A History of Lyme Disease
What Is Lyme disease?
Lyme disease was named after the East Coast town of Lyme, Connecticut, where the disease was first identified in 1975.4 The disease was first referred to as "Lyme arthritis" due to the presentation of atypical arthritic symptoms in children that lived in that city. By 1977, the black-legged tick (Ixodes scapularis, also known as the deer tick) was linked to transmission of the infection.Source: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/09/04/lyme-disease.aspx
Then in 1982, Willy Burgdorfer, PhD, discovered the bacterium responsible for the infection: the spirochete, named after him, Borrelia burgdorferi,5 is a cousin to the spirochete bacterium that causes syphilis.
In fact, the two look almost identical under a microscope. B. burgdorferi's corkscrew-shaped form allows it to burrow into and hide in a variety of your body's tissues, which is why it causes such wide-ranging multisystem involvement.
Borrelia burgdorferi does not just exist as a spirochete; it has the ability to live intracellularly (inside your cells) as an “L-form” and also encoated as a “cyst” form. These different morphologies explain why treatment is so difficult and recurrence of symptoms occurs after standard antibiotic protocols.
Adding to the difficulty in treating Lyme, the organisms may live in biofilm communities, which are basically a colony of germs surrounded by a slimy glue-like substance that is hard to unravel. For these reasons you will often see Lyme referred to as “stealth.”
No doubt about it, this clever maneuvering and the pleomorphism of the germ helps it hide and survive despite the most aggressive antibiotics of our time. Furthermore, as reported in the featured article:
“The Lyme disease bacterium has a quirky feature for survival. It can exist without iron, which most other living organisms require to make proteins and enzymes. Instead of iron, B. burgdorferi uses manganese, thus eluding immune system defenses that destroy pathogens by starving them of iron.”
There is also a website that researches Lyme in depth http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/lyme.html Remember to analyze what you read! There is always some part of a large opinion that isn't true!
Conspiracy: I can't find the details but here is what I remember. The Lyme treatment guide was designed by twelve doctors eight of them are involved with insurance companies(conflict of interests anyone). If a doctor tries to help you for more then two weeks or in a way that's different then the guidelines he can lose his medical license (as is happening all over the U.S.).
