40% of people with chronic type 2 leprosy reactions have Bartonella

I thought this was interesting because of the possible parallel implication that it's not just Lyme that makes co-infections chronic but maybe it works the other way around too: co-infections making the "primary" infection (maybe Lyme?) chronic.

Or, alternatively, maybe these people have Lyme as well. Hence the Bartonella being present... hard to say.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s1413867024000266

thanks for the article Rainy

i agree with your logic - these infections and their interaction in the host are complex and interconnected

i fully expect we will eventually find that the co-infections do indeed help keep the primary infection chronic -
in fact it may be very hard to fish apart which infection is really the primary one

is lyme only becoming a problem because bartonella is present ( this seems to fit my case - as i became ill after being bitten by insects - not ticks ) - or is it typically the other way around

what i also found interesting is that the method used was a relatively basic blood draw and culture then pcr to try to find the bartonella

they referenced Maggi et al ( Breischwerts bartonella research group ) but he uses a triple blood draw - then digital droplet PCR - for greater sensitivity.
Maggi only claims around 50% sensitivity for his method - even after many attempts to optimise it by his team - which is probably the foremost group of researcher studying bartonella in the world today.
The simpler method used in the above paper would likely have a lower sensitivity than Maggi's approach

so, when they found 40% of patients infected with bartonella - using a test with less than 50% sensitivity - it could well be that the vast majority of the patients actually had bartonella - making their overall findings even more striking.

its also interesting that the paper doesn't describe leprosy as a simple infectious disease - but one where some kind of over reaction of the immune system causes most of the symptoms
to my mind this has echoes of MCAS and chemical sensitivities, extreme reactions to herbs and drugs etc that we often hear about in bartonella patients. effects also mediated by dysregulation of the hosts immune system