COVID Archives - Bay Area Lyme Foundation

Toxic Load: Healing from Tick-borne Disease, Long Covid, Mold, & Bad Food

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

Jill Carnahan, MD

Jill Carnahan, MD, is a functional medicine doctor with a huge media presence, board-certified in Family Medicine and Integrative Holistic Medicine. She is the Medical Director of Flatiron Functional Medicine, a sought-after practice with a broad range of clinical services. As a survivor of breast cancer, Crohn’s disease, and toxic mold illness she brings a unique perspective to treating patients in the midst of complex and chronic illness. Her clinic specializes in searching for the underlying triggers that contribute to illness through cutting-edge lab testing and tailoring the intervention to specific needs.

Featured in People magazine, Shape, Parade, Forbes, MindBodyGreen, First for Women, Townsend Newsletter, and The Huffington Post as well as seen on NBC News and Health segments with Joan Lunden, Dr. Jill is a media must-have. Her YouTube channel and podcast features live interviews with the healthcare world’s most respected names.

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Dr. Akiko Iwasaki, Voted TIME100 Most Influential Person in Health, Discusses the Battle Against Infectious Disease

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

Akiko Iwasaki, PhD

Akiko Iwasaki, PhD, is a Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in Canada and her postdoctoral training from the National Institutes of Health. Her research focuses on the mechanisms of immune defense against viruses at the mucosal surfaces, and the development of mucosal vaccine strategies. She is the co-Lead Investigator of the Yale COVID-19 Recovery Study, which aims to determine the changes in the immune response of people with long COVID after vaccination. Dr. Iwasaki also leads multiple other studies to interrogate the pathobiology of long COVID, both in patients, and through developing animal models of long COVID. Dr. Iwasaki was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, to the National Academy of Medicine in 2019, to the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2021, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.

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Ticktective with Dana Parish: Rapamycin, The Dog Aging Project: What Animals Can Teach Us About Aging Better

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

Dr Matt Kaeberlein

Dr. Matt Kaeberlein is the Chief Executive Officer at Optispan, Inc., Affiliate Professor of Oral Health Sciences at the University of Washington, and Co-Director of the Dog Aging Project. Dr. Kaeberlein’s research interests are focused on understanding the biological mechanisms of aging to facilitate translational interventions that promote healthspan and improve the quality of life for people and companion animals. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Aging Association (AGE), and the Gerontological Society of America (GSA). Dr. Kaeberlein has published more than 250 peer-reviewed papers in the field of longevity and has received several prestigious awards including young investigator awards from the Ellison Medical Foundation and the Alzheimer’s Association, the Vincent Cristofalo Rising Star in Aging Research Award, the Murdock Trust Award, the NIA Nathan W. Shock Award, and the Robert W. Kleemeier Award for outstanding research in the field of gerontology. Dr. Kaeberlein is the founding Director of the University of Washington Healthy Aging and Longevity Research Institute, former Director of the NIH Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging and the Biological Mechanisms of Healthy Aging Training Program at the University of Washington, and former CEO and Chair of the American Aging Association.

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Ticktective with Dana Parish: Brain Bugs: A Neurologist Discusses Lyme, PANS, & PANDAS

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

Elena Frid, MD

Dr. Elena Frid is a Neurologist and Clinical Neurophysiologist specializing in Infection Induced Autoimmune Disorders. With clinical interests in Autoimmune Neurology, she sees patients with complex cases of Lyme disease + co-infections, PANS/PANDAS, and Autoimmune conditions resulting in various neurological complaints. Using cutting-edge diagnostic tools and clinical expertise, she differentiates between idiopathic and organic causes of various neurological disorders. Her knowledge has been sought by patients from all over the United States, as well as Canada and Europe. Dr. Frid attended a coveted BA/MD program at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS) and went on to North Shore-LIJ Health Care Systems (currently Northwell) where she completed a residency in Neurology and a fellowship in Clinical Neurophysiology.

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Stealth Invader: Unveiling Lyme’s Hidden Past

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

Ticktective Podcast Transcript

In this interview, author/filmmaker, Kris Newby, explains the murky history behind the US government’s involvement with Lyme disease and continued efforts to hide how the military’s bioweapons programs caused the spread of tick-borne pathogens. She explains how alliances between pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, university-based research teams, and the government led to inaccurate testing and denials of care, causing untold suffering to millions. Kris draws parallels between Long Covid and chronic Lyme and shines a light on how we are being dismissed, misinformed, and deliberately misled by the very institutions that should be protecting us.

