"Here�s news from Yale University on a new bacterial disease that�s transmitted by deer ticks:
NEW HAVEN � Yale School of Public Health researchers, in collaboration with Russian scientists, have discovered a new tick-borne bacterium that might be causing disease in the United States and elsewhere.
This new disease is caused by a spirochete bacterium called Borrelia miyamotoi, which is distantly related to Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. Yale professor of epidemiology Durland Fish and colleagues found this new spirochete, previously known only from ticks in Japan, in deer ticks in Connecticut in 2001, but did not know if it caused disease in humans.
Spirochetes are bacteria look like a coiled telephone cord under the microscope. They also cause syphilis, but some are beneficial. They break down cellulose in the digestive tracts of ruminants, for example. Mollusks rely on them, too.
Borrelia miyamotoi has been found in all tick species that transmit Lyme disease throughout the United States and Europe. By collaborating with a medical team studying tick-borne diseases in Russia, Yale researchers were able to compare disease symptoms in patients infected by the new spirochete in Russia with those having Lyme disease in the United States.
The new disease is characterized by high fever, which relapses without treatment and may be confused with Lyme disease. There are currently no diagnostic tests available, but Yale researchers have recently received a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a diagnostic test procedure to look for cases of this new disease in the United States.
�This is the first time we will have a chance to identify a new tick-borne disease in the United States based upon evidence that the agent occurs in ticks,� said Fish, co-author of the paper and co-investigator on the NIH grant along with Peter Krause, a senior research scientist in the Division of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases.
They report finding B. miyamotoi in about 2 percent of the deer ticks in the Northeast and Upper Midwest and have been conducting experiments with mice in the laboratory that become infected when fed upon by deer ticks. Because bites from deer ticks cause more than 25,000 cases of Lyme disease each year, according to the CDC, the Yale team is gearing up to determine if there is any illness that is caused by B. miyamotoi infection in the United States.
Their findings appear in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases."
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posted
krause is an awesome babesia researcher, so i would trust his work, not sure of other bad motives involved. (?)
this is very interesting to me. wondering if they have published what treats this?
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James1979
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quote:Originally posted by Mo: wondering if they have published what treats this?
...but they still haven't published what treats borrelia burgdorferi!!!
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Miyamotoi is not new, regardless of what Yale says. They are bringing up the rear, as usual.
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Tincup
Honored Contributor (10K+ posts)
Member # 5829
posted
I wouldn't trust either of them as far as I can throw them!
And why are they giving grant money to Fish again to develop diagnostic tests for the same thing he supposedly "discovered" years ago, much less for anything? He isn't qualified to do this stuff!
And this is being touted to be a "new discovery" NOW? What hooey that is!
Check the date on this article that announced the same discovery by Fish over TEN years ago, in 2001. And note the idiot comments found in it, like these three, that will curl your blood.
1. The grant money for studying it was from his rosebuds at the ""American Lyme Disease Foundation" and Yale.
YULK!
2. "The study [below] was published this month in the inaugural issue of a new journal, Vector Borne and Zoonotic Diseases, of which Fish is editor."
So he discovers it over 10 years ago and brags on it then in a publication that he was the editor of.... and brags again on the same discovery NOW?
A true Publicity Hound he is... for sure! Or shall I say a Milk Maid... milking that cash cow for all its worth.
3. Fish says in an article from 10 years ago... "We're anxiously studying this organism to develop diagnostic techniques and to determine whether or not it infects people. If it does, it's likely that the same treatment for Lyme disease would be effective against this organism."
So, he has been "anxiously" studying it for over ten years and came up with nothing so far to help anyone? Not a real swift guy.
You'd think he would have alerted CDC, the public and health departments that people might have a spirochetal illness like Lyme (its "close cousin" according to him) and it won't show up on tests.
And he wants more money NOW to do the same thing he claimed he was doing ten years ago- which was "anxiously" studying it?
And he has already determined that the same old treatment people are getting for regular Lyme (Bb.), that doesn't work worth a toot, would likely be affective for eliminating this yet unnamed organism?
No thanks Mr. Fish!
