Babesia testing and abx

“Anyhow I hope I do have babs. Then that'll explain all my screwed up symptoms that didn't ever go away with bart and lyme treatment. My llm wants to start me on some atovaquone or something like that.”

This is why my llmd treats all patients for Babesia first. He takes the guessing out of it.
Atovaquone is a good med for Babs but it tastes horrid.

Girlie said...
“Anyhow I hope I do have babs. Then that'll explain all my screwed up symptoms that didn't ever go away with bart and lyme treatment. My llm wants to start me on some atovaquone or something like that.”

This is why my llmd treats all patients for Babesia first. He takes the guessing out of it.
Atovaquone is a good med for Babs but it tastes horrid.

This was one of the first things i mentioned to my llmd in the beginning. He didn't seem concerned and said if we don't treat it now, then he'd definitely treat me for it sometime down the road during treatment. I've been on abx since like mid July. I keep hearing the horrid tast of Atovaquone, what does it taste like!? I think the bactrim pills taste so bitter and horrid, is it anything like that or worse?

So my babesia duncani test results just came back negative as well as microti. I don't trust quest for some reason. I don't even know if I'd believe it if I used igenex again and it came bk neg. My llmd treats based on symptoms, not tests. He azithro would hit babs if I had it . Now I'm thinking it is hitting babs since my rbc is so low. Anyone have low wbc while on abx, or anyone know why it'd be low? I thought wbc is high if we have infections to help fight it off, rather than low.

I believe wbc counts can be lowered by abx. That also just happens in chronic Lyme. Which was a major lab change for me that I saw post Lymestop, consistently 4-4.5, post Lymestop showed a 6. Coincidence? Maybe not.. but if that value changed with abx then it’s probably from the abx.

Azithro can hit babs but is never used as a stand alone treatment. Is bilirubin in range? If in fact RBC’s are breaking down fast that can correlate because bilirubin is the bi-product of that. That’s why jaundice is listed as a symptom. There’s also a difference between slightly out of range and dangerously out of range - back to the virulence aspect. What was your hematocrit at?

The other b’s can also be intracellular and influence anemia etc..

Wish I had a better answer. I was igenix b duncani + IGG and quest also. Not familiar with the sensitivity comparison there but hey props to quest on that one for me.

I picked back up buhners book on babesia today and I think he says 12 forms of babesia can infect humans. We have IFA’s for like 4, IGM for 1, and PCR for 1 with questionable cross reactivity. Plus if parastimia % is low no lab worker is going to see it. Fun stuff

Post Edited (loski01) : 10/29/2023 12:43:27 PM (GMT-8)

I didn't have any significant side effects from atovaquone. I did get low folate from proguanil (malarone) and had to stop taking that.

However, I was only treating bartonella and not babesia, so didn't need to take a high dose. Bartonella seems to be much more susceptible to atovaquone, as unlike babesia, bartonella has no glycolysis pathway at all so when atovaquone takes out its TCA cycle it has no alternative. I found it didn't take a high dose to kill bart, although I was taking it with azithromycin and minocycline, so I wasn't relying on atovaquone alone.