Dana Parish: I’m so excited to welcome Kris Newby. Kris is an award-winning medical science writer and a senior producer of the Lyme documentary Under Our Skin, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was a 2010 Oscar Semifinalist. Her book Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons has won three international book awards. I loved your book so much for journalism and narrative nonfiction. Kris has two engineering degrees and has worked as a science technology writer for Stanford Medical School, Apple Computer, and other Silicon Valley companies. Welcome Kris!

Kris Newby: Thanks Dana, and thanks for having me on the podcast.

Dana Parish: I’m so excited because you are one of the greatest historians of Lyme and you were so helpful to Steve Phillips and me when we wrote our book, Chronic. We loved your book. And Under Our Skin is the film that informed my view of what was really happening with Lyme disease. You’ve been working on Lyme education for 20 years. You’ve done a film, you’ve written a great book, you’ve published articles, you’ve worked in nonprofits, and you recovered from your own tick-borne diseases. How big is the Lyme problem?

Kris Newby: Ginormous and growing. The CDC’s latest estimate is half a million new cases of Lyme disease a year, and I’m sure everyone remembers when Covid hit a half a million. It was like, “Oh no, we have a problem here.” But for some reason, Lyme disease hasn’t bubbled up as a problem. 500,000 cases a year is an average of 1,300 a day. And, obviously, that mostly happened in the summer, so it’s huge. I am often frustrated because I’ve been working in this field for 20 years and not much has gotten better. The disease—this tick-borne disease—if it’s caught early, it can be cured. But we have a test that isn’t reliable in the first month, and later on it’s no better than a coin flip. About 10-30% of the people who are treated with a recommended treatment—according to what study you read—go on to become chronically ill. And the establishment has invested very little in new treatment protocols. I did an analysis with another Bay Area Lyme person of the NIH grants for the last five years, and less than 1% of the Lyme disease NIH budget is spent on treatments.

Ticktective with Dana Parish: Stealth Invader: Unveiling Lyme’s Hidden Past

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

Kris Newby

Kris Newby is an award-winning medical science writer and the senior producer of the Lyme disease documentary UNDER OUR SKIN, which was a 2010 Oscar semifinalist. Her book BITTEN: The Secret History of Biological Weapons and Lyme Disease has won three international book awards for journalism and narrative nonfiction. She has two engineering degrees and has worked as a science/technology writer for Stanford Medical School, Apple, and other Silicon Valley companies.

To read the podcast transcript, click here.

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Biosafety is Key to Our Future: The Truth About Germs, Lab Leaks, and Information Warfare

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

Ticktective Podcast Transcript

In this episode of Ticktective™, Dana Parish talks with Raina MacIntyre (MBBS Hons 1, M App Epid, PhD, FRACP, FAFPHM) about how lab safety lapses are still leading to frequent undocumented lab leaks, her concerns over Long Covid and the ongoing dangers of the pandemic, and how public health agencies use information warfare to keep everyone in the dark about what is happening at the forefront of biomedical investigations, especially in the field of experimental gain of function research. Raina MacIntyre is Head of the Biosecurity Program, Kirby Institute, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia, and author of Dark Winter. She has over 450 peer-reviewed publications, has received many awards including the Sir. Henry Wellcome Medal from the Association of Military Surgeons of the US and is a member of the WHO COVID-19 Vaccine Composition Technical Advisory Group and WHO Smallpox and monkeypox working group.

Dana Parish: Welcome to the Ticktective podcast, a program of the Bay Area Lyme Foundation, where our mission is to make Lyme disease easy to diagnose and simple to cure. I’m your host Dana Parish, and I’m the co-author of the book Chronic and I sit on the advisory board of Bay Area Lyme Foundation. This program offers insightful interviews with scientists, clinicians, patients, and other interesting people. We’re a nonprofit based in Silicon Valley, and thanks to a generous grant that covers a hundred percent of our overhead, all of your donations go directly to our research and prevention programs. For more information about Lyme disease, please visit us@bayarealyme.org.

Dana Parish: Hi, I’m Dana Parish and I’m thrilled today to welcome Dr. Raina McIntyre. Let me tell you a little bit about her. Raina McIntyre, MBBS is head of the Biosecurity program, Kirby Institute, UNSW. She leads research on prevention of epidemic infections, including EPI watch, an AI-driven early warning system for serious outbreaks. She has over 450 peer reviewed publications. She’s received many awards including the SIR Henry Welcome Medal from the Association of Military Surgeons of the US. She was on a US National Academies of Science Engineering Medicine Pandemic Consensus Committee, and she’s a member of W’S Covid 19 Vaccine Composition Technical Advisory Group and WHO Smallpox and Monkeypox Working Group. Has written over 450 publications and I am really pleased to have met you through this new nonprofit that we’re both a part of called BiosafetyNow.org. You know, it’s an honor to be able to learn from you and meet you, and I’d love to talk a little bit about your background and what it means to be a biosecurity expert and an MD and a PhD in your area of expertise.

