In this enlightening episode, we are thrilled to welcome Dr. Ed Breitschwerdt, a leading expert in vector-borne diseases. Join us as we delve into the fascinating world of One Health, exploring the interconnectedness of diseases affecting humans, pets, and wildlife. Dr. Breitschwerdt shares his journey from studying Rocky Mountain spotted fever to founding Galaxy Diagnostics, a lab dedicated to understanding and diagnosing infections like Lyme disease and Bartonella.
Our hosts, Janet and Alice, open up about their personal experiences with Lyme and Bartonella, discussing the frustration of being misunderstood and misdiagnosed. Dr. Breitschwerdt sheds light on the importance of accurate diagnostic testing and the growing recognition of vector-borne diseases in both veterinary and human medicine.
Throughout the conversation, we tackle pressing questions about prevention, treatment options, and the implications of co-infections. We also dive into the role of fleas in transmitting diseases and the need for effective flea control for our pets and ourselves.
Whether you’re a pet owner or simply curious about the impact of these diseases, this episode is packed with valuable insights and practical advice. Tune in to learn from Dr. Breitschwerdt’s extensive research and discover how we can all play a role in safeguarding our health and that of our furry companions!
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The Hidden Threat Of Vector-Borne Diseases Like Lyme & Bartonella With Dr. Ed Breitschwerdt
Welcome to Speaking of Pets. I’m Dr. Alice Novotny Jeromin, a board-certified veterinary dermatologist.
I’m Janet Novotny King, the doctor’s sister. I am not a board-certified allergist and dermatologist. I am a very happy, loving pet owner. Our goal is to provide pet owners with science-based information so they can make smart decisions, have healthy pets, and be happy pet owners. Thanks for tuning in.
Janet, did you know that people with Lyme disease have seen 10 to 20 doctors before they’re properly diagnosed? We thought to get more information on tick-borne disease, flea-borne disease, lice-borne disease, and all these vector-borne infectious diseases that our pets and we as pet owners can get. We went right to the top. We went to one of the world’s authorities on vector-transmitted infectious diseases. That’s Dr. Edward Breitschwerdt.
Dr. Breitschwerdt is a professor of medicine and infectious disease at North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine. He’s also an adjunct professor at Duke. He heads up the intracellular pathogens research lab. He’s devoted more than 30 years of his life to research in vector-transmitted intracellular pathogens. He and his group have published over 450 manuscripts in this area. I know that our goal with this show is to keep pets healthy. In this case, this is a One Health issue where pet owners can get these diseases, which are sometimes deadly.
If I don’t keep the pet parents healthy, we don’t have any pet health to talk about. Janet, I told Dr. Breitschwerdt in an email that you did have Lyme and Bartonella. We want to talk to our audience about a One Health aspect, meaning these diseases that affect our pets, wildlife, and us. That’s why we’re so honored to have Dr. Breitschwerdt, because that’s his area of research. Janet, I know you have a million questions, so let’s get started.
How did you come to start your own lab, which is Galaxy Diagnostics?
The Origin Of Vector-Borne Research
That is a little bit of a long story, but I’ll try to keep it short. Our research here at North Carolina State University started in the mid-1980s, with Rocky Mountain spotted fever. That was the first tick-borne or vector-borne organism that my research group focused on. Being a veterinarian, one thing that Alice can attest to is that our pets have a greater propensity of attracting vectors, be they fleas, ticks, lice, than we do. In veterinary medicine, we’re very familiar with a lot of vector-borne organisms that can cause disease in cats, dogs, or other animals.
Our pets are more likely than we are to attract vectors such as fleas, ticks, and lice. Share on XOver the years, we essentially studied Ehrlichia, Babesia, and Anaplasma. In 1990, I was attending a meeting of the American Society for Rickettsiology. One of the rickettsiologists that I knew very well in CDC said, “We’ve discovered the cause of cat scratch disease.” That was pretty neat because we’d known that cats could scratch someone and give them a fever and lymphadenopathy for almost 100 years. Over those 100 years, there have been a lot of different organisms that were blamed or thought to be the cause.
