RESULTS! - thoughts? (Bartonella bacilliformus)

I would take this as a positive test result. Welcome to the elite bartonella bacilliformis club. We can feel like superheroes, having survived the acute phase of an illness that carries a 40-85% mortality rate!

Hi, bellabee123,

I would be happy to message with you directly, but I can't find a way to do so without sharing my email address with the world, which I'd rather not do. :-/ Do you feel comfortable sharing yours? Or is there a different way you can think of? Maybe I'm missing something.

Bartonella bacilliformis when untreated is deadlier than ebola. Nuts, right? Everything online says it's only found in a specific species of sandfly only found in the Peruvian highlands. I don't know about you, but that most certainly is not how I contracted it! I too was diagnosed via the DNA Connexions test, though, and I'm sure they would not test for a bacterium that's actually that rare. It must be more common that websites reflect if it's being included in the test.

I read that bartonella species can be cross-reactive on tests, and I've had cats my whole life (bartonella henselae), so I thought maybe the bacilliformis result was wrong until I read about the tell-tale signs. I remembered getting both of these bizarre signs many years ago around the time my other symptoms began (dizzy, anxious, brain fog, insomnia, appetite loss) and soon after some awful fevers and encephalitis. One was a big lump on my cheek that felt like a big swollen gland - painful, with a hard lump, and a big swollen cheek. Like I was half Marlon Brando. Clueless doctors gave me azythromycin and it went away promptly. Then I started getting these weird bright red spherical skin growths on my chest. I remember it was summer and I felt self-conscious about them in a tank top. One day one got bumped and sprayed blood everywhere for several minutes, like something from a comic book. I thought they were an odd sort of inconvenient mole and my doctors just shrugged. I'm bitter about it, but really why would a doctor in Boston know about Peruvian sand fly bacteria?

Any of that sound familiar to you?

I'm not 100% sure that all the bartonellas respond to the same treatments. Maybe your Lyme-literate treatment team will know more about that than mine does.

Good luck!

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You could enable it for a short time and then remove it

Didn't mean to sound alarmist with the mortality rate aspect! I think the fact that DNA Connexions is testing for it is a good indicator that there are more cases than get counted by hospitals, sort of like how most people with mild flus stay home and therefore the news reports much scarier statistics about flu season dangers than reflect the reality of the flu for people with mild cases, since they're only counting people feeling bad enough to seek medical care. My impression is that bartonella bacilliformis is gnarly in its acute stage, but not for everyone, and that we're not in any danger (relative to other bartonellas) now in the chronic phase.

Yes, bluelyme, I think Wikipedia does quote a high mortality rate, but I also see similar stats elsewhere. I try not to put too much stock in Wikipedia. Unfortunately there's not much online about this species because it's so (allegedly) rare. (Check also Carrion's disease, verruga peruana, and Oroya fever.)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3493376/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/bartonella-bacilliformis
https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Bartonella_bacilliformis

These are just the first few results. Untreated cases of the acute initial fever (which not everyone develops, definitely worth noting) have a very high fatality rate, but the disease can take other forms. And once again, my lifetime distance from Peruvian sandflies shows how little is known about this disease's epidemiology!

Yes, Girlie, most of the known cases of the bacilliformis variety are in Peru, and it's very rare. People in the United States generally aren't even tested for it. Most of the time, people with bartonella as a co-infection of Lyme have bartonella henselae, which doesn't kill anyone. It's certainly troublesome when it becomes chronic! But not fatal.

I have b. Bacilliformis too. If you guys don't mind would you share what you are treating it with?

I was positive for that and Lyme. Did 10 months of IV rocephrin and other oral abx. Another 10 months of oral abx. Right now for bart Bacilliformis I'm taking ceftin, rifampin, plaquenil, azithromyacin, and A Bart. Some improvement but still really sick. My llmd is in Pittsburgh.

mike ,zhangs combo of allicin and hh2 hit bart hard... bvt may some effect Plasma rife helped too . needs daily as replication cycle is 24hrs