Lyme and MS - same cause?

I found this interesting because I have what has been termed a difficult case of MS. I have myriad symptoms. I have multiple lesions, but my evoked potentials and spinal fluid are normal.

When my urine is tested, I have elevated white cells, but nothing on culture. Recently, the urologist put me on long-term antibiotics and I feel so much better (as I have any time I've used antibiotics).

This site mentions this very phenomena.

Mysterious.

I tried to tell you at one time Art. I have seen, and heard of many MSers being diagnosed with Lyme Disease. I was diagnosed 2 years ago after thinking I had MS for over 12 years.

The problem with all of this is the testing. The tests in Canada have many, many false negatives, so good luck moving to the western blot. We have a two tierd testing system. Now in the US, there is now an investigation going in with the IDSA. The people that made up the panel had vested interest in the Lyme vacinne, big pharma co's and insurance people.

You can purchase a movie called Under Our skin and it tells the whole story.

Many people with either Fibro, Chronic fatigue, MS, ALS, Alzheimers, Bipolar are being misdiagnosed. Just think, if caught early one month of oral antibiotics, and you would be cured. It sure beats being hooked up to a picc line for a year. Plus, oral antibiotics are cheaper than many of the crab drugs or arthritis drugs.

No test is 100%. Lyme Disease is a clinical diagnosis, but your best bet is to be tested through Igenex in California.

Spend some time at the CanLyme site, and read up on all the articles and see for yourself.

Leslie

Thanks for posting the site. I know multitudes of MSers diagnosed with late stage lyme who get much better with treatment.

There is also a great presentation called, "Chronic Lyme Disasease: The Connection to MS-The Facts Behind the Controversy" given by Dr. Steven Phillips at the University of New Haven in 2006. I think DVD copies are still available from Prof. Eva Sapi of UNH. These are not fringe "crazies" but physicians and researchers who have seen thousands of patients. Antibiotic treatment brought my husband back from the brink.

Read your MS history books, kids. MS was understood to be caused by a spirochete as early as the late 1800's and early 1900's having been found via microscopy using silver staining. The two world wars wiped out most of the research (and European researchers) and the polio epidemics of the early to mid 20th Century shifted the focus - and research dollars - to viruses where we have been stuck with our heads in the sand ever since. The big problem is that spirochetes are a very fastidious and sophisticated pleomorphic bacteria (they can "morph" from a spiral shape to a cyst in minutes when under threat; e.g., antibiotics). They can shed their cell walls (which most antibiotics use to kill bugs), they coat themselves in the host's own fibrin to evade detection by the immune system (AND standard tests), they infect the very white cells that are supposed to kill them and can stay dormant (cysts) for YEARS until some trigger sets them to hatching again. Hence, the 'relapsing/remitting' course of early MS. One of the main reasons these bugs are hard to detect in lab tests is because they are very seldom found in their classic, spiral form. The best description of the problem is stated here:

CELL WALL DEFICIENT FORMS
Stealth Pathogens
3rd Edition
by Lida H. Mattman

"PREFACE

Pleomorphic forms are the first growth in culture, and usually predominate as the pathogen flourishes in vivo. They were observed in clinical specimens in the laboratories of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch and recognized as pathogenic. So why have they been ignored for many decades? In classrooms, two errors have been perpetuated: (1) students are taught to fix smears with heat [due to their high lipid content, cell wall deficient (CWD) forms melt into globs when heated], and (2) only the Gram stain is on the desks of microbiology students. The Gram stain should always be accompanied by Acridine Orange, which shows that otherwise unidentified material contains nucleic acids and, therefore, is cellular. Pleomorphism is an unfortunate phenomenon from the diagnostic point of view. Bacteria and fungi have lost their name tags. However, the greater efficiency in solving diagnostic mysteries compensates for the great inconvenience in identification. (...)"

I have TONS of scientific literature on the subject for anybody who's interested.