Raina MacIntyre: I started my career as a medical doctor and I was going to be a cardiologist because I’d done a lot of cardiology, in my specialist physician training and wanted to do cardiology. But I was also interested in epidemiology. I saw an ad for this Master of Applied Epidemiology, which is the Australian Field Epidemiology Training Program, which is a type of hands-on training in outbreak investigation that was pioneered by the US CDC called the Epidemic Intelligence Services. And in some countries when you do it, you get a degree. So, I decided to do that degree and it was quite life-changing for me because it was a new way of learning where you do just short bursts of classroom learning, but then you go out in the field, you investigate outbreaks and you apply the learning that you had in the classroom to practical problems in the field where you’re investigating outbreaks, trying to work out: What is this? Where did it start? How can it be stopped?

Ticktective with Dana Parish: Infectious Minds: Unraveling the Link Between Infections & Psychiatric Disorders

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

Robert Bransfield, MD

Dr. Robert C. Bransfield, MD, DLFAPA is a leading expert in the relationship between microbes and mental illness. He’s a graduate of Rutgers College and the George Washington University School of Medicine and board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in Psychiatry. He is a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Rutgers—Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine. Dr Bransfield has authored and co-authored a number of publications in peer-reviewed literature.

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Ticktective with Dana Parish: Biosafety Is Key to Our Future: the Truth About Germs, Lab Leaks, and Information Warfare

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

Raina MacIntyre, MD, PhD

Raina MacIntyre (MBBS Hons 1, M App Epid, PhD, FRACP, FAFPHM) is Head of the Biosecurity Program, Kirby Institute, UNSW and author of “DARK WINTER”. She has over 450 peer-reviewed publications, has received many awards including the Sir Henry Wellcome Medal from the Association of Military Surgeons of the US, and is a member of the WHO COVID-19 Vaccine Composition Technical Advisory Group and WHO Smallpox and monkeypox working group.

To read the podcast transcript, click here .

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From Long Covid to Long Lyme: Persistent Infections Drive Chronic Illness

Ticktective interview with Dana Parish and Amy Proal, PhD

By Bay Area Lyme Foundation

Ticktective Podcast Transcript

In this insightful conversation between Ticktective™ guest host Dana Parish and microbiologist Amy Proal, PhD, we investigate persistent pathogens, how they remain in the body after treatment often leading to chronic illness, and how they can be reactivated by new infections, including Covid-19. Note: This transcribed podcast has been edited for clarity.

Dana Parish: Welcome to the Ticktective Podcast, a program of the Bay Area Lyme Foundation, where our mission is to make Lyme disease easy to diagnose and simple to cure. I’m your guest host today, Dana Parish. I’m the co-author of the book Chronic, and I’m on the advisory board of Bay Area Lyme Foundation. This program offers insightful interviews with clinicians, scientists, patients, and other interesting people. We’re a nonprofit foundation based in Silicon Valley, and thanks to a generous grant that covers a hundred percent of our overhead, all your donations go directly to our research and our prevention programs. For more information about Lyme disease, please visit us at www.bayarealyme.org.

Today, on behalf of Bay Area Lyme Foundation, I am here with brilliant microbiologist Dr. Amy Proal. I have a little bio for her. I’m going to read right now. Dr. Proal serves as president and CEO of PolyBio Research Foundation, and she’s the chief scientific officer of the Long Covid Research Initiative, LCRI. She went to Georgetown, she has a PhD in microbiology from Murdoch University in Australia, and she is a rockstar in the field and a leader in the field of persistent pathogens. She has just come off of a huge press tour for her incredible work and the enormous grant that she just received for her Long Covid research, and I’m so excited to be one of the first people to talk to you after all this.

Amy Proal, PhD: Of course, Dana, thanks so much for having me. That was an amazing intro. I appreciate all of that. It’s great to be interviewed by you. It’s mostly just a friendly conversation, which is fun.

Dana Parish: So, congratulations on your grant. I found out about it all coming together because I saw it in Forbes and then in the LA Times, and then I saw it in the Financial Times and I was like, “Oh my God. This is front page news!” Can you talk a little bit about the work you’re doing in Long Covid?