Lyme disease is, for countless patients, a chronic, devastating, incapacitating disease. However, most patients in the US and western Europe find it very hard to get correct diagnosis and treatment.

The reason? Lyme disease, caused by a bacteria, and often aggravated by co-infections with other pathogens acquired at the same time from a tick-bite, is a matter of intense interest to bioweaponeers. As a result, government-backed health agencies such as the NIH, CDC in US, Eucalb in Europe, HPA in Britain etc are deliberately suppressing factual evidence regarding this disease. Their aim is to make the public believe that it is a trivial "hard-to-catch", "easily-cured" infection, which almost never incapacitates.

This is a lie.

One of the biggest hurdles that adults and children face when they acquire Lyme disease is simply being diagnosed correctly. Often, this is because their intensely disabling symptoms such as crushing fatigue, memory loss, severe pains (often migrating from one location to the next), sound sensitivity, weakness etc are dismissed as "subjective" by their doctor, especially when routine tests come up normal. They may then be told they are "somatising", hypochondriacs, malingering, or otherwise have a psychological cause for their illness.

One of the first priorities of a bioweaponeer when designing a biological weapon is to ensure that the agent evades detection. A bacteria or other pathogen that does not leave telltale signs on routine tests is ideal, from the twisted point of view of the men who make microbes to maim and murder.

Unable to gather objective signs or markers of the illness, the medical professionals of the target population are at a loss to identify the agent that has been used, much less to give correct treatment in time. In Lyme, if treatment is not given right at the beginning, chronic, persistent or recurring disablement is often the result.

The bacteria that causes Lyme disease is of the genus Borrelia, the same as that which causes Relapsing Fever. Both tick-borne and louse-borne relapsing fevers have historically been devastating illnesses for humans, especially in wartime, when people are living in prison camps or otherwise under terrible conditions. These often fatal diseases are endemic in many of the poorest nations.

The relapsing fever borrelia is extremely difficult to culture, so the traditional method of diagnosing this borrelia was by viewing a drop of blood under a darkfield microscope. Darkfield is necessary because the width of the spiral-shaped germs is so thin.

Are Lyme borrelia really so different? Could doctors not do the same, to detect this borrelia in Lyme patients' blood?

Ever since the early 1980's, when Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) officer Alan Barbour was reported as having cultured the Lyme bacteria for the first time, the public and the scientific profession has been assured that it is almost impossible to view Lyme borrelia in blood. (The EIS is an elite, quasi-military unit of Infectious Disease specialists run under the auspices of the American Center for Disease Control, the CDC. It was created in the McCarthyite era for the purpose of offensive biowarfare R&D, which at the time, was legal. Today, Barbour is head of a new biowarfare "centre of excellence" at UCI in Irvine, California.)

Barbour and the rest of the government-backed Steere camp (after Allen Steere, "discoverer" of Lyme, and also an EIS officer at the time) state that there is simply no use searching for Lyme borrelia in blood, and that it is only present there in tiny numbers, or not at all. Doctors have been encouraged to rely instead on antibody detecting tests, such as Elisa or Western Blot.

But these tests are notoriously insensitive, especially as Lyme borrelia, like their cousins which cause the relapsing fevers, practise the tactic of "antigenic variation" . This means swapping outer surface antigens (antigens are proteins that cause your body's immune cells to produce specific antibodies against them), bringing out **new** antigens which fool the immune system, just when it had managed to get the production of defensive antibodies against the first set started. The result is that many very ill patients will not show up on the antibody tests.

Researchers studying the disease have always been encouraged to grow blood or other samples in the BSK culture medium before viewing under darkfield. The "B" in "BSK stands for Barbour. Could Alan Barbour, of the EIS, have given the world a medium that is only good for growing certain sub-types of borrelia, ie especially those that are "easily cured in three weeks", and rarely incapacitating, but not very good at growing the actual borrelia sub-types that afflict the majority of patients?

That would explain why several European doctors, **not** following the dictates of the Steere camp, have been able to see the live borrelia in both the traditional spiral-form and the cell wall deficient forms, under darkfield microscope, in an ordinary drop of blood, which has not been cultured in BSK medium.

Mark Stroud is a Lyme sufferer who has built his own darkfield microscope from easily available parts. He has seen and filmed what appear to be borrelia and possibly cell wall deficient borrelial forms too, in a simple drop of his own blood (and of others). Prior to testing his blood, Mark had PCR (polymerase chain reaction) confirmation of the presence of Lyme borrelia in his blood. PCR is extremely specific, as it is based on unique sequences of DNA. In other words, if you have a positive PCR for borreliosis, it is very, very unlikely you have something else instead.

Please visit Mark's website at www.lyme-diagnosis.org.uk .I know Mark personally and can assure you he is not selling anything. If you or a loved one is suffering Lyme disease, please ask your doctor to view a simple drop of blood under darkfield as Mark has done, or, if your doctor will not do it , try to get access to a darkfield microscope yourself. If possible, film and record your results.

I have had constant harassment, internet hacking attempts, and death threats since I first suggested publicly that the facts regarding Lyme disease have been deliberately suppressed by the US government -backed Steere camp. However, in the last few weeks, the harassment has become much more intense, since talking to Mark Stroud about the possibility of Lyme patients, en masse, viewing ordinary blood smears under videomicroscopy, without culture in BSK medium first.

I take it the US government, and allied governments, such as my own in Britain, are very frightened of the prospect of patients trying this out for themselves.

If anyone has tried to view their blood under darkfield microscopy and would like to discuss their findings, please email me at lymerayja AT yahoo.co.ukremovespam (Please remove "removespam" and replace "at" with "@".) Thank you.

Lisa Masterson
6 April 2006
5 pm