CDC finally found the real cause of cat scratch disease. That ended up being a bacterium, Bartonella henselae, which is transmitted by fleas and carried by cats. After that, my lab, since we knew absolutely nothing about Bartonella in cats or dogs, started focusing very strongly on that organism. With time, I would lecture to my peer group, essentially internists at the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine, in other meetings. If there were 100 veterinarians in the audience, I would have six come up and say, “Could you test me?”
That is the origin of Galaxy Diagnostics. In reality, our research then became predominantly human-based research. It started with veterinarians and veterinary technicians. We developed new and better ways of documenting infection with Bartonella in animals and humans. Galaxy started as a One Health company offering animal health testing and human health testing.
As a human Lyme and Bartonella victim, my frustration when I had it was that I didn’t think anyone believed me that something was wrong. I knew something was wrong. When I went to my regular interns, they do that one in the office that measures three things. Alice, who was at the time reading Dr. Phillips’s book about Lyme, and my chiropractor are the two who put it together and said, “You have to get tested.” My chiropractor sent me to IGeneX. Honestly, if I didn’t have the resources, the hutzpah, or the vet sister to keep pushing and pushing, I would have still been suffering. I love telling people that a veterinarian and a chiropractor diagnosed me.
When I’m sitting there reading Dr. Phillips’s book, I see Dr. Breitschwerdt mentioned in there. I read about your dad with Bartonella. That was mentioned in the book. I said to Janet, “You’ve got to get in to see this Dr. Phillips,” because Janet lives in Connecticut. You got on the waiting list, but then you got in to see an immunologist.
They call him LLD. He is an immunologist specializing in Lyme, which was not on my medical plan, but insurance covered most of it. You have half an hour. It was verbal diarrhea. I’m going through what was wrong with me, but it’s just frustrating as a human patient. I tell my friends, “If you think something’s wrong with yourself, get tested.” The only test you can get is that one from the doctor. Is there any way that Galaxy and IGeneX are going to become more mainstream?
The Challenge Of Diagnosing Chronic Illness
We hope so. There’s clearer recognition that these vector-borne infectious agents are much more prevalent than was historically understood. Whether you’re a veterinarian or a practicing physician, identifying an acute illness and figuring out what causes it, such as influenza, a strep infection, or something that is fairly acute in nature, is easy to accomplish. Trying to help a patient with any chronic illness is much more complicated. I’m an internist, so 99% of what I see is chronic illness. The differentials are much broader.
The fact that Alice was able to help you is that veterinary medicine has certainly specialized tremendously, but we have not sub-specialized to the extent that human medicine has. Until I retire, I’m pretty insistent that every animal at this institution has one doctor. That is the primary person who’s responsible for all aspects of that patient. You mentioned my father’s story. One of my frustrations in that situation, and I was in the same shape as Alice, perhaps being your sister. I couldn’t figure out who my father’s doctor was, because no one doctor seemed to be responsible.
It was pretty clear that no one doctor had a picture of what had been happening over a three-month or so period of time. It is becoming more mainstream. What’s helping us is the improvement in diagnostic testing. If you look at the National Vector-Borne Disease Task Force recommendations, the number one recommendation across all vector-borne diseases is to improve the sensitivity and specificity of diagnostic testing. For a long time, I’ve told our internal medicine residents the kindest form of therapy is an accurate diagnosis. You have to have the right tools to make the right diagnosis. For some of these organisms, the tools have not been adequate.
At least as a dermatologist, people blow off, “He’s got a couple of fleas.” Switching from Lyme to Bartonella, they don’t realize the danger that we can get and the manifestations of disease, which are horrible manifestations, from flea dirt. People are like, “I’ve dealt with flea allergy for 35 years.” It goes beyond that. All we need is adequate flea control that prevents the disease in the pet and prevents us from getting Bartonella and the horrible manifestations of that. Everyone likes to think that everything in this world is easy. “He has a few fleas. So what?” or “I picked a tick off the dog today. So what?” It’s a big deal.
What can pet owners do to protect their pets and themselves? Our dog takes medication. The cats hate the stuff I put on them, so I’m not very fortunate. I’m not lucky in doing that.
They’re making oral Credelio now. I told you.
Good luck with that. If I can’t put the drops on them, I’m certainly not going to be able to put that thing in there unless I stick it in a chipmunk, which is loaded with bad things.
Ed, what do you have your pets on? I’m curious.
