IDSA Guidelines Author Bockenstedt Contravenes Regulations to Evade Verification of her Findings

http://www.elenacook.org/macdonaldjci2012.html

Dr Linda Bockenstedt is a Yale-based author of the deeply-flawed Lyme Disease guidelines issued by IDSA in 2006. Recently, she published a study purporting to show that signs of persisting Borrelia burgdorferi in antibiotic-treated mice (and, by implication, in humans with chronic Lyme Disease), were nothing more than the remnants of dead bacteria (1). She did not explain why this "debris" should, exceptionally, resist all normal immune mechanisms for clearing dead microbe remnants in a mammalian host.

Images accompanying her publication attracted the attention of Dr Alan B. Macdonald, who is currently researching Biofilms of Borrelia along with Dr Eva Sapi and her team at University of New Haven, Connecticut. This collaboration recently resulted in the first-ever study demonstrating Biofilm formation by Borrelia burgdorferi in vitro. (2).

Biofilms are highly organised structures produced by microbes on both living and non-living surfaces. One of their main functions is protective; they are notorious for shielding bacteria from harmful environmental influences, including the presence of antibiotics.

Dr. Macdonald believes that the bacteria, clearly seen glowing green in Dr. Bockenstedt's images (due to Green Fluorescent Protein DNA recombinantly inserted into the Lyme bacteria's infectivity plasmid Cp26) represents a mixture of live and possibly dead Borrelia biofilm community members in the mouse tissue, as opposed to all completely dead, as she alleges.The term "amorphous globs" used by Dr. Bockenstedt to describe the fluorescent material is unscientific. It has never appeared in any published article in any language describing Borreliosis in any living host.

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