yep, it was discussed a month or so back
Dr Kim Lewis is a highly respected microbiologist
he points out, if it passes FDA trials, it may be a viable treatment for acute lyme - but not chronic lyme.
the press stories on the other hand seem to be out of touch with reality
i.e. eradicating Lyme bacteria in the wild via blanket distribution of laced baits.
anyone suggesting this has not done even basic math of square miles of land that would have to be covered and the quantity of bait needed
let alone how many species would need to be dosed - mammals, birds, reptiles .....
and even if we managed that - what happens when migratory birds come back to the area -
i just don't think that part has been thought through.
borrelia have been in the environment for millions of years and in my view will continue to be.
new effective treatment options and research to produce them are of course welcome
but reporting on science is as usual pretty poor
i think accurate diagnostic tests are the first thing we need - as until this is established - the farce and tragedy of poor diagnosis - patients being ridiculed rathe than supported - and health insurance companies ducking the costs will go on indefinitely.
then of course truly effective treatments for chronic mixed infections with biofilm involvement are required.
there is a schism in the worldwide scientific community on this topic at the moment that is little know to outsiders.
basically medical science has arrived at a bunch of antibiotics that work well for all the easy to culture and easy to kill bugs that typically cause acute infections and used to kill a lot of people, discovered more than 40 years ago. This is a natural consequence, because the easy to culture bugs were all they could work with in the abx development experiments 40 years ago when most abx were developed. (no really new abx drugs have been developed in the last several decades).
however - the science of microbiology has moved on, and now understands, now that acute infections are well treated, a greater burden on society as a whole is represented by chronic infections - caused by microbes that cannot easily be cultured, form biofilms, and do not respond well to the above antibiotics that were developed for acute planktonic infections, not chronic biofilm causing pathogens. Conditions like diabetic wound infections, COPD, cystic fibrosis, Asthma exacerbations, chronic urinary tract infections, benign inflammatory prostatitis, various forms of arthritis, hospital acquired infections, surgical implant infections, joint replacement infections, to list just a few - and that is before one even considers the controversial world of Lyme and its co-infections where Lyme biofilms have been found in the organs of persons at autopsy despite 16years of antibiotic therapies.
the problems are both mindset (the medical fraternity do not believe in complex chronic infections) , vested interests ( the insurance companies do not want it to be true so are denying and lobbying to keep the status quo) and economic ( in the current model abx are expensive to develop and low profitability even when successful - hence no business case).
we need an entirely different system to develop such drugs - because the established institutions have active motivations to avoid doing so.
perhaps direct patent funded research is possible - where the state, and established medical authorities and insurance companies are not involved, except perhaps to rubber stamp the final approval - as has started by some Lyme patient advocate groups already - but upscaled 10x - 100x or more.
but this would take some heroic efforts in terms of fund raising and organisation.
the need is clear, i think real scientists are
open to doing the research, cost is perhaps the biggest barrier - hence the need to scale fundraising - we are talking $5-10M per small lab per year working on initial research and maybe $50-100M to bring a product to release.
but on the other hand there are a few thousand billionaires on the planet now - and to whom $50M is a rounding error in calculations of their net wealth - and many give these type of sums to charity routinely.
i would love to be involved in such an activity
Post Edited (Garzie) : 12/31/2021 4:58:33 AM (GMT-7)