I want to see science- real science, not IDSA science, and certainly not your uneducated, tainted opinions. I don't like playing guessing games when it comes to public health issues.
Talk about "anti-science", or shall I say "shoddy science"?
:yulk:
````````````````````````````````````````````` 10 year old article announcing the same "new discovery" by Fish.
FOUND IN: Health & Medicine
Ticks Now Found to Carry a New Infectious Agent Related to the Lyme Disease Bacteria
Published: April 26, 2001
New Haven, Conn. � The pin dot-sized deer ticks responsible for more than 100,000 cases of Lyme disease nationwide are now found to carry yet another new and infectious organism, a Yale researcher has found.
"We report here, for the first time, the existence of a previously unrecognized Borrelia species transmitted by (Ixodes scapularis) ticks," said Durland Fish, associate professor of epidemiology in the Department of Public Health at Yale School of Medicine and senior author of the study. "This discovery represents the fifth transmissible agent associated with this tick species in the Northeast."
The organism was detected in mice during a routine experiment designed to investigate transmissible pathogens in a tick/rodent model. Fish said the organism, as yet unnamed, closely resembles a spirochete found in ticks in Japan, Borrelia miyamotoi, and is a close cousin to Borrelia burgdorferi, the spirochete that causes Lyme disease.
"It is not yet known if the bacteria can infect humans, but we do know that all the other organisms that this tick transmits to mice can also infect people," he said.
The study was published this month in the inaugural issue of a new journal, Vector Borne and Zoonotic Diseases, of which Fish is editor.
In addition to the new bacteria and Borrelia burgdorferi, deer ticks also are carriers of Ehrlichia phagocytophila, which causes ehrlichiosis; Babesia mircoti, which are malarial like organisms; and a virus which can cause encephalitis.
The new organism was observed in nymphs derived from larvae that had fed upon mice that were not infected with Borrelia burgdorferi.
"Some of our experiments were getting some bizarre results," Fish said. "We were finding infected ticks in experiments where we did not expect them. We sequenced a portion of the DNA to determine what it was and it turned out to be a spirochete that is related to relapsing fever spirochetes rather than the Lyme disease spirochete."
Fish said the new organism has been found in about two percent of the nymphs tested in four states: Rhode Island; Lyme, Conn.; Westchester County in New York, and in northern New Jersey. It was previously thought that all of the spirochetes found in deer ticks were Borrelia burgdorferi, but these findings show that up to 20 percent of the infected ticks are carrying this new organism instead.
"It is completely cryptic, which means there is no way to diagnose it," Fish said. "None of the Lyme disease tests would detect an infection by this organism. We're anxiously studying this organism to develop diagnostic techniques and to determine whether or not it infects people. If it does, it's likely that the same treatment for Lyme disease would be effective against this organism."
The principal investigator of the study was Glen Scoles, a former post doctoral student who worked with Fish and is now at the USDA Animal Disease Research Unit, Washington State. Co-authors were Michele Papero, research associate, and Lorenza Beati, M.D., associate research scientist.
The work was supported by an American Lyme Disease Foundation Research grant and the Yale School of Medicine Brown-Cox Fellowship to Scoles, as well as by grants to Fish from the USDA Agricultural Research Service and the G. Harold & Leila Y. Mathers Charitable Foundation.
Vector Borne and Zoonotic Diseases publishes original research papers dealing with infectious diseases that pose serious threats to public health in the U.S. and worldwide. The journal examines geography, seasonality, and other risk factors that influence the diagnosis, management, and prevention of these diseases.
PRESS CONTACT: Office of Public Affairs 203-432-1345
Tincup
Honored Contributor (10K+ posts)
Member # 5829
posted
People may wonder why I get my knickers in an uproar. When I see this kind of garbage and waste that is hurting and not helping so many people, year after year, it isn't hard to want to blow up a storm and rain all over them.
Meet Mr. Fish....
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DURLAND FISH, professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, stands in the "Tickery," the part of his lab where Lyme disease-infected ticks are stored in refrigerators.
