Well, so much for the new culture test by Advanced Labs. For a while we had at least thought that there was now a more accurate way to test for active Lyme disease in patients. It looks like the Centers for Disease Control have determined that the blood samples used for detection of the Borrelia were likely tainted with a strain of Borrelia that exists in the laboratory itself. The assertion by the CDC is that this probably lead to false positive findings of active ongoing Borrelia bergdorferi in the patients' blood cultures. It was not an inexpensive test, either. I elected to have it done on my blood shortly after the lab test became available, and it was around $600, as I recall. The results of the test on my blood was negative.

Medscape Medical News

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/809626

New Lyme Culture Test Failed CDC Analysis

Janis C. Kelly

Aug 19, 2013

 

Eighty percent of the patient samples used to demonstrate a novel method of culturing Lyme disease spirochetes from serum contained gene sequences identical to those found in laboratory strains used to develop the test and were likely false positives, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) researchers report in an article published online August 14 in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology.   More…

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/809626