Bartonella is Becoming the Most Important Issue in Treatment of Lyme

by Dr. James Schaller, M.D.

Bartonella may be one of the most important issues in the treatment of Lyme disease. Why? In last month's issue we showed it was a staggering immune-suppressive infection. We have visualized these unusual bacteria covering red blood cells, and yet the patient had no fever. If this were any other bacteria, e.g., Staph or Strep, the patient would be dead in days! At this time, I believe it is impossible to fully kill off all Lyme in the presence of Bartonella, simply because we know from many specialized labs that Bartonella turns off immunity in many ways missed until recently. Lyme body volume will go down with treatment but not a cure. How could it with an infection that is so powerful it turns off immune chemicals to allow it to safely float in the blood?

It is also very easy to miss because no lab in the world can test for all the new species. New Bartonella species are being found every month using DNA techniques similar to those used to map and identify our human genomes. Some unpublished research talks about 32 species and 212 variants. An antibody test for one is one too few if it is another strain. We currently are using a wide range of labs to identify Bartonella. One sample lab, which still occasionally misses noticing it, was discussed in the August 2007 issue.

The Use of Skin Findings to Diagnose or to Raise the Possibility of Bartonella

Some of these proposed skin findings we feel are solidly diagnostic of Bartonella. And with new advanced and diverse lab testing which looks for Bartonella over 8 ways, we find the positive labs match these proposed Bartonella skin findings very well. Therefore, since routine lab testing done is very poor, and since even one large lab is raising its titer cut off for a positive, due to so many positive "past" infections that are supposedly "not clinically meaningful," we can use all the help we can get in diagnosis. And since Bartonella has far more ways of infecting humans and damages all organs in 12-20 ways, we feel offering a sample of some of our images now could save lives, decrease illness, prevent psychiatric acting out and prevent organ damage. While vast numbers of images of Bartonella will be in my upcoming books, The 16 Reasons Lyme Disease Treatment Fails and The Diagnosis and Treatment of Bartonella, the editor and I agreed it was too important to delay at least a sample of these materials.

See a variety of Dr. Schaller’s Bartonella Photo Gallery in this issue on page 2.