Fish virulently disputes the attempt by a small group of doctors to discredit the short-term treatment he and other scientists recommend for the disease, and is resisting a subpoena from the state attorney general's office related to the challenge. (Photo: STEPHEN DUNN / August 1, 2007)
NEW HAVEN - Durland Fish, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology, leading authority on disease-carrying insects, is sitting in his paper-strewn office at the Yale School of Public Health. He is ticking down a list of physicians who disagree with him on the matter of chronic Lyme disease.
"This guy ..." Fish begins. "He cheated. He fabricated an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. He provided false results. The paper had to be retracted. He was banned from [National Institutes of Health] funding for a period of time. The guy used to be the director of some penile enlargement clinic out on the West Coast. I mean, this guy ... There's some problems with him."
He proceeds down the list, name by name: "Totally bogus." "He killed one of his patients." "They tried to shut him down." Words like "crackpot," "wacko," "buffoon" and "fraud" pepper his discourse.
A little later, he stops to ponder a question.
"I don't know," he says after a moment's thought. "I don't know why they hate me so much."
"Hate" may be too strong a word, but many in the chronic Lyme community return Fish's evident antipathy. With varying degrees of vehemence, he is accused of being part of - even a leader of - what they view as a conspiracy to deny chronic Lyme sufferers the care they need for reasons of pride and profit.
It is a resurgence of a long and heated dispute over the nature and treatment of Lyme disease. On one side are mainstream physicians and researchers, including Fish, who believe Lyme is a relatively straightforward infection that can be treated in almost all cases with no more than four weeks of antibiotics, although some effects of the infection, such as fatigue or joint pain, can persist.
On the other is a small but extremely vociferous group of doctors and patients who say it is much more serious and requires much longer treatment - years of intravenous antibiotics in some cases.
Now Fish is fighting a subpoena from state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who says Fish and 13 other experts may have improperly excluded scientific evidence of chronic Lyme when they issued guidelines last year for treating the disease.
How did a guy with no formal training in medicine find himself in the middle of what is perhaps the most virulent medical debate going on right now? One might say that it started with his being a bad restaurant inspector.
Fantastic Mosquitoes
The United States was in the process of doubling its force in Vietnam, to about 400,000 troops, when Fish graduated from Albright College in Redding, Pa., in 1966. He had a degree in biology and wanted to do graduate work on mammals. But with the draft looming, he opted instead for an occupational deferment.
"I went to work for the state health department, totally bored out of my mind inspecting restaurants. A terrible job, and I wasn't very good at it," Fish said. He hated imposing regulations on eateries just scraping by in the poor county where he was assigned. "I'm not a very good cop. ... I used to coach them on how to get by - how to cheat."
"I was on my way out," Fish said, when he was transferred to the regional office in Redding and given a job nobody wanted: tromping around the woods and swamps checking the stations set up to monitor mosquitoes and disease-bearing animals - in scientific parlance, vectors. He loved it.
"I thought, `You're going to pay me to do that?'" said Fish, who had grown up surrounded by woods in rural Berwick, Pa. "That got me interested in mosquitoes. I didn't know anything about mosquitoes - I thought they were fantastic."
Fish went back to school in 1970, but not to study mammals. He earned a master's degree in entomology from the ...
University of Massachusetts and a doctorate from the University of Florida, and did postdoctoral work at the University of Notre Dame. He then set out to look for a job doing research on mosquitoes. It was a struggle.
"It wasn't a fundable area. Nobody cared," he said. "You couldn't get any grants on it. Nobody cared about the ecology of vectors."
So in 1980, Fish went to work teaching general biology, ecology and medical entomology at Fordham University. Its campus was in the Bronx, N.Y., but Fish got to live at the university's research station in Westchester County. It was there he discovered the insect that came to dominate his professional life: the deer tick.
"I was doing some field work on mosquitoes there and these little brown ticks started showing up. Nobody knew anything about these ticks," he said. "I'd never seen them before. They weren't there in '80, maybe we just started seeing them in '81, a rare one. By '82 they were pretty easy to find."
The tiny deer tick had already infested southeastern Connecticut by the time Fish started finding them in New York, and had already been associated with what was beginning to be called Lyme disease. But no one was sure just how the disease was transmitted from tick to human.
