Article telling researchers what we know

/tinyurl.com/yckh4g3v

I love this part:

This is significant because it demonstrates that subjects infected with the same strain of B. burgdorferi may have different immune responses to the same antigen. And, because humans, like primates, are genetically diverse, it underscores that testing antibody responses may be inherently unreliable as a singular diagnostic modality for Lyme disease.

This is awesome. Glad they're putting some of Wormsers nonsense to rest. Can't wait to see what that lunatic comes up with next. Speaking of, I was just reading over some of the paper on the stringent response this morning and noticed a nice little burn.

"Though its applicability [the stringent response/aka persister cell formation] to B. burgdorferi has been controversial (Wormser and Schwartz, 2009; Wormser et al., 2012; Iyer et al., 2013), persistence is a widely accepted phenomenon in microbiology which in some instances can have therapeutic implications"

It's funny because half of these arguments that Lyme patients have been making are just based in textbook microbiology. The part about antibody testing is interesting though. I need to read deeper in to that part.

Sure thing.

"While it remains possible that the spirochetes detected in xenodiagnostic ticks could be unrelated to the infection, we view this as unlikely. First, we used a highly-specific (OspA) monoclonal antibody for detection, which should only target B. burgdorferi. Second, our ticks are wild caught at the adult stage but lab-reared from egg mass to nymphs, so with the absence of transovarial transmission, any occurrence (very rare in Louisiana) in adults would not be passed on to progeny. Finally, we fed a portion of our nymphal ticks on clean mice as controls to validate the absence of spirochetes in our tick colony."

It's not the tissue that is fed to the tick. The ticks feed on the live apes themselves to simulate natural zoonotic cycles. The point you raise is interesting because without the availability of robust detection methods how can one ever be sure a tick is sterile? Never the less some precautions listed above were made to lower the risk of contamination. Basically they took ticks from a place that has a low prevalence of Lyme disease, raised them in a controlled environment, took the progeny which are even less likely to be infected, and then confirmed their lack of infectivity by letting them feed on non-infected mice as well as staining with OspA antibody. I don't see this method as a 100% guarantee, but what can you really do. This is just one of the challenges of this illness.