For those of you who have a "delicate constitution" and get upset easily, try to remember that this scientist's theory is not mainstream. Which...doesn't mean that it's not accurate.
I think this is going to upset alot of people, once they understand it. Towards the end of the second page she starts talking about spirochetes and syphilis, and on the third page she starts about Borrelia, the Lyme bacteria.
Edited quotes:
...chronic spirochete infection is an example of symbiosis.
The common myth is that penicillin kills spirochetes and therefore "syphilis is not a problem." But syphilis is a major problem because the spirochetes stay hidden as round bodies and become part of the person's very chemistry, which they commandeer to reproduce themselves.
The spirochete lives permanently as a symbiont in the patient. The infection cannot be killed because it becomes part of the patient's genome and protein synthesis biochemistry. After syphilis establishes this symbiotic relationship with a person, it becomes dependent on human cells and is undetectable by any testing.
And then Ms. Margulis explains how syphilis and Lyme resemble each other, and why they are both difficult to treat.
I am not copying the entire article here, as I'm not sure about copyrights.
If her theory is right, the implication is stunning for people who have Lyme. Many, if not most, of the physicians we are seeing do NOT adhere to this theory...they believe that antibiotics will kill the Lyme bacteria.
There are people here, myself included, who have understood this all along, that Lyme spirochetes are in our cells, they are now part of us, and they aren't going away.
Ugh, it is appalling, but it's not hopeless, as we can strengthen the immune system to hold the bacteria down and go into remission.
I'm interested in talking with others about the implications for us, if this theory is true.
Carol
Posted by lou (Member # 81) on :
What about the people who are treated for syphilis or lyme and never have anymore symptoms?
There apparently is something going on when one does not get treated in the early window of opportunity, something happens to make it harder to treat/cure. What is that? Sequestering could explain it? Different morphological forms? Changing immunological response? Maybe all these would end up having the same result as keets in the genome. But it would seem like genome testing would find the keets, even if they were no longer testable by themselves.
And what about people who turn positive after a lot of treatment, when they were negative before?
Posted by Lymetoo (Member # 743) on :
up
Posted by Carol in PA (Member # 5338) on :
Okay, people aren't reading this and falling apart from shock. That's a good thing, because I don't have to get out the smelling salts, but it's bad, because I don't think people understand the implications.
When I was in high school, Biology was one of my favorite classes. One of the diseases we learned about was Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, which is caused by Rickettsia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickettsia
The only thing I remember about Rickettsia was that I was in absolute shock when I found out that once you have it, you have it. It's in your cells, it's part of you, you can't get rid of it.
Hmm, now when I read about Rickettsia in Wikipedia forty years later, I see that it is similar to mitochondria.
Quote: They are one of closest living relatives to bacteria that were the origin of the mitochondria organelle that exists inside most eukaryotic cells.
The scientist in the article I linked to discusses mitochondria, and how the only reason animals developed as they did was because a cell ingested the mitochondria, and then couldn't digest it, and they lived together in a symbiotic relationship.
The mitochondria makes energy, which the cell benefits from. The cell acquires food and oxygen from the rest of the body, which the mitochondria uses to make energy.
The mitochondria make waste products, such as carbon dioxide and oxidants, which the cell gets rid of by passing through its membrane to the lymph and the bloodstream.
This happens with every cell, throughout the body.
Apparently, the Lyme bacteria has incorporated itself into our cells too. But the Lyme cells are not benefiting us like the mitochondrial cells do.
The science fiction movies are fond of showing a symbiont as a "thing" inside the abdomen of a person, which is dependent on the person to survive.
Mitochondria are symbionts in our cells, but WE are dependent on them. When they aren't working properly, we experience fatigue.
I was surprised that no one commented on it, especially considering her opinion that corkscrew shaped spirochetes can turn into dormant round bodies and survive in unfavorable conditions.
Doesn't that statement by her go to the heart of the disagreement between the ILADS and IDSA camps? That BB is able to survive in the body and cause long term chronic illness? I would have thought that a comment by a well known biologist and University professor (even if she is somewhat controversial), would have been very welcomed by the lyme community.
Posted by Carol in PA (Member # 5338) on :
That link is difficult to read, and many likely would not have made the effort. Oh okay, you can zoom in and make the page larger.
Funny thing for me is, we get the magazine, and somehow I missed that article. Maybe that was the issue I put aside to read later, because I wasn't feeling well.
When I read it, I did not consider the fact that spirochetes can turn into dormant round bodies (cysts) to be news. At least, not new news.
What I considered to be earthshaking was that both the Syphilis and the Borrelia bacteria have just enough DNA to live inside our cells and let our cells do the rest.
They become symbionts, dependent on our cells. They are in our cells, part of us, and they cannot be eradicated.
Therefore, the spirochetes survive in the host, which is us, for as long as we live. If a spirochete like this kills the host, then it dies too.
But if it coexists for a long time, then it lives for a long time, and can eventually spread to other hosts...other people. It may compromise the health of the host, causing many symptoms from its waste products, which are neurotoxic to our systems.
So yes, that statement does go to the heart of the disagreement between ILADS and IDSA. However, there is more.
If the spirochete is living symbiotically in our cells, then taking antibiotics will not kill it. Because antibiotics stay in the bloodstream, and do not pass through the body's cell walls into the muscle and nerve cells.
more later....
Posted by no_lyme_in_florida (Member # 5537) on :
Carol, I agree with everything you said. I also knew that her statement about cysts was not new news, just that it came from a member of mainstream academia who was not directly involved in the lyme debate.
Since the Steere/IDSA camp does not believe that chronic infection is possible after short abx therapy, I thought that her statement was compelling as far as being supportive of the ILADS position.
