Cure Unknown (Revised Edition): Inside the Lyme Epidemic by Weintraub Pamela

Author:Weintraub, Pamela [Weintraub, Pamela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

33

A Note from the Underground

Colorado Springs, Colorado, 2003

As the doctors had warned, the flush of energy after the photo safari began to wane, and soon Dave Martz was sicker than before. By the fall, he couldn’t get out of his chair unless Dee pulled him up. He couldn’t walk more than a hundred feet, or stand for more than fifteen minutes. She had to roll him over in bed and help him dress. He’d be in a wheelchair in less than six months, his doctors emphasized, so he’d better get ready to die.

Falling deeper into illness, Martz might have accepted his fate, gone on with the process of dying, if not for his son, a northern Virginia genetic engineer working on the human genome. Talking to any expert he could get his hands on, Martz’s son was told that people with Lyme disease failed the blood tests all the time. Negative tests, alone, could not rule Lyme out.

Then, in December, a friend of Dave’s son noticed a newspaper article published some months before in the Danbury, Connecticut, News-Times. Amazingly, the article described another patient, also diagnosed with ALS, who’d been treated for Lyme disease and gotten well. The man in question, Tom Coffey of Fredericks County, Pennsylvania, had been diagnosed with ALS in 2001 and given a few months to live. His steps were faltering, his speech slurred. He couldn’t swallow his own saliva, let alone food, and had been scheduled for a tracheotomy and ventilation support in a few days’ time.

“I couldn’t cough or laugh,” Coffey told the crowd at a Lyme disease symposium held at the New Milford High School in April 2003. “And I had what I can only describe as a constant pressure on my brain. I think my doctors thought I was faking it, or losing my mind.”

According to the article, Coffey had questioned the ALS diagnosis, finally seeking help from a Lyme doctor, who placed him on an intensive, long-term regimen of antibiotics until he recovered his health.

“I’m just so grateful to be liberated from the hell of Lyme disease,” Coffey told the group.

Martz knew he wasn’t reading the New England Journal of Medicine here, just a local newspaper story; still, he took the quoted experts to heart. Especially compelling to him was the idea, put forth by a Dr. Steve Phillips of Ridgefield, Connecticut, that the outer proteins of the spirochetes changed, sometimes making it hard to pick the disease up on antibody tests. The implication, to Martz: To scout out Lyme, you sometimes needed to look not for traces of the spirochetal proteins detected on Western blots and ELISAs, but for B. burgdorferi DNA. Among the diseases that Lyme patients could be misdiagnosed with, the doctors at the conference had ticked off not just ALS, but multiple sclerosis, lupus, even rheumatoid arthritis. They also mentioned coinfections of Lyme disease, including, Martz noted, babesiosis—a ringer for malaria and treatable with the same medication, Lariam, that had coincided with the unexpected temporary improvement in his own declining health during the Kenya safari.

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