testing for only 1 of 100 strains = seronegativity

here's today's ammunition for dealing with MD's
who are uncertain, ambivalent, or outright hostile to
the patient with Antibody Negative Lyme or Chronic Lyme
best,
alan
PS: Please post for me foryou group to read
thanks
_____________________________
B31is the Burgdorferi strain sub-name of ONE STRAIN of LYME disease
causing borrelia in the USA. Actually, it came from a tick gut, and B31
never saw human blood before it was recruited by the CDC to
represent ALL POSSIBLE strains of Borrelia.This was a disastrous
decision because of the huge limitations of using only one Strain
for ALL Testing of human blood ,when more than 100 strains
which are genetically distinct from B31 are actually out there
causing human disease.
Positive blood tests are great ,but Negative blood tests do not exclude
the other 99 strain Genotypes which can cause human disease.

The "31" in B31 does not refer to the 31kd protein which is OspA,.
Instead it is a tribute to the three names beginning with
"B;" Burgdorfer, Barbour, Benach - all key players in the
discovery of the microbe.

I do not have primers for the 100 strains.
Primers are a different issue. Each primer pair "set" is designed to
amplify a small segment [up to 500-1000 bases] of the target .
The Chromosome contains about 1 million bases, and each of the
mini-chromosome plasmids contains several thousand bases.
Genotypes are strains in which the DNA entire
may vary from the B31 by at least one base or more- [usually more bases
are different in each of the "geno-vars". So since Dna-Rna-Protein synthesis
is inked,
the proteins produced by each of the Geno-vars is different from the proteins
of the B31 clone.
Ergo, One "geno-var"[ B31 strain] is ineffective in screening for patient
antibodies for 99 out of 100 "geno-vars". The actual number of Geno-vars
in the USA a worldwide is unknown. We do know that the USA test kit misses
many patients with Borrelia infection, because it is only capable of
detecting a very limited set of antibodies, and because it will miss
many of the "wild " Borrelia which infect humans.
So , Take home message" The Negatives in USA Lyme test kits
are not a good diagnostic tool.
A recent paper has further underscored the point that
when patients have European borrelia infections [Afzelii, garinii, or European
burgdorf variants]
that USA Test kits frequently will fail to find evidence of the antibodies which
patients
produced because the test kit proteins are different for European borrelia
when compared with USA borrelia.
Remember that in the USA according to Dr Benjamin Luft, Dr Mark Eshoo, and Dr
Eva Sapi
that in excess of 100 different DNAs are recorded.
so use of One Strain of Borrelia [B31} for ALL USA Test kits to detect ALL
possible
burgdorferi genotype variants is an exercise in futility.
We need a kit or method which adequately represents
ALL of the borrelia DNAs {plural} which are out there causing
disease.
Best,
Alan MacDonald MD, FCAP, FASCP
August 1,2013