In my opinion, the IDSA, CDC, NIH, and other chronic lyme deniers are never going to admit that they are wrong. Never. As such, I think that the only thing things that are going to help us is a breakthrough treatment/treatments and/or overwhelming scientific evidence that BB can survive long term in the body, even after treatment.
Her other statements about the possible symbiotic relationship between spirochetes and their hosts was also very interesting, as well as having huge implications for all of us if true, as you said.
As far as her symbiosis theory, she certainly may be right. However, there does seem to be many stories of chronically ill lyme patients who found a way to get better and stayed that way long term after all treatment was stopped.
I would think that if it was impossible to totally eradicate the spirochetes from the body, these patients would relapse at some point. It may also be that treatment was able to beat down the spirochetes enough so that the hosts immune system was able to keep it in check.
Also, about antibiotics staying in the bloodstream, I thought that some abx's were able to penetrate cell walls. I am not an expert on abx activity in the human body so I could be wrong.
Even if she turns out to be partially or substantially correct, I really hope that we are able to find a way to get rid of these things from our bodies and get our lives back.
Posted by kam (Member # 3410) on :
Thanks Carol. All I know is that I go into what I call lala land when I do not have enough abx in my system.
I know it is difficult to tell as this thing cycles for me.
Posted by Carol in PA (Member # 5338) on :
KAM, Antibiotics create a dangerous environment for the Lyme bacteria, and they go into their defensive cyst mode.
If you look for them, they are microscopic round bodies. They aren't doing anything, just sitting and waiting until their environment is better so they can come out again.
When there are no antibiotics in the bloodstream, the cysts open up again.
People who are not taking antibiotics can take Cat's Claw, which stimulates the white blood cells to phage, or eat, the bacteria.
I've read about studies that showed that taking Cat's Claw for a long time cleared out all the Lyme bacteria from the blood.
However, I don't think those studies looked for evidence of the cyst form. But the cyst form isn't hurting you, as long as it stays that way.
Posted by Carol in PA (Member # 5338) on :
Lynn Margulis, a biologist whose work on the origin of cells helped transform the study of evolution, died on Tuesday at her home in Amherst, Mass. She was 73.
She died five days after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke, said Dorion Sagan, a son she had with her first husband, the cosmologist Carl Sagan.
Dr. Margulis had the title of distinguished university professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1988. She drew upon earlier, ridiculed ideas when she first promulgated her theory, in the late 1960s, that cells with nuclei, which are known as eukaryotes and include all the cells in the human body except mature red blood cells, evolved as a result of symbiotic relationships among bacteria.
The hypothesis was a direct challenge to the prevailing neo-Darwinist belief that the primary evolutionary mechanism was random mutation.
Rather, Dr. Margulis argued that a more important mechanism was symbiosis; that is, evolution is a function of organisms that are mutually beneficial growing together to become one and reproducing. The theory undermined significant precepts of the study of evolution, underscoring the idea that evolution began at the level of micro-organisms long before it would be visible at the level of species.
``She talked a lot about the importance of micro-organisms,'' said her daughter, Jennifer Margulis. ``She called herself a spokesperson for the microcosm.''
The manuscript in which Dr. Margulis first presented her findings was rejected by 15 journals before being published in 1967 by the Journal of Theoretical Biology. An expanded version, with additional evidence to support the theory -- which was known as the serial endosymbiotic theory -- became her first book, ``Origin of Eukaryotic Cells.''
A revised version, ``Symbiosis in Cell Evolution,'' followed in 1981, and though it challenged the presumptions of many prominent scientists, it has since become accepted evolutionary doctrine.
``Evolutionists have been preoccupied with the history of animal life in the last 500 million years,'' Dr. Margulis wrote in 1995. ``But we now know that life itself evolved much earlier than that. The fossil record begins nearly 4,000 million years ago! Until the 1960s, scientists ignored fossil evidence for the evolution of life, because it was uninterpretable.
``I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and micro-organisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date.''
Lynn Petra Alexander was born on March 5, 1938, in Chicago, where she grew up in a tough neighborhood on the South Side. Her father was a lawyer and a businessman. Precocious, she graduated at 18 from the University of Chicago, where she met Dr. Sagan as they passed each other on a stairway.
She earned a master's degree in genetics and zoology from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at Massachusetts, she taught for 22 years at Boston University.
Dr. Margulis was also known, somewhat controversially, as a collaborator with and supporter of James E. Lovelock, whose Gaia theory states that Earth itself -- its atmosphere, the geology and the organisms that inhabit it -- is a self-regulating system, maintaining the conditions that allow its perpetuation. In other words, it is something of a living organism in and of itself.
Dr. Margulis's marriage to Dr. Sagan ended in divorce, as did a marriage to Thomas N. Margulis, a chemist. Dr. Sagan died in 1996.
In addition to her daughter and her son Dorion, a science writer with whom she sometimes collaborated, she is survived by two other sons, Jeremy Sagan and Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma; three sisters, Joan Glashow, Sharon Kleitman and Diane Alexander; three half-brothers, Robert, Michael and Mark Alexander; a half-sister, Sara Alexander; and nine grandchildren.
``More than 99.99 percent of the species that have ever existed have become extinct,'' Dr. Margulis and Dorion Sagan wrote in ``Microcosmos,'' a 1986 book that traced, in readable language, the history of evolution over four billion years, ``but the planetary patina, with its army of cells, has continued for more than three billion years. And the basis of the patina, past, present and future, is the microcosm -- trillions of communicating, evolving microbes.''
Posted by Keebler (Member # 12673) on :
- Carol,
Thanks for updating this thread, although it's sad news,
I will come back tomorrow and read more of this thread, especially about MITOCHONDRIA. They are on my brain today, er, well, actually, guess they are IN my brain, eh?
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