THE FIRST OF THE FIVE When you go to a Doctor with a tick bite, there are things the doctor may not know about tick-borne diseases that you need to know. Why Blood Tests often fail to detect Lyme: …
Source: Five Things That You Need to Know About Lyme Disease
When you go to a Doctor with a tick bite, there are things the doctor may not know about tick-borne diseases that you need to know.
Why Blood Tests often fail to detect Lyme: After a known tick bite, it may take 4-6 weeks after the tick bite to make enough antibodies to test positive on a Lyme disease screening ELISA blood test or a Western Blot.
This is bad for us because it has known since the 1950s that Borrelia infections can be induced in rats using just one spirochete that is injected from a micropipette. But the rat takes about four months to manifest its first symptoms and it only develops a weak spirochetemia, but the spirochetes have had time to quietly reach the brain.
To wait 4-6 weeks after a tick-bite to receive antibiotics is too long to wait. Yet this has been the recommendation of many Ivy League Infectious-Disease doctors.
The simple reason of why we need immediate treatments is that most Borrelia species can leave the blood stream quickly by creating holes in our blood vessels and entering other tissues where the bacteria can better thrive such as the brain. Longstanding Borrelia infections in the brain can be insidious and devastating.
There are many other reasons that serology based antibody tests can fail and give us false negative results. The first reason I already mentioned some infected Lyme disease patients don’t make adequate antibodies to test positive, another is the methods of measuring antibodies is flawed.
Most Lyme Blood Tests Use B31 Antigens: All serology blood tests need to start with a source of the bacteria that we are looking for. In other words if you are looking for the Lyme bacterium Borrelia kurtenbachia, for best results you need to create your blood test with wild strain B. kurtenbachia preferably from the area you were bitten. We now have about eight known Lyme species of Borrelia in America and another half dozen in Europe and more species are being found every year, but the tests we use are based on one strain of Borrelia burgdorferi that isn’t even found in nature.
Lab Strain B-31 friend or foe?: Manufacturers use Lab Strain B-31 because: it never changes from division to division, it grows easily in culture and is readily available, and last but not least is it saves time and money to use a lab strain. The trouble is that this is a terrible representation of the range of bacteria in the real world that causes Lyme disease or more accurately “Borreliosis” .
Even the Pasteur Institute has commented on the shortcomings of using B-31 as the main source of Borrelia antigen to make Lyme blood tests. The B-31 tests have repeatedly shown that they do not have sensitivities that are as strong as using local wild strains of Borrelia. This is why labs like IGenix that use wild strain 297 get better results and more accurate results. Critics have claimed that the increase of positives seen in the IGenix Blood Tests are false positives but the IGenix tests simply picks up the antibodies that B-31 based tests are incapable of detecting.
Immune Suppression of the Compliment System: Another characteristic of Borrelia burgdorferi that suppresses the immune response is that from the time the tick feeds on your warm blood and then infects you, the bacteria have already began producing a protein to fool your immune system by blocking the human compliment-cascade which can kill most bacteria, and tag other bacteria to be killed.
Surface proteins constantly change: Then for the bacteria that remain in the blood the Borrelia bacteria are able to change surface proteins quick enough that the human body cannot keep up and cannot produce the right antibodies quickly enough to kill the bacteria. So blood tests are always struggling to recognize the bacteria’s antibody signature and in many cases the blood tests look to be negative when the active infection is merely in constant change. Borrelia is the “quick-change” artist of the bacteria world.
Now that you know what many doctors don’t, DO NOT LEAVE the doctor’s office without antibiotics! He can gamble with his own family’s life and health, but realistically he would probably demand antibiotics for his own family whether he admits it or not.
Tom Grier
Bakken LL, Callister SM, Wand PJ, Schell RF (1997) Interlaboratory comparison of test results for detection of Lyme disease by 516 participants in the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene/College of American Pathologists Proficiency Testing Program. J. Clin. Microbiol. 35(3):537-43 (PMC229622) View Abstract · Pubmed Record
Bakken LL, Case KL, Callister SM, Bourdeau NJ, Schell RF (1992) Performance of 45 laboratories participating in a proficiency testing program for Lyme disease serology. JAMA 268(7):891-5 View Abstract · Pubmed Record
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