Advancements In Tick And Flea Prevention
A Seresto collar. I’ve got a German short-haired pointer, so he’s wide open. Credelio is the other product that he’s currently on. Janet, the good news in veterinary medicine is that we have products and a spectrum of products to address these agents that should be the envy of human medicine. In human medicine, we don’t have a Lyme disease vaccine. In veterinary medicine, we’ve got six different companies that make Lyme disease vaccines. All of which have shown reasonable efficacy, and some of which have shown a little better efficacy than others. How this will evolve in the future is a little bit anyone’s guess, but some of these can be prevented through vaccination.
The only one we can do as veterinarians for vector-borne diseases in a cat or a dog would be a Lyme disease vaccine. As Alice suggested, the products that we have are rigorously tested because there’s tremendous competition between the various companies. There are numerous studies by every company looking at whether their product kills the northern deer tick, the one that transmits Lyme disease. That’s the easiest tick in the United States to kill. If you can kill that tick, then you can move on to some of the other ticks that can get on your dog or cat that are extremely hard to kill.
The only thing we can do as veterinarians for vector-borne diseases in cats and dogs is provide a Lyme disease vaccine. Share on XIt goes to Dermacentor and Rhipicephalus. What we call the rate-limiting tick is the southern deer tick, which is Amblyomma americanum, or the lone star tick. That’s the hardest one to kill and kill rapidly. The companies have done such a good job of coming up with new chemistry and new formulations. The collars that are being used, with repellency and kill for ticks and fleas, are so different than collars that would have been available years ago.
Alice mentioned fleas. I’ve got a PhD student who’s absolutely amazing. She generated five or six exceptionally important publications related to fleas and the organisms they’re transmitting. It’s because she wants to be a parasitologist. I bring it up because I’ve spent my entire career studying tick-borne diseases. I am more concerned about fleas on cats and dogs and the role they’re playing in transmitting Bartonella and potentially Rickettsia to humans.
Dr. B, when a person does get Bartonella from flea dirt, which is how they get it, what are some of the bad manifestations of that?
I can tell you.
Janet, let’s start with you. What were your manifestations?
You had two things. Isn’t it more common to get more than one disease when you get a tick?
The Prevalence Of Co-Infections
That’s one of the advantages we’ve had in veterinary medicine. If you talk to veterinarians, co-infection is not a novel concept. Co-infection is absolutely expected. In teaching about infectious diseases to veterinary students, what I’ve always said is, if you have an animal that you think has ehrlichiosis, which is a tick-transmitted infectious disease of dogs and humans, and it’s an atypical case in your experience, and you’ve seen a lot of Ehrlichia cases, then look for another infection.
It’s because what you’re probably missing in that dog with Ehrlichia is Babesia or Bartonella. It can be transmitted by the same tick and doesn’t respond to the same antibiotic that you’d use to treat Ehrlichia. Co-infections are almost the norm. Amazingly enough, the paper that we published is on co-infection with Babesia and Bartonella in humans from the Americas. Co-infections are important. In regard to your question related to Bartonella and symptoms, it’s one of the most challenging vector-borne infectious diseases that exists in the context of symptomatology.
That’s based on a guy who spent over 30 years reading the literature and trying to understand these things both in animals and humans. The reason I make that statement is that we went from not knowing that Bartonella existed on the North American continent in 1990. It took the AIDS epidemic and a population of immunosuppressed people to figure out, “We have it.”
The two Bartonellae that we figured out we had were the Bartonella that caused trench fever in World War I. It is Bartonella quintana, transmitted by lice. The second Bartonella that was discovered in the AIDS epidemic was Bartonella henselae, which is found in cat fleas. It is transmitted to cats all around the world. Anywhere you can find a cat flea, you can find Bartonella. That includes every continent except for Antarctica.
The other thing, Dr. B, that I’m consumed by is the potential role of this organism in canine hemangiosarcoma.
I am, too.
I’m fascinated by that.
Put that in English, please.
The Potential Link Between Bartonella And Hemangiosarcoma
It’s this big splenic tumor in, say, Golden Retrievers that then bursts. They’re standing in the backyard, and they just fall over dead.
