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The Bay Area Lyme Foundation raised nearly $500,000 at its second annual LymeAid benefit concert on April 27 at a Portola Valley home, said foundation spokesperson Yvonne Wolters.
The money will go for research to find a reliable way to diagnose and cure Lyme disease, she said.
The first recipients of the foundation’s $100,000 research grants were announced. They are:
n Lisa K. Blum, a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford University School of Medicine whose work might explain why some people have short-term symptoms from a Lyme infection and others become chronically ill.
n Jerome F.M. Bouquet, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, who is working to identify “biomarkers” that will allow for the development of a host-based clinical diagnostic for both acute and post-treatment Lyme disease.
More than 300 people attended the event, where scientists from Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Stanford discussed Lyme disease research. The band The English Beat performed.
Go to www.BayAreaLyme.org for more information.
Thank goodness that we have researchers interested in lyme and its myriad of co infecting agents, many of which lead to chronic infection. I would love to see research on how Borrelia affects both cellular as well as humoral immunity and specifically what we can do to restore the immune system. Because of the immune compromising ability of these pathogens, lyme patients show up with reactivated herpes viruses and other opportunistic infections, pretty much the same as in AIDS patients. NON HIV AIDS patients in Asia were shown to have auto antibodies to interferon gamma.
It is very important to understand how the Lyme disease bacteria manages to evade and adapt to the immune response and survive. What we can learn about immunosuppression can help us understand how so many other illnesses can survive and become chronic. This could also relate to it’s ability to survive short term antibiotic treatment.