There is a crucial event going on in the Lyme world.
The new culture method, published by Sapi et al and set up at Advanced Laboratory Services, and based on great expertise and advice from Dr Alan MacDonald and to a lesser extent Dr Joe Burrescano, has been vilified by the CDC in a paper authored by Barbara Johnson.
The CDC team claimed that a major proportion of Dr Sapi's samples from patients' blood contained DNA sequences from the standard strains of borrelia that were kept in her lab, and thus they must have been contaminated samples, and that's why they gave positive culture results. The patient's weren't positive, and the lab had just been growing borrelia that had crept into the cultures. And also, there were too many garinii strains seen, which shouldn't be in the USA.
All this is poppycock because borrelia garinii and afzelii are being found in the states and in Mexico . And so it seems there is another glaring mistake that she has made:
Dr Barbara Johnson wrote that she had registered 3 sequences of the "contaminants" at the Gene bank.
But no one can find them in the gene bank where she said she's registered them.
Also, the most crucial point of all is this so amazing and farcical it's the biggest mistake of all which makes all the squirming around talking about which bits of the genes were "contaminants" absolutely unnecessary:
Hardly anyone in the world was aware that Dr Sapi's standard strains of borrelia were kept in her labs in New Haven Connecticut, and never left the premises. Any work with them was carried out there.
The work with patients' blood was carried out at the ALS labs in Philadelphia, at least 200 miles away.
There is no way that the Borrelia could have hopped on a plane or a train and planted itself in the Philadelphia labs.
But Barbara magically found that they were in Dr Sapi's samples at the ALS labs and rushed into publication and now has egg on her face in front of the whole world of microbiology and infectious disease and molecular biology too.
This is the proverbial excrement hitting the fan, and it is at the very front of the crucial battle in the Lyme wars where the persistence of Borrelia is being proved..the lives of millions of people depends on this because if this somehow gets pushed away and hidden, then we will know that all science and all truth will have been denied..
The CDC have spread their paper around in the news quite a bit, as they have the power and connections to do this, and it was a major news item on the massive publication called Medscape, which hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses, social workers and scientists receive in their inbox every day. The way it's worded is as if the case it shut and closed, with contamination being proved and the ALS methods trashed...
That was about 5 days ago.
Not one single comment has appeared after the article, although I know of at least one person who has tried to put a comment on there, and several of us believe that there may be drastic censorship going on.
Alan MacDonald has written to the editors of the journal in which the CDC article was published, and he has now also written to the head of the CDC. He is prepared to take this to a senate committee which oversees the CDC unless he receives an explanation for several questions he's asked.
This is history in the making folks...
