightful analysis!
CDC's Dr. Barbara Johnson and Dr. Allen Steere Conspired to Bury Results Showing Unreliability of Lyme Testing
by Elena Cook 3 March 2014
Dr. Barbara Johnson, leading policy-maker on Lyme Disease at the US Center for Disease Control (CDC), and Dr. Allen Steere, an officer of the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service whose views have dominated Lyme Disease medicine since he first "discovered" * the disease in the 1970's, conspired together in 2007 to bury experimental results which, in Steere's own words, might make some people "conclude that two-tier testing is not that reliable".
Those familiar with the controversies surrounding Lyme Disease will be aware that both Dr Johnson and Dr. Steere have for years maintained that Lyme Disease is over-diagnosed, easily-cured for the most part with short courses of antibiotics, and that serious chronic brain disease virtually never occurs in treated people.
Against this is a raft of evidence showing that the Borrelia spirochaetes which cause Lyme have been recovered from the tissues, including the brain, of chronically ill people, despite treatment.
The two-tier testing method imposed by CDC and other government-backed health agencies involves the ELISA test as first tier. This so-called "screening test" for antibodies is notoriously poor at detecting Lyme.
However, only those positive on the ELISA ever go on to receive the second tier antibody test, the Immunoblot or western blot. There are a great number of factors which could cause a patient to test negative using this regime, despite the presence of infection with Borrelia.
The extracts below derive from email correspondence released in response to a FOIA request by Kris Newby. ** All boldface and some additional spacing in the text is mine.
"From: Steere, Allen C., M.D. Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 1:01 PM To: Johnson, Barbara J. (CDC/CCID/NCZVED) Subject: Serology Manuscript
Dear Barbara,
It was good to see you and have the opportunity to talk at the recent Banbury conference....
I have attached two tables. One gives summary data about the results of the prospective serologic study based on our data (Table 1) and the other (Table 1a) gives the summary results of your data....
Although the biggest discrepancy is in IgM testing, the frequency of positive results in every category is less in your testing than in ours. I think that this is particularly problematic as it relates to the early disseminated infection (neurologic and cardiac disease) and late disseminated infection (arthritis) groups.
In your testing, the frequency of IgG positivity is on the low side in each of these groups. In contrast, in our prospective testing, these patients had positive results.
We have postulated that this may have resulted from some degrading of the sera with shipping and with time.
However, this is only one explanation that one would have to give in a manuscript. I am worried that some people would conclude that two-tier testing is not that reliable, which is not the message that we would want to give. Therefore, I would propose that we would go back to the plan in which we simply report the prospective study results from my laboratory.
Please let me know what you think.
Allen"
From: Johnson, Barbara J. (CDC/CCID/NCZVED) Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 6:06 PM To: Steere, Allen C., M.D. Subject: RE: Serology manuscript
Dear Allen,
It was good to see you, too, at Banbury!
After (re)reviewing the data from the prospective study, I agree with your assessment. The best evidence of the performance of two-tiered testing (and a C6 assay) are the data that were acquired in real time.
These data are the ones that are most relevant to clinicians. Since I am not able to dissect the effects of time, shipping, storage here, and our performance of the tests, we would confuse the field by showing these results side-by-side. If we had a clean story to tell of differences between our labs, I would not hesitate to publish the results. But unfortunately, we do not.
Since Banbur
****text here was censored before release under FOIA****
I should be able to send a draft summary of our Banbury discussions fairly soon.
Warm regards, Barbara
Barbara J.B. Johnson Ph.D."
**************************************************************************************************************************** Ms. Newby was kept waiting five years for the FOIA material, even though regulations state that it should be provided within a month. When it finally arrived, well over 1000 pages had been censored.
For more information on the FOIA documents, please see:
* Although Dr. Steere is often lauded as the "discoverer" of Lyme Disease, many familiar aspects of the disease had actually been known in Europe for a century or more. What is not clear, however, is whether the Lyme Disease afflicting people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was as virulent as it is today. It is a historical fact that the Borrelia genus of bacteria was researched as a bioweapon since at least as far back as the Second World War era.
**Kris Newby, as many of you will know, is the executive producer of the landmark documentary "Under our Skin", which so poignantly highlighted the impact of the denial of chronic Lyme Disease on the lives of its many victims.
Amazing how these guardians of public health were acting!
A.
[ 03-09-2014, 06:18 PM: Message edited by: Andromeda13 ]
Posts: 180 | From UK | Registered: Nov 2005
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Catgirl
Frequent Contributor (5K+ posts)
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posted
I'm not surprised.
-------------------- --Keep an open mind about everything. Also, remember to visit ACTIVISM (we can change things together). Posts: 5418 | From earth | Registered: Mar 2011
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poppy
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What legitimate reason could they possibly have for censoring 1000 pages!!!!!
None that I can even imagine. Those people are killers. There is no other word for what they are doing to destroy lives.
Posts: 2888 | From USA | Registered: Mar 2004
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TerryK
Frequent Contributor (5K+ posts)
Member # 8552
posted
Thanks for posting.
I'm sure this is the tip if the iceburg as to their deceit.
Employees of the CDC should NEVER be allowed to have personal patents for ANYTHING related to lyme let alone testing.
Terry
Posts: 6286 | From Oregon | Registered: Jan 2006
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TerryK
Frequent Contributor (5K+ posts)
Member # 8552
posted
poppy - I thought the same thing.
Andromeda - would you be so kind as to fix your post so it is not too wide to read without scrolling? It is probably the long links that is making it go wide.
posted
Hi Poppy, The excuse CDC gave for censoring the huge number of pages (1300 if I remember rightly) was that it shows "internal CDC processes".
Hmmmm.
I agree with the poster who said it is the tip of the iceberg. In fact, what is most stunning about the this and some of the other emails they released, is just how much corruption, bias and cronyism they do reveal. You have to wonder, if this is what they are PREPARED to reveal, what must the censored portions contain!
Elena
-------------------- Justice will be ours. Posts: 786 | From UK | Registered: Oct 2007
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posted
Thanks Terry K, for the tiny urls. I should have done this editing sooner, but I saw that Elena Cook had done a much better post and so I left mine to sink down the list. Now I see her post has gone, so this one will have to do for now.
Wish I could remember what she wrote, my Lyme brain is very forgetful.
I saw some people writing on another forum that they thought it wasn't much of an issue, that Johnson did not publish the bad results. On the contrary, this whole devious keeping back of results is very wrong, from the moral and ethical standards, as well as the scientific and medical. Just shows they will do anything they like and calls into question the integrity of Johnson.
We know the CDC are up to their necks in denials of the science, and the ensuing cruelty to hundreds of thousands of Lyme victims, but maybe the rest of the medical world will wake up to this fact any day now.
posted
Which forum was that, Andromeda? Hard to understand why anyone would consider it trivial that Steere and CDC's Barbara Johnson, two of the most influential people ever in (bad)Lyme medicine, were withholding experimental results on the grounds that they might make people think that their recommended testing regime is unreliable.
I saw some people writing on another forum that they thought it wasn't much of an issue, that Johnson did not publish the bad results. On the contrary, this whole devious keeping back of results is very wrong, from the moral and ethical standards, as well as the scientific and medical. Just shows they will do anything they like and calls into question the integrity of Johnson.
We know the CDC are up to their necks in denials of the science, and the ensuing cruelty to hundreds of thousands of Lyme victims, but maybe the rest of the medical world will wake up to this fact any day now.
A.
-------------------- Justice will be ours. Posts: 786 | From UK | Registered: Oct 2007
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