In 1982, however, a researcher found that long, spiral-shaped bacteria called spirochetes were responsible for the disease. Fish got the news in a phone call.
"So I gathered up a bunch of these ticks and went down to Fordham and I was looking through a microscope," he said. "I saw these tiny little threads, about the limit of visibility under a microscope."
The discovery altered Fish's professional course.
"I said, `Geez, every other tick has these spirochetes in them'" Fish said. "Nobody knows anything about these ticks, there are a hell of a lot of them here, and half of them are infected. This is going to be a big, big problem."
"So I just dropped all the mosquito stuff and started working on ticks," Fish said. "It was a totally wide-open field. Anything you did was new."
Two Camps
And, as it turned out, controversial.
Within a few years of the discovery that bacteria were responsible for Lyme disease - which meant it could be treated with antibiotics - two camps developed: One saw Lyme as a simple, easily detectable and easily cured infection; the other believed it was an insidious, long-term disease capable of invading the brain and other organs and hiding its traces.
What the latter group lacked in mainstream scientific support it soon made up for in organizational clout. In 1992, for instance, when several presentations on chronic Lyme were rejected by the program committee for an international conference on the disease, angry advocates contacted members of Congress and the conference's sponsors to complain. The presentations were allowed back in.
Organizers denied that they were caving in to pressure. Accepting the presentations "was the human and nice thing to do," one told a reporter for the journal Science.
But Fish, a member of the committee that had rejected the papers, thought otherwise, and said so with characteristic bluntness.
"I'm damned annoyed," he told Science. "These lay pressure groups are interfering with research."
Even then the passions stirred by the issue were evident: Although the Science article quoted several researchers critical of the about-face, only Fish would allow his name to be used.
The debate was fueled last year when a group of 14 experts, including Fish, published Lyme treatment guidelines under the auspices of the Infectious Disease Society of America.
Those guidelines called for the use of antibiotics for no more than four weeks, disputed the existence of chronic Lyme and rejected treatments favored by the chronic Lyme community, including long-term antibiotic use.
That brought Blumenthal into the fray. Shortly after the guidelines were published, Blumenthal - long associated with Lyme patient advocate groups - began an antitrust investigation to determine whether the panel ignored scientific evidence that conflicted with its guidelines.
That investigation is still going on, Blumenthal said last week. His office has subpoenaed documents from IDSA and from members of the panel, he said; so far, the society has complied, but the members have not.
Blumenthal would not discuss details of the investigation. "I can tell you," he said, "that the information we've received so far has created very significant concerns about the process and about potential conflicts of interest."
Dr. Henry Masur, president of IDSA, disputed the notion that any society member could benefit from the guidelines.
"In fact, it would be better financially for IDSA members if our guidelines recommended the broadest possible diagnostic criteria (which would mean more patients, more people needing antibiotic treatment, more research dollars, etc.) and the longest possible course of treatment (which would mean more doctor visits, and more drugs and diagnostic tests being sold)," he said in a statement.
But Blumenthal's investigation heartened chronic Lyme believers, who have long claimed that the mainstream consensus is driven by conflicts of interest.
"There's a group represented by the IDSA that has staked out this position that Lyme disease is hard to catch and easy to cure, and they don't want to admit they're wrong," said Raphael Stricker, a San Francisco physician, the former penis enhancement doctor and current president of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society.
He and other chronic Lyme advocates say IDSA members stand to benefit financially from their position. Some, they say, have relationships with insurance companies that don't want to pay for extended courses of antibiotics or other long-term Lyme treatments. Others have interests in drugs or vaccines. Fish, Stricker contends, is in the latter group.
"He's really into supporting the party line and developing vaccines that can make him a lot of money," Stricker said. "He has a lot of patent interest."
Fish scoffs at such allegations. Yale had an interest in a vaccine that has been taken off the market, he said, but none of the Yale researchers who helped develop the guidelines stands to gain from them.
Besides, he says, it's the doctors treating chronic Lyme cases for months and years who have a financial interest in their position.
