mpost said...
yeah i believe these claims of yes and no are very much not working with lyme disease. Traditionally any eurekas coming from this field, with simple binary answers like this , are somehow incompatible with the complexity of the pathogen. So i have seen NO yes-es and no-s with lyme, just a lot of maybes or dunnos....
We don't know if it is sexually transmitted, given it is a spirochete and a cousin of syphilis it is reasonable to assume it COULD do that, but maybe it does that only in immunocompromised individuals. Let's not forget that the tick, when biting the victim, is also rendering inert some parts of the host immune response : you do not feel the tick, you do not get a rash immediately so you don't need to scratch there and remove the tick. Its saliva has immunmodulatory properties that ARE USED by borrelia early in dissemination to avoid the local immune response and have time to replicate and spread.
Without trying to be grose, you do not get the same immunomodulatory tick saliva during sex .... So i'd say that Borrelia probably can get into you during sex but has a harder time surviving because it is used to an abberrant immune response at the site of the bite (which does not exist during sex). BUT.... if your immune system is aberrant to begin with, like u have HIV, you are under steroids or something similar... maybe it does not need the tick saliva and you still can get infected.
Bottom line... no YES and NO, just ...maybe/sometimes....
Actually, we DO know that it can be transmitted sexually - the only ones not warning of this are those that are denying that chronic Lyme is real and that it can't be passed in utero either - well we know that it most definitely be passed in utero, although we don't understand why all children of infected mothers aren't infected - but that doesn't discount the fact that it does happen. It's the same with sexual transmission - we know it happens, but haven't figured out how or why it only happens at times.
"In the study, researchers tested semen samples and vaginal secretions from three groups of patients: control subjects without evidence of Lyme disease, random subjects who tested positive for Lyme disease, and married heterosexual couples engaging in unprotected sex who tested positive for the disease.
As expected, all of the control subjects tested negative for Borrelia burgdorferi in semen samples or vaginal secretions. In contrast, all women with Lyme disease tested positive for Borrelia burgdorferi in vaginal secretions, while about
half of the men with Lyme disease tested positive for the Lyme spirochete in semen samples. Furthermore, one of the heterosexual couples with Lyme disease showed identical strains of the Lyme spirochete in their genital secretions.
“The presence of the Lyme spirochete in genital secretions and identical strains in married couples strongly suggests that sexual transmission of the disease occurs,” said Dr. Mayne.
“We don’t yet understand why women with Lyme disease have consistently positive vaginal secretions, whilst semen samples are more variable. Obviously there is more work to be done here.”"
/www.lymedisease.org/lyme-sexual-transmission-2/Most of the other articles on this are based off of this one study. There has to be more research on this, as it has major implications - but at this time, this is all we know.
Gfields - yes. Lyme spirochetes can live in the mouth - but not for everyone. Another one of those "Lyme mysteries" until more research is devoted to these bacteria.