DNA Crimes, Chapter 539; Borrelia mastersi (1995)

[Mort Zuckerman]

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Subject: DNA Crimes, Chapter 539; Borrelia mastersi (1995)

Date: Sep 12, 2008 7:57 PM

http://www.actionlyme.org/index.htm

Welcome to RelapsingFever.org ICD-9 Diagnostic Code 0871:
http://www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov/toolssoftware/chronic/CCI2008.csv


The only MD who ever claimed that Lyme was a Relapsing Fever organism
was Allen
Steere in 1986. These crooks have been lying about how the testing
should be done
for it and playing a shell game with the DNA ever since. For
instance, the crooks,
Gary Wormser in particular, pulled the wool over the eyes of Edwin
Masters and said
that because Master's bug has no OspA gene in it, it wasn't "Lyme
disease."
Master's Disease is Bovine Relapsing Fever. It was patented in 1996
by CDC
Officer Alan Barbour:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5,932,220.PN.&OS=PN/5,932,220&RS=PN/5,932,220

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=11158095
: (2001):
Phylogenetic analysis. Borrelia gene sequences were initially aligned
with the CLUSTALW
program (28). Corrections to alignments were made manually,
particularly in the
case of the fla gene, where the algorithm failed to preserve the codon
reading frame.
The sequences that we derived from B. theileri and the Amblyomma agent
were compared
with representative Borrelia 16S rDNA and fla gene sequences
accessioned in GenBank
(Table 1). When the Harvard laboratory submitted the sequences for the
Amblyomma
agent to GenBank in October 1995 (1), those for B. lonestari (2) were
under embargo
and unavailable for comparison. At the time we had provisionally named
this spirochete
B. barbouri, in honor of Alan Barbour's many contributions to the
study of Borrelia
biology. The sequences accessioned under the names B. lonestari and B.
barbouri
are identical and derive from the same entity; pending a formal
designation in Bergey's
Manual, we here use the term Amblyomma agent to refer to it.


It's not named mastersi because that would be honest. No one's even
told
Ed Masters that he'd been hoodwinked by Gary Wormser in Wormser's
Primers
Shell Game, still, to this day:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=DetailsSearch&Term=masters[All+Fields]+AND+wormser[All+Fields]+AND+(%22borrelia%22[MeSH+Terms]+OR+%22borrelia%22[All+Fields]

No Relapsing Fever infection is curable with anything. People may
think they're
cured but they're walking around with a Trojan Horse in their brains.
http://www.actionlyme.org/SIKAND.htm

"It is well known that Borrelia burgdorferi indeed after
asymptomatic infection
can lurk or secrete itself in certain areas of the body, perhaps the
central nervous
system or perhaps the joint spaces, only to reappear months or maybe
years later
in the form of late stages of illness which are harder to diagnosis
and treat.

"It is probably worth noting, since I have learned a lot, that we
don't
have the clinical luxury in private practice that we had in the
SmithKline Beecham
trial in which we had baseline sera on all the patients who enrolled
so that when
they presented with symptoms, we could draw acute and convalescent
serologies so
as to compare them with each other and with baseline to better
understand what symptoms
they are presenting with.

Finally, there are indeed many dilemmas in therapy. In
particular, untreated
or inadequately treated Lyme disease may lead to the chronic morbidity
with which
we are very familiar. Most commonly arthritis and the not common but
complex neurological
syndromes are what often result and which confront the primary care
physician in
the office diagnostically and therapeutically.

These particular outcomes result in much more intensive, long-term
expensive
therapy, often in the form of long-term intravenous antibiotics.
These are the
patients who often are refractory to treatment. Indeed, these are the
patients
in whom symptoms seem to persist despite what we have given in terms
of adequate
antibiotic therapy by any known measure.

In conclusion, we need a vaccine for Lyme disease because it is
increasing in
incidence and geographic spread. We need a vaccine for Lyme disease
because there
are problems in clinical diagnosis, its
laboratory evaluation, and its treatment. We need a vaccine for
Lyme disease
because preventive measures are unfortunately ineffective. Lyme
disease is indeed
vaccine preventable. Availability of this vaccine would lead to a
significant reduction
in chronic sequelae and substantive morbidity. Lyme vaccine is thus a
critical
new public health approach to the primary prevention of Lyme disease
in the United
States. Thank you very much."--

Vijay Sikand, EAST LYME, CT
===========

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Stringing Together The Clues of DNA
Fairfax Lab Solves World's Mysteries

By Michael Laris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 12, 2008; B01

That some people can't see the connection between JonBenet Ramsey's
long
johns and the charred bones from a mass grave in Peru doesn't surprise
Ed Huffine.

Huffine has spent his life exploring the thin scientific strands that
connect such
tabloid stories with the unwritten histories of places that are easy
to ignore.

With the same understated, patient tone he has used for decades --
first as a top
U.S. military expert on soldiers' remains, then as leader of
international efforts
to identify victims of massacres in Bosnia -- Huffine, a top executive
at the Lorton-based
DNA identification lab Bode Technology, walks though the connections
he finds amid
the static.

"You see, DNA technology never works in a vacuum," Huffine said. "If
you improve a technique that might help get DNA results from a very
challenging
environment, like in the JonBenet Ramsey case, those same types of
techniques could
be used to help identify people who are missing in other countries. It
could help
to address systematic and government-sponsored rape in other
countries, and so on."