Alice, the way Bartonella was discovered in people in North America was because a subset of AIDS patients would get vascular tumors on their skin or in their liver. That was in and around 1990. It biased a lot of the early research on Bartonella for a decade or two. That’s still going on. Researchers were trying to understand how in the world this bacteria, which is absolutely unique. It induces these vasoproliferative tumors. If you treat the AIDS patient with an antibiotic and you eliminate the Bartonella, they all go away.
After knowing that and after isolating Bartonella from some dogs and some humans with other vascular tumors, with one PhD student a number of years ago, we decided to do a study where we would look for three vector-borne organisms that live in the blood. We studied Bartonella, Babesia, and what are called hematopoietic mycoplasma. They’re bacteria that live in and around the erythrocytes and circulate in the blood. They can be found in dogs. They can be found in cats. They can be found in a whole bunch of animals out there.
Do you find them, and they’re not causing disease?
They do cause disease. They’re not very pathogenic. Usually, they cause disease in association with another disease or another infection. For you, it would be Mycoplasma haemofelis, Mycoplasma haemominutum in cats, and Mycoplasma haemocanis in dogs, or haematoparvum, which we’ve gotten out of veterinarians. What she essentially used were stored paraffin blocks from dogs from the regional area here that had a hemangiosarcoma.
When we looked at dogs that had no lesions in their spleen, we found no Bartonella. When we looked at dogs that had an immune response in the spleen but no cancer, we could find a little bit of Bartonella, but not much. When we looked at dogs that had a hemangiosarcoma statistically compared to the other groups, they had Bartonella in their spleen. That was the first study. Dr. Erin Lashnits, who’s a veterinary internist and on the faculty now at the University of Wisconsin, did her PhD with me.
We were lucky to get samples from the Comparative Oncology Consortium, which was up in Washington, DC. The reason we were lucky is that they were collected at five different veterinary colleges across the United States. They were very well characterized samples. We had blood, we had serum, we had normal tissue, and we had splenic cancers, splenic hemangiosarcoma, which is what we looked at previously. We also had a hemangiosarcoma from the heart.
One of the questions we wanted to ask is, since this organism was in the blood, was it the fact that we found it in the spleen, just that the spleen was doing its job and trying to take it out and kill it? That’s not the case because if you have a cardiac hemangiosarcoma, you can find more Bartonella in that than we were able to find in the spleen. If you ask me what I believe, I believe Bartonella is potentially causative in splenic hemangiosarcoma If that’s true, and if we had a vaccine and we could prevent that particular cancer, it would be analogous to papillomavirus.
Most of the people tuning into this show would be surprised to know that 20% of all human cancers are directly caused by an infectious agent. In some of the studies that have been done, they’re trying to push that number up and say it could be much higher. My bias as a vector-borne infectious disease researcher is that vector-borne organisms have been totally ignored, and bacteria have been relatively ignored as potential causes of cancer. A lot of that is the viruses. We need to take a serious look at the bacteria.
About 20% of human cancers are directly caused by infectious agents, and some studies suggest that figure may be even higher. Vector-borne organisms—bacteria in particular—have been largely overlooked as potential cancer drivers, but we need to take… Share on XI have a theory. On my walk, I was thinking of this question. I’m thinking, “How come I don’t know the answer to this?” I have an elderly client. She’s a widow. The kids want to go and adopt a shelter adult cat for her. She’s maybe in her 80s, potentially good health, not immunosuppressed that we know about. Is there a threat of cat scratch fever in this eight-year-old shelter cat that they’re bringing home to this elderly woman? It’s an open question, I realize.
Safety Considerations For Adopting Shelter Cats
It’s a difficult question, and honestly, a question that’s being asked of veterinarians more and more. I was contacted by a neuro-ophthalmology fellow at Emory University down in Atlanta. We published a paper on cat scratch disease. What do you do with a cat? I bring that up because so many times, cat scratch disease is diagnosed by the physician.
They ask the physician, “What do you do with the cat?” The physician says, “Ask your veterinarian.” This neuro-ophthalmology fellow, who sent me an email and is now a faculty member at Duke, called a bunch of veterinarians, so she got a whole bunch of different answers. It is not unusual. She contacted me. We put together a structured manuscript that says these are things you should think about for that particular situation.
