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Hacker News Hacker NewsAny interventions would have to be targeted directly at the B. burgdorferi to disrupt their internal regulation of manganese. It's a long shot used to make this research discovery sound more impressive, not an actual cure.
Your own body uses manganese for critical processes like your metabolism, critical brain functionality, and generating important antioxidants in your mitochondria (MnSOD, the same one mentioned inside of Lyme in the article).
Your body also regulates manganese absorption and excretion. Manganese deficiency is extremely rare outside of genetic conditions or other medical problems which interfere with this regulation. You can't really starve yourself of manganese by adjusting your diet or even by periods of fasting.
So if you're reading this and thinking you could defeat Lyme by starving yourself of manganese or overdosing on manganese, don't. That's not what this article is saying.
One such assumption is that borreliosis is always the same. But researchers have been able to capture on video the morphosis of borreliosis spirochets to biofilm, and also spirochets hiding inside red blood cells. Antibiotics apparently only work on some of these forms, thus if you are using antibiotics to cure yourself, you need long-term antibiotics to permanently kill borreliosis.
There is actually a whole subculture of hobbyists investigating their own blood samples, prepared in certain way, to capture on video how the borreliosis emerges when the red blood cells die.
Lyme is actually not a single disease but a syndrome of borreliosis together with some co-infections. These co-infections appear to work synergistically together. If you reduce the amount of one of them, others increase in numbers, weakening you so that the original co-infection can make a comeback.
Also, sometimes curing borreliosis or co-infections can make you feel worse. This is called the Herxheimer reaction. One of the reasons for this seems to be that sometimes the symptoms are actually not due to the co-infections themselves, but toxins that are released in your body when the co-infections die within the body. Thus, the more effective the cure, the more toxins, and you feel worse.
If I remember correctly, there are around 40 subspecies of borreliosis. The tests can recognize only few of these.
I also remember reading about research where random people (without symptoms) were tested for certain types of borreliosis. If I remember correctly, around 15% tested positive. This means that actually many of us may carry these diseases, but at a level that does not cause symptoms. But if our body is weakened, these diseases may become active.
As and outdoor-hobbies type person I've had it 3 out of 4 previous years and have begun sourcing antibiotics from agricultural suppliers, or directly from India. Contrast this to my childhood in the same region, when tick-borne diseases were never even a blip on the radar. Supposedly this is because of climate change and much warmer winters allow deer ticks to spread rapidly.
From my own anecdotes and research, none of the traditional guidance is accurate:
-Never had a bullseye rash
-Never had a tick attached more than 24 hours
-When a tick was attached around 24 hours, infection rate was close to 50% and symptoms appeared within 10 days. Contrast to ~3% infection rate per cdc average.
...I suppose the sad irony here is that lyme is not getting attention because well... current generations never touch grass and the outbreak never appears as bad as it actually is.