Prestigious French scientist on why a vaccine based on Osps must fail in Europe

[LymeRayja]

This comes from Dr Postic, of the world-renowned Institut Pasteur:

".[in Europe] where the main species, B. garinii, is also the one with
the most heterogeneous Outer Surface proteins, [Osps], the [Lymerix]
vaccine is unusable, because the antibodies generated by this vaccine
will not recognise these proteins. ******This also explains the fact
that one cannot envisage a vaccine, based on the outer membrane
proteins, (which are the most immunogenic but also the most variable),
that can ever be effective by all the pathogenic strains present in
Europe*****."

Dr Daniele Postic
Unite de Bacteriologie Moleculaire et Medicale
Institut Pasteur

The proposed new European vaccine contains OspA from a mix of
burgdorferi sub-types. But that's only a few strains. We have no idea
how many strains we may have (and maybe, we need to be looking at
non-burgdorferi borrelia species too, or at the very least, the
possibility of other burgdorferi sensu lato species not yet
discovered?)

And there are other factors at work too.

Or are we about to repeat the Lymerix fiasco in Europe, and injure or
activate latent Lyme in thousands of people, as Lymerix did in the US?

Oh well. McSweegan did say recently that it would be good to launch an
OspA based vaccine in Europe, because **we have no Lyme advocacy
movement here**.
Lisa

[Nutcracker]

LymeRayja wrote:
> Or are we about to repeat the Lymerix fiasco in Europe, and injure or
> activate latent Lyme in thousands of people, as Lymerix did in the US?

Let's ask Joel to write another excellent paper about the vaccine, and
then use that as our position paper!