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Tag : Bartonella

Interview mit Prof. Volkhard Kempf

According to Prof Kempf, the knowledge of Bartonella is in general low in the medical community. There is a lot of wrong information is circulating.

Bartonella infections are frequent, but general practitioners are not aware of these infectious diseases. According to Prof Kempf, Bartonella infections can be diagnosed and treated easily. However if you don’t know what to look for, you will not find it. You need to look for endocarditis, swollen lymph nodes and other rare manifestations.

According to Kempf, only immunosuppressed patients need treatment. They can be diagnosed using serological essays, which both have weaknesses and strengths. You can find a 6-10% seroprevalance (anti bodies) in the normal population. In forest workers there are 30% that have antibodies against Bartonella.

He states that infections diseases are worldwide and will get even more important in the future.

Interview with Dr. Robert Mozayeni

Dr. Mozayeni talks about Bartonella as one of the major co-infections of Lyme disease. It’s more prevalent than Lyme, as there are many more ways to contract the disease (eg. flees, cats). In a study, that Dr. Breitschwerdt and himself published in The Journal of Emerging Diseases, about 60% of Lyme patients tested positive for Bartonella.
Dr. Mozayeni also talks about the importance of looking at Biofilm when treating Lyme, Bartonella etc as biofilm can harbor many of these microbes and be the cause of many symptoms.

Bartonella spp. bacteremia in blood donors from Campinas, Brazil.

Important new prevalence data from a healthy blood donor study in Brazil:

“Bartonella DNA was present in the bloodstream of approximately one out of 30 donors from a major blood bank in South America.”

“Antibodies against B. henselae or B. quintana were found in 16% and 32% of 500 blood donors, respectively. Serology was not associated with infection, with only three of 16 Bartonella-infected subjects seropositive for B. henselae or B. quintana.”

Read full article here.

A new article on Bartonella and possible treatments:

“Pathogenicity and treatment of Bartonella infections”
By Emmanouil Angelakis, Didier Raoult
International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, May 9th 2014.

Abstract
Bartonella spp. are responsible for emerging and re-emerging diseases around the world. The majority of human infections are caused by Bartonella henselae, Bartonella quintana and Bartonella bacilliformis, although other Bartonella spp. have also been associated with clinical manifestations in humans. The severity of Bartonella infection correlates with the patient’s immune status. Clinical manifestations can range from benign and self-limited to severe and life-threatening disease. Clinical conditions associated with Bartonella spp. include local lymphadenopathy, bacteraemia, endocarditis, and tissue colonisation resulting in bacillary angiomatosis and peliosis hepatis. Without treatment, Bartonella infection can cause high mortality. To date, no single treatment is effective for all Bartonella-associated diseases. In the absence of systematic reviews, treatment decisions for Bartonella infections are based on case reports that test a limited number of patients. Antibiotics do not significantly affect the cure rate in patients with Bartonella lymphadenopathy. Patients with Bartonella spp. bacteraemia should be treated with gentamicin and doxycycline, but chloramphenicol has been proposed for the treatment of B. bacilliformis bacteraemia. Gentamicin in combination with doxycycline is considered the best treatment regimen for endocarditis, and erythromycin is the first-line antibiotic therapy for the treatment of angioproliferative lesions. Rifampicin or streptomycin can be used to treat verruga peruana. In this review, we present recent data and recommendations related to the treatment of Bartonella infections based on the pathogenicity of Bartonella spp.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924857914001186