Re: Strange Illness For Over One Year, Please Help!

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Robert wrote:

It is always more definitive to find a living breathing bug that one can
look at. It's brother causing relapsing fever also a Borrelia is fairly easy
to see on blood smears for diagnosis. Lyme Borrelia is also found in ticks
quite easily.

It would be lovely to find a tick embedded in a bite confessing the sin of having infected us, but it doesn't happen. It is not at all easy to find borrelia in humans for a whole variety of reasons. Don't take my word for it, check Medline.


That's going a bit too far.

Not if you've spent many years paying attention to research in this area, as I have, discussing it with researchers, reading the literature.

LD can cause false positive ANA's and RF 
testing. The whole history of TBD is full of cross reacting antibodies. The
earliest testing was based on proteus antigens and other bacterial antigens
in what was called febrile agglutinins Weil-Felix.
He is the cross reactions with IgG testing
 "Patients with other spirochetal disease and/or who test positive for
rheumatoid factor or Epstein Barr virus may have cross-reacting antibodies.
A positive response in this, as in any antibody assay, indicates
sensitization, not necessarily active disease."
link below

I attended a public health seminar on CNS infections and they are having
problems with West Nile virus cross reactivity in south east asians,
phillipinos in the states making the test useless in these individuals for
epidemiological purposes or diagnostic purposes.

The lyme test kits like any test performed in the States must be approved by
the FDA after testing on clinical specimens and been evaluated with
specificity and sensitivity.


Yes, and William Golde, an immunologist who left the CDC to do research elsewhere said in a meeting I attended, "there is no clinically meaningful diagnostic test for Lyme disease." He went on to say, "you may be pumping out a million antibodies to some strain of borrelia, but the FDA approved test kits won't find them." He went on to discuss strain heterogeneity, the fact that the test kits only test for a limited number of them, host immune evasion, immune modulation, etc.



You really have to be careful when saying someone has something when you
can't see evidence for it.



I never said you have TBDs. If you go back and read my posts, you'll see I suggested it as something that could be causing your symptoms, among all the possibilities. I merely addressed your misinformed beliefs about the rule out value of serology.

Good luck with your illness; you can do or not do whatever you choose with the information I've provided.

Susan
.

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