It’s hard for me as a veterinarian to say what I’m about to say, but if I were to get a shelter cat for my 80-year-old mother, I would screen it and make sure it has no antibodies. I would do a PCR test or, preferably, a BAPGM enrichment culture, which is more sensitive than just routine PCR. I do my absolute best to make sure that the cat is not carrying Bartonella. I would be the one who personally made sure that that cat never got a flea.
That’s what I don’t feel people realize. You prevent that whole disease situation from happening if you have good flea control on that cat.
It’s so important. I’ve got a young research scientist working with me. My bias is that we should have Bartonella vaccines. The veterinary industry has not yet come to that conclusion. We know these organisms cause very insidious and chronic disease in cats and dogs, including myocarditis, endocarditis, and things that can kill them.
Also, we know that, like rabies, if we can protect the pet and the pet can’t get infected, the pet cannot infect the person. The example you give is a perfect example. You brought up my father’s story, which I rarely, if ever, bring up. I am 99% confident that the old farm cat that was in the garage with him every day, that he antagonized and would bite and scratch him when he antagonized it, was the source of his Bartonella henselae infection.
I’m going to tell my husband to quit hitting little K on the head and picking him up like that. Now that I said that, my husband did test positive for Bartonella henselae because he has cutaneous T-cell lymphoma. I had emailed Dr. Breitschwerdt about this. I had read a report out of Italy where they had isolated eighteen patients who were positive for Bartonella henselae. I ran this paper off and took it to my human dermatologist friend, Dr. Hazen. Is it 30% or 38% of veterinary workers who tested positive for Bartonella?
I bet. That makes sense to me.
Is that right for the Bartonella antibody?
Bartonella Exposure Among Veterinary Workers
We’ve done a number of studies looking at veterinarians and veterinary workers. As I mentioned earlier in the show, our Bartonella research essentially went from cats to discovering the first Bartonella in the world that ever infected a dog, which became a new Bartonella species. One of the PhD students looked at Bartonella in cattle because I live on a farm. On any given day, 80% of the cows on my farm have Bartonella bovis in their blood.
In Europe, they have Bartonella schoenbuchensis in their deer. They have Bartonella chomelii in their cattle. I bring these things up because this is a genus of bacteria that we didn’t know many years ago. The other thing I’ve learned is that it takes a long time to change thinking and change paradigms, no matter how many manuscripts you publish.
When you said that, that reminds me of the discovery of H. pylori, how he was shunned off the stage at the AMA meeting. For seven years, they thought he was a nut. He wins a Nobel Prize.
The Bartonella story honestly has a lot in common with the Helicobacter pylori story. Helicobacter was a paradigm changer in human medicine. As you well know, Alice, before Helicobacter was associated by those guys over in Australia with gastric ulcers. You went to your doctor and you had a gastric ulcer. He would tell you, “Take an antacid. Decrease the stress in your life. Quit your job.” It’s all those things. In the review I read in The New England Journal of Medicine on gastric ulceration, if you go to your doctor and he suspects a gastric ulcer, he will ask you one question. Are you taking NSAIDs?
If the answer’s no, they don’t even suggest doing testing for Helicobacter anymore because 98% of the people who are not taking NSAIDs have Helicobacter-induced ulcer disease. One thing that changed is that all those drugs that were developed, such as the proton pump inhibitors, the H2 receptor antagonists, and all those drugs that were developed to treat ulcers, needed a new market for them.
I bet the drug companies didn’t like that.
For our pets, we treat them. We call it ticking them. It is what we call in our house. We are giving them tick medicine, whether it’s oral, topical, collar, or whatever it is. For humans, I’m a big gardener, so I did research. I use permethrin. I spray the bejesus out of myself. I buy clothing that is soaked in it and is treated with it.
I do things like tuck my pants into my socks. I wear white socks. The other thing I’ve found online as a trick is those sticky rollers for lint. You roll that thing over your dog or over your legs. It’ll pick up those little teeny-eeny ticks. It’s the little guys. I know those are all things there. Also, I know you can have your yard treated.
I want to get Dr. B’s opinion on that.
We have ours treated with a cedar oil spray. It’s effective, I guess. I don’t know. Is it?
There’ve been a fair number of studies. I’m not authoritative on them. I looked at the abstract and moved on because I see one patient at a time. It is a little different than treating the yards and preventing these. Janet, everything that you mentioned certainly makes sense. My problem is that I grew up on a farm. I still live on a farm. I would tell you that my father was published in emerging infectious disease because when he died, we had documented three Bartonella species.