"If anyone has ... conflicts it's this group. I mean, they're making millions on this scam," he said. "This cast of characters here has some gall to challenge the Infectious Disease Society of America."
Stricker said pharmaceutical companies may make a lot of money on long-term Lyme therapy, but physicians don't. To Fish's remark on his previous work in penis enhancement, he said, "I wish I was still doing that. I could make a lot more money doing that than doing what I'm doing now."
Both his previous employment and a 20-year-old determination by the National Institutes of Health that he had falsified a paper - a finding he disputes - are "irrelevant" to his Lyme work, Stricker said. And he's dismissive of Fish's background as well.
"He and others in the IDSA camp make these kinds of statements: that this is all motivated by greed, that there's no chronic Lyme disease, that there's no reason to treat these people who are sick with these symptoms," Stricker said. "That isn't what patients want to hear. And they don't want to hear it from an entomologist."
But Gary Wormser, a physician and researcher at New York Medical College, says telling patients what they want to hear isn't necessarily good for them. The long-term antibiotic treatment advocated by many doctors who diagnose chronic Lyme disease can be harmful or even fatal, he said, but patients are convinced that it's the only way to cure their ailments.
"Many feel abandoned by conventional medicine and are desperately seeking help from somewhere. They are especially vulnerable to those who profess to have the answer, even if they do not," Wormser said. "We are very, very concerned about these patients."
Wormser, who headed the IDSA panel that drew up the 2006 guidelines, said they were based on repeated studies that showed that a brief course of antibiotics is effective in preventing or treating Lyme disease. Most people treated for "chronic Lyme" never had the disease at all, he said, and among those who did, no sign of the infection remained after standard antibiotic treatment.
As for Fish, he said his role on the IDSA panel and in the Lyme controversy generally relates only to his expertise about ticks, not to medical matters.
"I'm not an M.D. I don't have the training to be making recommendations on therapy or even to some extent diagnosis," he said. "But I understand science, and what's good science and what's bad science."
"This is a matter of good science vs. junk science."
posted
Sorry Tincup; I didn't mean to get your knickers in an uproar!
But, seeing what you posted, I understand!
It's a shame that these people can keep getting away with this. How incredible!
I can't always remember who the anti-lyme people are so when I came across the article I thought it was interesting and posted. Had I known, I wouldn't have bothered.
Don't waste your breath on them; our day will come, of this I am sure.
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James1979
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Tincup - thanks a ton for posting the info.
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dmc
Frequent Contributor (1K+ posts)
Member # 5102
posted
Don't trust nor have any regard for any of them. Krause & Fish are so anti-cronic lyme, in their professional opinions we are all just nuts.
I get so angry reading any of their drival I could spit. Psstooey!
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Tincup
Honored Contributor (10K+ posts)
Member # 5829
posted
Hey rks...
I am HAPPY you shared what you did. We ALL need to be aware of what is going on behind the scenes so it can be understood and addressed!
It may also help patients who feel the progress in the Lyme community is moving too slowly. When you deal with wealthy (billions), long-term, aged, arrogant and set in their ways idiots, who are bent on not working with patients or working to solve the problems (while sucking up the research funds), the grass roots fight we are up against is almost impossible.
We need people to understand what is going on and to help with the efforts to improve our situations and to hopefully prevent others from becoming ill and suffering.
Thank you for doing what you are to help in that regard!
Working together for the common goal is much needed and I want you to keep up the good work! Please!!!
�People shouldn�t panic,� Dr. Krause said. �And they also should not jump to the conclusion that we�ve found the cause of chronic Lyme disease. It�s not highly likely, but it�s possible. We just don�t know.� --------------------------------
IF THAT ISN'T ADMITTING THAT CHRONIC LYME DISEASE EXISTS, I DON'T KNOW WHAT IS.
Oops, sorry, I forgot my caps lock on.
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James1979
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posted
And another thing: If they "just don't know", then how do they know that it's "not highly likely"???? That statement doesn't make any sense at all.
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Tincup - will do! I do believe they will be eating their words and looking like the fools they are somewhere down the road. Too bad they have left a lot of devastation in their pathetic path as they go though.
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