Today’s letter to Shapiro with Cc: to the Tick-Borne Disease Working Group
Lyme Bumper Stickers (Public Service Announcement)
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WAKE UP AMERICA!
-------- Original Message ----------
From: CARL TUTTLE <runagain@comcast.net>
To: tickbornedisease@hhs.gov, eugene.shapiro@yale.edu
Cc: (98 Undisclosed Recipients)
Date: June 5, 2019 at 9:36 AM
Subject: Re: Shapiro named to the Tick-Borne Disease Working Group panel
June 6, 2019
Yale Pediatric Infectious Disease
Yale New Haven Children's Hospital
1 Park Street, Ste West Pavilion - 2nd Floor
New Haven, CT 06504
Attn: Eugene Shapiro, MD Professor of Pediatrics
Dr. Shapiro,
Your appointment to the Tick-Borne Disease Working Group has raised a red flag as you have spent your career discrediting the sick and disabled Lyme patient community and the courageous clinicians attempting to help these patients. [1]
Might I remind you that you refused to answer a serious question I presented to you and Dr. Wormser through my letter to the editor published in JAMA last December:
Controversies About Lyme Disease
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2718786
Excerpt:
“It is well known that untreated streptococcal pharyngitis can progress to rheumatic fever, causing irreversible heart damage. Untreated syphilis leads to progressive disability and dementia, and untreated human immunodeficiency virus infection progresses to AIDS with significant disability and death. What happens to a patient with Lyme disease who goes months, years, or decades before diagnosis because of a false-negative serological test result? Shapiro and Wormser do not discuss the consequences of untreated Lyme disease in their Viewpoint.”
Post Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome (PTLDS) after early treatment and untreated Lyme of months, years or decades are two entirely different disease states; the latter being ignored for three decades. Patients who have had a prolonged exposure to the pathogen are almost always incapacitated.
Purposely avoiding the advanced stage of disease hides the horribly disabled and anyone unable to see this is somewhat naive.
Untreated Lyme is destroying lives, ending careers while leaving the patient in financial ruin as reported by the disabled Lyme community for the past three decades. The absence of a bulls-eye rash after tick bite allows patients to progress to severe neurological disease instead of obtaining a prompt diagnosis and early treatment. It is well known that 20% of those who are treated early do not recover.
Recent Examples:
A previously healthy cadet was found unfit for duty receiving a 100% service connected disability after discharged from active military service:
1. Latent Lyme Disease Resulting in Chronic Arthritis and Early Career Termination in a United States Army Officer (Published: 06 March 2019)
https://academic.oup.com/milmed/advance-article/doi/10.1093/milmed/usz026/5370051?searchresult=1
2. Nicole Malachowski: Unfit for Duty from Debilitating Tick-Borne Disease
http://cdmrp.army.mil/cwg/stories/2018/nicole_malachowski_profile
“Her medical retirement, however, was premature. At only 43 years old, she was deemed unfit for duty due to neurological damage from tick-borne illness.”
While researching the mishandling of Lyme disease it has become crystal clear that Lyme was pigeonholed into its current status as a nuisance disease (hard to catch and easily treated) because a chronic relapsing seronegative disease does not fit the vaccine model.
Prior to 1994 (Dearborn) the seriousness of Lyme disease was found in many publications.
I would like to call attention to the following press release originally published in 1990 interviewing Dr. Allen Steere who became the principal investigator for the first Lyme disease vaccine licensed in 1998.
In this article Steere admits to persistent infection (chronic Lyme disease).
Lyme disease can remain dormant for years
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1990/11/21/Lyme-disease-can-remain-dormant-for-years/8201659163600/
We have a critical need to find a curative approach for a disabling disease as current antimicrobials DO NOT WORK and we have lost nearly forty years to vaccine development when we should have been focusing on finding a curative approach for this antibiotic resistant/tolerant superbug. [2, 3, 4, 5,6]
If you are not 100% committed to promoting a cure for chronic Lyme disease then you do not belong on our Tick-Borne Disease Working Group and I ask that you resign from this position immediately.
Respectfully submitted,
Carl Tuttle
Lyme Endemic Hudson, NH
Cc: The Tick-Borne Disease Working Group
REFERENCES (Please read them!)
1. Lyme disease antiscience
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(12)70054-3/fulltext
2. Stationary Phase Persister/Biofilm Microcolony of Borrelia burgdorferi Causes More Severe Disease in a Mouse Model of Lyme Arthritis: Implications for Understanding Persistence, Post-Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome (PTLDS), and Treatment Failure
Published on March 28, 2019
3. Peer Reviewed Evidence of Persistence of Lyme Disease Spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi and Tick-Borne Diseases (700 Articles)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/n09sk90eo6xz7ua/700%20articles%20LYME%20EvidenceofPersistence-V2.pdf?dl=0
4. Seronegativity in Lyme borreliosis and Other Spirochetal Infections
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3d6m45jzlhhwalu/Seronegativity.pdf?dl=0
5. Deaths from Lyme Disease
https://www.dropbox.com/s/eo794dx7zspc1ln/Ld%20deaths.doc?dl=0
6. Congenital Transmission of Lyme
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z10em0szgpm8bll/Congenital%20Transmission%20of%20Lyme%202015.doc?dl=0