My mother is published in vector-borne and zoonotic diseases because on the eastern shore of Maryland, she got ehrlichiosis, which is what took her out of the world. That’s a tick-transmitted disease. I am published in emerging infectious diseases because I got Rocky Mountain spotted fever on my farm from a tick that does not transmit the organism that causes Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
Either I gave the tick, which I saved, and we amplified and sequenced Rickettsia rickettsii out of the Rickettsia. That tick gave me Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which made me very sick and febrile and caused me to pass out in my kitchen. I bring that up in the context that I grew up on a farm where dogs had ticks all the time. They were generally brown dog ticks, which, as you look at ticks, are not good ticks. We’ve got some other ticks out there that are just as bad. That is the problem. There are a lot of different tick species. There are a lot of different infectious agents that we know about in those tick species, and some we didn’t know about that are just now being published.
It comes down to one tick can either make you very sick or potentially kill you, or make you chronically ill for a long period of time, with a disease process that many doctors will never test you for, or is difficult to diagnose, even if they’re a knowledgeable doctor about those infections. They’re trying to do the best job in diagnosing you. Everything you’re doing is important. People should not take exposure to ticks or fleas for granted. As my dad used to say, “Don’t do what I do. Do what I say.”
One tick can make you very sick, potentially kill you, or leave you chronically ill for a long period with a disease process that many doctors may never test for or that is difficult to diagnose. Share on XOne less tick is a good thing for me.
You never know when that one is the one that’s going to kill you.
That’s the problem. You can get 100 ticks, never get sick, never get transmission of the infectious agent, and be unlucky enough to get one tick. The most lethal tick-borne infection in the United States is Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
They tested me for that. I thought they were crazy.
Did you read that Kris Kristofferson passed away? For fourteen years, they thought he had ALS, but he had Lyme. That makes me sick to know what he went through. He had muscle spasms and heart arrhythmias. They had to put a pacemaker in him. What else did he have? Sleep apnea and joint pains. Janet, I know what you went through in the short time you had it. Dr. B, they wanted to put her on steroids. She called me sobbing. “I read about steroids. I don’t want to go on it.” I live in Ohio. She’s in Connecticut. I wanted to put my arms around her and say, “You’re not going on pred.”
I didn’t.
She got chastised by the rheumatologist. You were intimidated. She was saying, “You’re my only patient who refused to go on steroids.”
I went, “That’s right.” I walked out, and then I burst into tears. Dr. Breitschwerdt, we’re going to ask you our question. We have a couple of questions we ask all our guests. What is the most rewarding thing about the work that you do, which is such important work?
The most important thing is when we make a difference in an animal’s life or a human’s life. The group that works with me has a very clear understanding that we are not a basic science research group. We are a One Health translational research group. We’re concerned about animal health, human health, and the environment we all live in.
We want to come up with discoveries that’ll make a difference when a physician or veterinarian sees their patient in a day, a week, or a year down the road. I’ve been super fortunate to be surrounded by extremely bright, extremely talented, and extremely motivated young people who believe in that vision and that objective. That’s what brings me to work every day.
I love that they want to make a difference. That is such a wonderful goal for One Health, human health, animal health, and wildlife, just to make a difference. It’s so rewarding.
What is your pet or human peeve?
It can be something like someone who doesn’t use turn signals.
It can be ehrlichiosis. I never thought I’d be saying all those words.
We’ve got an opossum in the barn that won’t leave.
My current peeve, which has been a five-year battle in one instance and longer than that in the other, is that I am dealing with an invasive grass in my pastures that’s commonly called split grass. It is endemic. It comes from Asia. We know that. We know it came to Southport, Bloomington, or the ports through one of those big boats down there.
The problem, which is quite amazing, is that it will grow. It’ll throw a seed pot about this high, which will have a couple thousand seeds. It’ll outgrow crabgrass. That’s my current peeve in life. I’ve spent a lot of hours of my life that I wouldn’t like to be spending using a chemical that I prefer not using in my pastures to kill this grass and get it so it’s not on my farm.
What we have here in Connecticut are those Japanese lantern bugs.
They’re here in Cleveland, but not as many as you have.
