forwarded from UK: Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium is a very nasty one with many tricks up its sleeve to evade detection. It is like something out of a horror movie. It is also commonly accompanied by co-infections such as babesia which are also insidious and cruel. Together with others, they produce over a hundred symptoms which defy categorisation and so the medical profession has chosen an easier response which is to deny its existence in most patients. The only exception is those who present with a classic bulls-eye rash who will then get antibiotic treatment. Hopefully that knocks it out before it can spiral too deeply into tissue, but if it isn't spotted and treated early it can pass through the blood-brain barrier and wreak a lot of havoc with the endocrine system and other functions. Its long life cycle means that antibiotic treatments stop too soon, not that antibiotics are great.
If the disease is not treated and reaches the chronic rather than so-called acute stage, that is where the medical system goes into serious, dangerous and unprofessionally hysterical denial. Patients are treated appallingly, and are told they are making it up, and that they are mentally unstable. Doctors who take Lyme seriously are scapegoated and sometimes run out of the profession. Medical researchers also take little interest and funders won't put money into figuring out what is going on. The standard blood tests so poor that it is as if they are designed to generate false negatives on purpose. So your doctor can then declare that you don't have it. It's a complete nightmare for victims. And because it isn't identified and treated, cases just keep growing, although it is not as infectious as coronavirus. But because there is so little hard research, no one really knows the levels or the risks of transmission.
So that is the sorry state we are in. I have never come across anything like it.
