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Innatoss Test: Disgraceful waste of money on Test that will further doom Borreliosis sufferers

Innatoss Test: Disgraceful waste of money on Test that will further doom Borreliosis sufferers

Blog post by Elena Cook (personal capacity)

29 July 2016

I received an article regarding the Innatoss test today from a friend who forwarded it from the Caudwell Lyme list. British billionaire John Caudwell, who has several members of his family afflicted with Lyme disease, is praising this new test and is apparently very "excited" about it.

I think it is an utter farce that leading people in the British Lyme patients' movement are rejoicing over things they have no understanding of, and which will only end up hurting patients with Borreliosis not just in UK, but the world over.

This new test, funded by the European taxpayers to the tune of 2 million Euros, is based not on recognition of the DNA of Borrelia, but on the immune response to it. Yet that same principle of aiming to detect this disease using antibody and other immune response-based methods has FAILED consistently to diagnose accurately for several decades now.

The fact that Dr Gerald Stanek is an integral part of this colossal waste of money comes as no surprise. Stanek is arguably the leading chronic Lyme Denialist in Europe, and certainly one of the leaders of that shameful contingency worldwide.

Stanek was one of only two Europeans to co-author the IDSA Lyme guidelines. Those infamous guidelines have hurt countless victims -  child and adult -  of this disease, and were the subject of an investigation by the Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal some years ago, due to the large-scale corruption involved.

Stanek is also the main force behind the appallingly unscientific European guidelines which have been the model for Dr. Tim Brooks' policies.

As Britain's  top Lyme Denialist Tim Brooks wrote in his shameful report to the Health and Safety Executive (Ref 1):

"RIPL follows  current  practice  as  recommended in Stanek’s review (see Table 3)." (RIPL is Brooks' testing lab for Lyme in Britain, based in our biological warfare lab at Porton Down).

Should anyone have more doubts, they have only to glance at "Table 3" in Brooks' document to see just what Stanek's policy means -

  • ZERO prophylactic antibiotics are to be given to people bitten by ticks in the UK, despite strong evidence that by the time symptoms appear, the bacteria has already disseminated around the body

  • Only 3 weeks' antibiotics to be given in Lyme carditis, even when Third-stage Heart Block occurs (third-stage heart block can and does kill; not long ago CDC quietly published on cases of three young people who died of sudden cardiac death due to Borreliosis. One of the dead had been diagnosed with "anxiety". CDC did not offer any apology, and certainly no policy changes, related to the fact that Lyme carditis goes undetected largely because of the myths they have spread as to its "rarity" - a baseless description they even repeat in the report on the 3 deaths itself.)

  • Only 3 weeks' antibiotics to be given in "late" neuroborreliosis (Denialists routinely use the term "late" as they do not wish to admit to the epidemic of **chronic** neuroborreliosis. ) This is the case even when the neuroborreliosis produces signs as serious as myelitis (inflammation of the spinal cord, which can cause patients to be permanently paralysed, with total loss of bladder, bowel and sexual function for the rest of their lives)

Apart from Stanek's murky involvement, the test manufacturer itself, Innatoss, is heavily bound up with the United states Department of Defense, being part of a consortium currently receiving over $5 million to develop a biowarfare vaccine.

Given that the US biowarfare establishment, along with its European allies, is the major force behind the decades of neglect and maltreatment of chronic borreliosis patients (not to mention the coverup over related serious and fatal neurological diseases), we can hardly expect DARPA and the United States Department of Defense to be funding a company that would reverse their own Denial, and allow the true incidence and prevalence of serious, persistent Borreliosis  internationally to emerge (see Ref 2).

Is anyone really foolish enough to believe this new T-cell based test will diagnose anyone but a small proportion of very recently-infected individuals, while missing multitudes?

Dr Herremans, senior scientist at Innatoss, has already made her views clear in published papers on Lyme. She believes that existing antibody-based tests are just fine for the "later stages of disease", the only problem being that chronic Lyme patients may be false positive:

"Based on this and other studies, we can conclude that commercially
available assays for the detection of anti–B. burgdorferi antibodies
generally have a high sensitivity in later stages of disease in patient
groups with clinically well-defined disease caused by B. burgdorferi
(neuroborreliosis, ACA, and arthritis).We think that we can extrapolate
these results to other disease manifestations of B. burgdorferi infection.
The specificity of the assays varies considerably. This problem is most
prominent in patients with potential aspecific or cross-reacting antibodies.
This phenomenon may also be of importance in patients in
whom chronic Lyme disease is suspected." (Ref 3 )

For many decades now, evidence has accumulated showing the many ways in which the Borrelia bacteria evades the immune system. Furthermore, the discovery of relapsing fever-type Borrelia like B. miyamotoi , and other species that are routinely missed by antibody based tests, mean that we are not equipped to detect Borrelia infections by methods based on the immune response.

What detects Borrelia burgdorferi sensu stricto B31 strain or those antigenically closest to it (the original basis for all current antibody tests) may be totally irrelevant to some of the Borrelia species and strains circulating in the brains and spinal cords of extremely ill people. We have very little knowledge of wild-type strains, and these are not used in the immune based tests, including the type of test proposed here.

So why this test? This is a cosmetic move to falsely lower the apparent incidence rate of Lyme borreliosis on a pseudoscientific basis.

At the same time it allows the governments of Europe to pretend they are doing something concrete to address the epidemic. The public pressure has been mounting in recent years - especially in France, where several dozen patients are currently suing their government.

We can understand why an infamous Denialist like Stanek would be keen to promote such a test, and why the US Defence department, for whom Borrelia is a militarily sensitive subject, would encourage its partner to do so.