They will cover the bark of a tree, on top of each other. You see people out with their feet.
That’s what they’re telling you to do.
That’s what we do. Those suckers jump. We have those here. I understand that grass with the seed pods is going to go everywhere.
The Canadian geese that forgot to go back to Canada like to land in the pasture, eat it, and just spread it even broader.
They’re having a party out there.
You know what is bad here, even though you didn’t ask me, Janet? In Cleveland, I’ve never seen so many acorns. I was listening to something from Millwood Center in New York. They were equating a prosperous acorn year with a prosperous tick year because the mice feed on them.
I had to have an exterminator come out because we had a hedgehog we couldn’t get rid of.
Hedgehog or groundhog?
Same thing.
No, they’re not.
It was one of those. He or the exterminator told us that it’s cyclical. You’ll get a big acorn year, and then you’ll have a big squirrel year. It’ll be something else within that. He said it’s sick, which I thought was fascinating.
I noticed that in Florida, because we have to walk the dogs in Florida, whereas here, we can let them out. There’s an acre fenced in. One year, there was a rabbit, literally every six feet. The dogs go nuts. Before Hurricane Ian, we didn’t see any rabbits for two years.
That’s what he said. He said the varmints come and go. Dr. Breitschwerdt, who funds you? Are you completely funded by North Carolina State?
No.
Do you have someone who writes grants for you?
The Realities Of Grant-Based Research Funding
Yes. My team and I write the grants, which is a challenging process. You put your heart and soul into a grant, and then it doesn’t get funded. From the time you start to grant until you submit it, it generally takes nothing less than six months, sometimes nine months to a year to get the grant and submit it. The review cycle is probably a minimum of three months and more likely six months. You find out that it wasn’t funded. We have been funded primarily by the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation in New York.
I love them. I know them. I met the guy who heads up the Tick the Line Fund, or whatever they call it, because Alexandra had it badly. They are fantastic. He owns the Mets. He’s here in Connecticut. She’s amazing. They’re amazing philanthropists. I was going to ask you if the Cohen Foundation funded you.
They do. They have been the major source of funding in our lab for three years. We have two grants we want to submit and renew. You can please put in a good word for us.
I will do so.
I’ve got the best research team in this lab that I’ve ever had. I’ve been very fortunate to have pretty good ones along. It takes a long time to put a good team together. Having to start over is a big interruption and a setback, honestly. Most of the funding goes to salaries for the researchers who are doing the work at the bench day in and day out, and then some for equipment. The equipment that the Cohens bought for us just prior to the pandemic is what’s called droplet digital PCR. For the audience, it’s a piece of equipment that allows you to start with a single copy of DNA and end up with millions of copies of DNA, so that you can say what the DNA is.
It is like in crime shows. They amplify the DNA.
There you go.
People understand that.
I’m so happy to hear you’re well-funded that way. That’s fantastic.
I have a very naive question as a clinician in private practice. I have never written a grant in my life. Do you know who the reviewers are, or do you not know?
No.
Dr. Breitschwerdt, I’m on the other end. I run a non-profit. We fund 36 local human service organizations. I’m reading around 50 grants a year. I’m on the other side, applying for grants because I work for a non-profit. There’s an art to grant writing. You never know how much funding they’re going to give out. It’s this gray zone once you submit that grant.
That’s why, Janet, you’re always so happy when you’re visiting me, and you get a message that, “We just got a $25,000 grant.”
I pulled over one day because one of our donors called me.
Did you cry?
No,. He goes, “I’m sending $50,000.” I’m like, “Can you say that again? How many zeros?” When we do fundraising events, I’m always like, “My favorite number is whatever number you pick, but I like a lot of zeros after it.” That’s how it works. I can do more good that way.
The good is in the zeros, not the number up front.
Pick a number.
Janet, before we go, I was telling Dr. Breitschwerdt that where we grew up in Cleveland, a very ethnic neighborhood, our neighbors were the Breitschs. It’s exactly like yours, except without the werdt. I wonder if theirs was Breitschwerdt and they shortened it, Janet?
Probably.
It could have been. A lot of the Germans, when they immigrated to the United States, because the name was so long, cut the end off, and sometimes in different places.
On our street, we had the Breitschs, who were German, the Novotnys, who are Czech, and the Ironmen. Euclid was a real ethnic neighborhood.
