In Award Winning Film, ‘The Quiet Epidemic,’ Technology Proves Existence of Chronic Lyme

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After decades of being accused of being hypochondriacs, sufferers from chronic Lyme disease have been exonerated in an award-winning American documentary called “The Quiet Epidemic.” The 2022 film proves that Lyme spirochetes, in approximately 20 percent of those affected, remain active in the human body long after the customary three-week round of antibiotics.

Doctors and Insurance Companies Have Traditionally Questioned the Existence of Chronic Lyme

Although Lyme disease was first “discovered” in 1975, its chronic version is still often not accepted as a viable disease by many doctors and most insurance companies. “The Quiet Epidemic,” a documentary about chronic Lyme disease by filmmakers Lindsay Keys and Winslow Crane-Murdoch, may finally provide conclusive evidence that chronic Lyme does indeed exist.

Journalist Mary Beth Pfeiffer, from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., stated in the film that the battle over chronic Lyme is “one of the most controversial and vicious medical debates today … What we have here is a war—an insurgency against evidence-based medicine.”

Dr. Kenneth Liegner, a board-certified internist with additional training in pathology and critical care medicine, states in the film that he believes insurance companies have denied the existence of chronic Lyme in order to avoid covering expensive treatments such as long-term intravenous antibiotics.

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The doctor, who practices in Pawling, New York, helped his patient, Vicki Logan, pictured in the documentary, to sue her insurance company to pay for her medical costs. “The deck is stacked against Vicki and patients like her,” Liegner said. There is “no reimbursement for the kind of care Lyme disease patients need.”

Lyme–A Worldwide Epidemic

Richard Horowitz, M.D., and medical director of the Hudson Valley Healing Arts Center in New York has been treating Lyme and other tick-borne infections for 28 years and has written several comprehensive books on the subject. He said in the film that Lyme is “one of the smartest organisms on the planet.”

Lyme is a great imitator that can produce the symptoms of many other diseases such as chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s Disease, lupus, and Alzheimer’s. Shaped like a corkscrew, the spiral-shaped organisms can bore through joints and cartilage, and even make their way to the organs and the heart. Horowitz stated that he needed “to share this information because this is a worldwide epidemic.”

New Technology Proves 20 Percent of Patients Exhibit Spirochetes Long After the Usual Round of Antibiotics

The film’s most poignant narrator, Duke University physician-scientist Dr. Neil Spector, reveals through projected microscopic images that Lyme spirochetes are present in the brain, the organs, and the blood of approximately 20 percent of patients long after the customary round of antibiotics has been taken.

Spector describes in the documentary how his team at Duke University in North Carolina identified HS-198—“a small molecule-fluorescent conjugate that selectively targets the highly conserved bacterial protein, HtpG (high-temperature protein G), within B. burgdorferi, the bacterium responsible for Lyme Disease.”

The microbe can now be identified “using noninvasive imaging” or a “small molecule imaging probe” in organs and tissues and its presence in chronic patients can no longer be categorically denied.

Spector stated in the film that he believed his innovative technology to image Lyme disease spirochetes would be available for patients within a year. He hoped that it would “change the course of insurance coverage.” Unfortunately, the doctor died in June 2020, and by the time the film was released in October 2022, that had not yet happened—but there is ample hope that it will.

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His co-researcher of five years, Timothy Haystead, a professor of pharmacology and cancer biology and associate professor in pathology at the Duke Cancer Institute, has continued to complete Spector’s work. Haystead’s physician wife, who had been afflicted with chronic Lyme, recently succeeded in securing $2 million in funding to continue the project from the Bay Area Lyme Foundation.

When asked what his next steps would be in the development of his Lyme testing and treatment protocols during a November 2021 Tick Boot Camp podcast titled “There’s Hope” Haystead said:

“We’re on a fast track right now because we have a lead molecule … There was a paper that came out in Nature Chemistry, a very prestigious journal, and it described a new (radioactive metal) isotope called Serium 134 … and we’ve become a test site for this Serium 134.

“Why are we excited about it? Because it’s something you can take to a radiologist … We can carry it to the Borrelia and it allows us to image it. It’s a high-energy emitter. It’s a very, very, sensitive, noninvasive molecule probe to detect infection at an extraordinarily sensitive level.”

In terms of the funding process, Haystead said, the bar is a little lower for an imaging agent than for a drug. “You have to believe in what you’re doing,” he stated during the podcast, and then the funders will back you.

The Duke researchers’ innovative imaging techniques will likely make it possible for chronic Lyme patients to have their treatments covered by insurance companies in the near future. Spector’s imaging has made it infinitely harder to deny the existence of chronic Lyme disease.

The film is currently showing in film festivals and special screenings throughout the United States. “The Quiet Epidemic” May 9 sneak peek screening + Q&A, ahead of the May 16 release