What is much harder to understand is the overwhelming ignorance and gullibility of "leading lights" in the Lyme patients' movement who fall over themselves to laud every false and deceitful move made by our enemies.

During the First World War, the US public health authorities, then, as now, under the ultimate control of the military, insisted that the Spanish Flu epidemic was really nothing to be alarmed about, and that people should remain calm.

As citizens watched body after body carted away in their neighbourhoods, their children, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers among them, they lost confidence in their government.

Perhaps we can forgive the actions of the US government in those days - after all, they had no real protective equipment or anti-viral medicines to offer the afflicted public during the terrible days of the Spanish Flu, which claimed an estimated twenty million lives - more than the War itself.

But today we have the technology and we have an armoury of medicines which, if used for long enough and in the correct manner, can potentially cure Borreliosis: so the denial of diagnosis and correct treatment is unforgivable.

What is acutely pathetic about this whole situation is that in the space of just a year, phenomenal progress has been made in understanding the true nature and ramifications of Borreliosis, its relationship to parasitic nematode worms (which shelter it both from exposure to the immune system , and from treatments), and the ability to identify these infections using cast-iron, DNA-based methods.

I am referring to the exemplary work done by Dr Alan MacDonald and his Dr Paul Duray Research Fellowship Endowment.

John Caudwell seems to believe that a 2 million Euro initiative stage-managed by Europe's biggest Lyme denialist is somehow going to help patients. Yet he ignored an appeal signed by 266 doctors, researchers and patients to donate some money from his own huge 2 billion fortune to aid Dr MacDonald's research.

Members of the various support committees backing Dr MacDonald's work, including myself, spent much time trying to explain the huge importance and scientific significance of Dr MacDonald's extraordinary achievements using his Molecular Beacon DNA probes and FISH method, as well as nematode detection procedures, to uncover evidence of a combined Borrelia-plus-nematode worm infection involved in Alzheimer's disease. Lewy Body dementia, Multiple Sclerosis and the deadly brain cancer Glioblastoma multiforme, as well as to confirm the presence of Borreliosis in many patients negative on immune response-based tests.

This is phenomenal work, and if the Foundation had been able to repeat its experiments on a larger scale, could have led not only to a massive improvement in diagnosis and treatment approaches for those who already suspect they have chronic Borreliosis, but potentially for millions of others with neurodegenerative disease.

Sadly, Mr. Caudwell chose not to donate a single penny to Dr MacDonald's research initiative. Neither has this research ever received any funding from Pat Smith's Lyme Disease Association in USA, not from Lyme Disease Action in the UK (two major Lyme campaigns which both advocate the pipe dream of a "partnership" with our enemies as the way forward.)

In the case of the appeal for funds to Mr. Caudwell with its 266 signatories, the fundraising committee did not even receive an acknowledgment of its letter.

Mr. Caudwell is relatively new to Lyme, having only recently learned that it is the cause of the tragedies in his own family. Nor is he a person of scientific or medical background. However, it appears that Mr. Caudwell is taking advice from people who have their own agenda, and who have convinced him that rather than fund Dr MacDonald, he should be promoting initiatives by the IDSA guidelines author Dr. Stanek.

Mr. Caudwell needs to acknowledge that he has no expertise in Lyme scientific matters, and to understand that those advising him do not either, or perhaps do - but have certain agendas of their own.

Ironically, Dr. MacDonald's FISH DNA probe research has been uncovering the involvement of Borrelia in psychiatric disorders -  a matter of great relevance to Mr. Caudwell, whose son's life has been in limbo since childhood due to what was for years considered a "psychiatric illness". (See Ref 6)

Who knows whether this work could benefit not only Mr. Caudwell's son, but thousands of others similarly languishing with lives destroyed and convenient "psychiatric" labels. Ask any psychiatrist what his or her cure rate is for the myriad mental diseases they diagnose - and they will look at you blankly. The cure rate has hovered on the zero mark for millennia.

It is tragic, but with no funding forthcoming from those organisations and individuals in the Lyme patients' movement who do have substantial resources, the incredibly vital research that Dr. MacDonald has been doing may have to close. The Duray foundation is a non-profit foundation, and receives no funding from any government or industry sources.

It is a research effort solidly grounded in the welfare of patients, and supported by patients - not IDSA guidelines authors or the US military.

Despite crowd-funding from intelligent patients and the best efforts of volunteers, Dr. MacDonald was forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars of his own money to purchase the specialist equipment and services he needed to make the landmark discoveries he made. Information on these discoveries can be seen on the websites of the Duray Foundation and Spirochaetal Alzheimers Association (Refs 4 and 5 )

In sum, I suspect that Mr. Caudwell actually has no idea just who Gerald Stanek is. l could have advised him, but I have been effectively cut off from communicating not just with him but with almost the entire British Lyme movement, as I have been banned from just about every British electronic Lyme forum that exists. Why? Because I refuse to stop pointing out the biowarfare aspect of this coverup - something we will have to face and overcome if we are ever to make progress, justy as those harmed by Agent Orange had to expose the matter before they could hope to gain any recognition, much less compensation, for their injuries.

I have also been banned from UK Lyme forums because I refuse to condone initiatives based on "partnering" with out enemies - something that the Lyme movement has been attempting to do now for over 40 years.

In forty years, all we have to show for it is a mountain of destroyed and broken lives - our own.

Ref 1:
http://www.hse.gov.uk/aboutus/meetings/committees/acdp/161012/acdp_99_p62.pdf

Ref 2






Ref 5

ref 6