And so, on a typical afternoon in a lab near a landfill and storage
warehouse in
Fairfax County, scientists can be found churning through shipments of
bones and
samples and swabs from a world of cases. Technicians with hammers and
centrifuges
and lasers are using extraction techniques developed in Bosnia to help
decipher
13,000 bone fragments from the World Trade Center.

Experience with the Trade Center, where bones were subjected to
intense heat, is
in turn applied to the work in Peru, where soldiers tried to hide
killings by burning
bodies.

"It's very September 11-like material. It's very degraded," said
Jose Pablo Baraybar, executive director of the Peruvian Forensic
Anthropology Team,
which has been sending exhumed remains from a massacre in southern
Peru's Accomarca
area to Lorton. "There are a lot of children. That's a problem. The
bones
are very fragile."

Catching criminals by using genetic clues has become commonplace in
courtrooms and
ubiquitous on crime dramas. Bode's work on the remains flowing into
its Virginia
headquarters shows how leaders, lawyers and investigators are seizing
lessons from
here and around the world to spread DNA's impact to new areas.

The grinding work is being done by a cadre of investigators at Bode
and beyond who
are surprisingly philosophical and upbeat for people who spend their
days handling
disturbing evidence of tragedy.

"Day to day, we're motivated by the challenges, the techniques, the
science,
technology improvements," said Mike Cariola, vice president of
forensic operations
for the firm. "But at the end of the day . . . there's an impact. It's
solving crimes; it's making identification of remains from 20 or 30
years before.
It's always been something that's just been incredibly motivating."

This summer, Bode's discovery of skin cells on 6-year-old JonBenet's
long
johns helped clear her parents and brother in her killing. So-called
"touch
DNA" can find results without blood drops or swabs.

A similar analysis of skin cells found on the handle of a bloody bat
in Howard County
provided key evidence in the killing of a teenage boy there last year.

Bode has translated its work on an estimated 40,000 criminal cases
into a focus
on unraveling mass tragedies and human rights abuses around the world.
The analysis
of thousands of bone fragments from the World Trade Center led to
hundreds of DNA
matches.

Bode's results are also being used to help build a case against a
longtime Montgomery
County resident and former Peruvian lieutenant accused of conspiring
to commit war
crimes.

Juan Manuel Rivera Rondon was part of a planning meeting with fellow
Army officers
before a group of Peruvian villagers was massacred in 1985.


Bode has compared DNA profiles from the villagers' bones to reference
samples
from family members, helping to create a scientific tally of victims
-- a key point
for any possible prosecutions. A Peruvian forensic report at the time
catalogued
ribs and other bones. But it could state definitively only that six
people were
killed, because that was the number of heads that were found. The
updated toll is
69.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) earmarked $3 million for groups in Peru,
Guatemala,
El Salvador and Argentina to use DNA to uncover abuses. Bode is doing
some of the
analysis in the effort, which is overseen by the State Department's
Bureau of
Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

Rivera Rondon's unit is accused of blocking a possible escape route
and burning
houses nearby, but not of the killings. In an interview, his court-
appointed attorney,
Cary J. Hansel, said Rivera Rondon had no advance knowledge of any
plans to kill
civilians and harmed no one.

On Aug. 15 federal agents flew Rivera Rondon, who had been in a
Maryland detention
center, to Peru, where he was turned over to local authorities.

Bode will also analyze a separate set of bones that Baraybar's team
unearthed
in May from a mass grave in a village called Putis. Residents there
were told to
dig a trout pond, then were buried in it. "We are also trying to
preserve the
memory of the forgotten," Baraybar said.

DNA can document hidden patterns and cut through lies, said Huffine,
who is vice
president of Bode's humanitarian efforts.

After Huffine arrived in Bosnia in 1999, Serb leaders were still
denying that there
had been a massacre in the eastern city of Srebrenica. Serbian leaders
said victims
in mass graves were Serbs, or suicides.

"We'd find a leg in one grave, an arm in one grave and a skull in
another
grave," Huffine said. "Suicide victims don't migrate."

Huffine, who lives in Springfield, started working with DNA after
finding out that
his wife was having twins. He was in graduate school at the University
of Oklahoma
and needed insurance, and the Federal Aviation Administration needed a
DNA lab to
handle plane crashes. He later headed part of the Armed Forces DNA
Identification
Laboratory in Rockville, where he developed new techniques for
deciphering the weathered,
aging remains of service members.

He moved to Bode after leaving Bosnia in 2004. The company, with 90
employees, was
founded 13 years ago. Now Huffine inspects parcels of evidence from
some of the
world's harshest conflicts.

After a disputed election in Kenya last year, women reported being
gang-raped. But
there was little ability to test the samples locally. Earlier this
year, hundreds
of samples started arriving in Lorton. Most show multiple male
profiles.

"We might be able to determine if it's the same group of men
responsible
for these attacks," Huffine said. "DNA can't tell you if there's
sponsorship going on, but it can tell you if there are patterns."

Some of the cases farthest from home hit him hardest. Earlier this
summer, Pedro
Aragonez, a Bode collaborator who was the lead DNA scientist in
northern Mexico,
was assassinated. He fought organized crime and was working with Bode
on identifying
missing women.

"In some cases, you might be committing an entire generation to this
work,"
Huffine said.

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