I’ve often said that the German genes are a blessing and a curse. They are a blessing in regard to the work ethic and a curse because that’s about all I seem to do anymore.
You are also very good cooks.
Love the food.
Thank you so much. This has been an honor.
I can’t tell you how I’ve been looking forward to this. Janet, I read so much because I had so many questions. I can’t wait to meet you in person. You’ll have to go, “Go away,” because I’ll be so annoying, more than usual.
It’s been delightful. I hope the show is well-received.
Thank you.
We wish you great success.
We follow your work. I don’t know if Janet does, but I do.
Whatever you can do to stop this horrible disease.
Emerging Research On Neuropsychiatric Illnesses
Janet, one thing I do want to mention is that, being a veterinarian and doing human infectious disease research, which is primarily what we’ve been doing, thanks to the Cohen Foundation, about 90% of the research in the laboratory is human rather than dog and cat. It’s important what we’re starting to see in regard to these organisms and neuropsychiatric illnesses.
I would encourage parents and people to follow that literature as it matures because it’s totally different than what has historically been done in regard to patients with neuropsychiatric illness. If we can truly prove that there is infectious ideology and we can effectively eliminate it, we can change these people’s lives. Some of our publications, case reports, have supported that. You asked me what brings me to work every day, but right now, the focus in our laboratory is definitely what brings me to work.
If we can truly prove that there is infectious ideology and effectively eliminate it, we can change these people’s lives. Share on XDr. Breitschwerdt, I’m sure you’ve seen the documentary Under Our Skin?
Yes.
If anyone hasn’t seen it, it’s a good thing to watch because it’s about people who had these horrible manifestations of disease. No one could figure out what was wrong with them. It was due to an infectious disease.
We are making progress.
Thank God for that.
Thank you. We appreciate the work you do. Thanks for being on. We appreciate it.
You’re welcome.
This has been wonderful. It’s a dream of mine to be able to meet Dr. Breitschwerdt and to have him on the show. So much great information. For now, this is Dr. Alice Novotny Jeromin.
This is Janet Novotny King. We’re the Novotny sisters from Cleveland, Ohio, asking you to like, review, and share. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for tuning in.
Important Links
- Dr. Edward Breitschwerdt – Bartonellosis
- Ed Breitschwerdt, DVM, DACVIM, PhD – Bay Area Lyme Foundation
- NCSU Global Health – Ed Breitschwerdt Profile
- Galaxy Diagnostics
- Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation
- VetriMax Veterinary Products
- Chewy | VetriMax
About Dr. Ed Breitschwerdt
Edward B. Breitschwerdt is the Melanie S. Steele professor of medicine and infectious diseases at North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine. He is also an adjunct professor of medicine at Duke University Medical Center and a Diplomate, American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (ACVIM). Dr. Breitschwerdt directs the Intracellular Pathogens Research Laboratory in the Comparative Medicine Institute at North Carolina State University. He also co-directs the Vector-Borne Diseases Diagnostic Laboratory and is the director of the NCSU-CVM Biosafety Level 3 Laboratory.
A graduate of the University of Georgia, Breitschwerdt completed an internship and residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Missouri between 1974 and 1977. He has served as president of the Specialty of Internal Medicine and as chairperson of the ACVIM Board of Regents. He is a former associate editor for the Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine and was a founding member of the ACVIM Foundation.
Breitschwerdt’s clinical interests include infectious diseases, immunology, and nephrology. For over 30 years, his research has emphasized vector-transmitted, intracellular pathogens. Most recently, his research group has contributed to cutting-edge research in the areas of animal and human bartonellosis and babesiosis. In addition to authoring numerous book chapters and proceedings, Dr. Breitschwerdt’s research group has published more than 450 manuscripts in peer-reviewed scientific journals. In 2012, he received the North Carolina State University Alumni Association Outstanding Research Award and in 2013, he received the Holladay Medal, the highest award bestowed on a faculty member at North Carolina State University. In 2017, Dr. Breitschwerdt received the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges Outstanding Research Award and the American Canine Health Foundation Excellence in Research Award. In 2018, he was named the Melanie S. Steele Distinguished Professor of Medicine at North Carolina State College of Veterinary Medicine.