Manganese is Lyme disease's double-edge sword
Mood
thoughtful
Sentiment
neutral
Category
science
Key topics
Lyme disease
Manganese
Microbiology
Researchers have discovered that manganese plays a dual role in Lyme disease, both helping and hindering the bacteria that cause the illness.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
2h
Peak period
83
Day 1
Avg / period
42
Based on 84 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
11/14/2025, 4:51:03 PM
4d ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
11/14/2025, 6:54:17 PM
2h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
83 comments in Day 1
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
11/15/2025, 5:09:38 PM
3d ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
I wonder if a prolonged water fast would do the job.
> In its metallic state it appears to be inert when swallowed, unless it meets with much acidity in the alimentary canal, or is in a state of minute division ; its compounds are, however, all of them more or less poisonous.
> Mercury has been employed in one or other of its forms in almost all diseases ; but each of its numerous preparations is supposed to have some peculiarity of action of its own, combined with that common to all the compounds of this metal. The mercurials form, indeed, one of the most important classes of the materia medica.
He goes on to explain that mercuric acetate is the basis of Keyser's antivenereal pills (according to Robiquet), that mercuric chloride (which is probably what you meant by "mercuric chlorine") is "employed as an alterative, diaphoretic, and resolvent, in the chronic forms of secondary syphilis, rheumatism, scrofula, cancer, old dropsies, numerous skin diseases, &c." He also devotes a lot of space to emphasizing how important it is to be careful of it, describing the symptoms of poisoning with it, and explaining how to analyze "animal tissue" to detect mercury salts in it. He also discusses the use of mercuric nitrate in syphilis.
But never in all the pages he devotes to the uses of mercury and its compounds does he suggest that anyone ever used metallic mercury for syphilis.
I've also never seen a suggestion that mercuric chloride was ineffective against syphilis. Wikipedia says, "Once used as a first line treatment for syphilis, it has been replaced by the more effective and less toxic procaine penicillin since at least 1948."
[https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/history...]
Less academic of course. And mercuric chlorine was an autocorrect mistake from chloride.
If mercuric chloride was actually effective (without killing the patient) seems like total luck, and generally the first actual effective treatment was considered Salvarsan [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsphenamine] - which was arsenic based yes?
Until antibiotics came around.
But people tried all sorts of things, including liquid mercury, as your source notes.
Your guess would be wrong. Your body needs manganese for similar reasons that Lyme disease needs it. You also produce MnSOD.
If you starved your body of manganese sufficiently (which I doubt you could do without eating a completely synthetic diet for months) then you'd be killing yourself in parallel with the Lyme disease.
How long would it take you to die on a zero-manganese diet? If it's longer than it takes Borrelia, you still win!
I regularly find myself on a zero manganese diet for hours at a time, and I've yet to experience immediate death, screaming in agony.
Furthermore we have lots of data on how well humans can tolerate extended low manganese regimens. The standard treatment course for TB in the 1950s resulted in humans having low manganese for 1-2 years. This was unpleasant, but not lethal.
Any google search on PAS and manganese will show that it eliminates manganese from the body by chelating it, and is therefore used for treating manganese toxicity.
I don't have a specific reference for manganese levels in people undergoing the old TB treatment. But I'm sure that it should exist somewhere.
The mechanism of action of PAS against TB is in the Dihydrofolate Reductase pathway: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5395024/
I can only guess that this commenter saw that PAS can also be used for manganese chelation and jumped to conclusions?
Plenty of other treatments can remove manganese. But they all are biologically active in other unwanted ways.
That said, it is very unlikely that simply reducing manganese is preferable to existing antibiotics. But that doesn't rule out the potential effectiveness of a combination therapy.
Here is how we'd do that combination therapy. We'd mix a standard antibiotic with oral para-Aminosalicylic acid (PAS). Orally delivered PAS is the the standard treatment for treating excess manganese in humans. (Sorry, but you're dead wrong about needing a completely synthetic diet for months.) While PAS does harm a few kinds of stomach bacteria, it is far better than a broad spectrum antibiotic. And if the target disease is under stress already, then you need less antibiotic to finish them off.
Sure, a medicine that targets manganese in Lyme disease bacteria would be even better than this combination. But that medicine does not exist. And the combination in question is something that can be experimented with today, using drugs that have already been approved by the FDA.
Furthermore this is a combination that we already have a lot of experience with. Back in the 1950s, a variation on this, working on the same principles, was the standard treatment for tuberculosis. It was abandoned not because it was ineffective, but because we developed treatments with fewer side effects.
I responded to your comment above with this same claim. I cannot find any sources that say reducing manganese was the mechanism of PAS in TB.
A recent research paper on PAS in TB doesn't even mention manganese once. It identifies Dihydrofolate Reductase related actions as the mechanism against TB: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5395024/
> orally delivered PAS is the the standard treatment for treating excess manganese in humans.
EDTA has been the standard treatment. PAS has been explored and trialed. It can be used, but I don't know if I'd call it the "standard" treatment.
> (Sorry, but you're dead wrong about needing a completely synthetic diet for months.)
I was talking about a low-manganese diet, which the comment above me suggested. I don't know why you're so set on calling me "dead wrong" so much when you can't provide sources and aren't even reading what I'm writing.
> While PAS does harm a few kinds of stomach bacteria, it is far better than a broad spectrum antibiotic. And if the target disease is under stress already, then you need less antibiotic to finish them off.
You're really going to have to provide sources for PAS reducing manganese as a mechanism for fighting TB.
As I pointed out in my other comment, manganese is an essential cofactor for one of the other anti-TB drugs in the triple combination that was used in the past.
You cannot achieve what the paper is discussing through diet or supplements.
The paper is hypothesizing that if a drug could target the components of B. burgdorferi that regulate manganese then that would kill it.
You cannot deprive the cells of manganese or overwhelm them through supplementation or restrictive diet. You would damage your own body long before reaching levels that killed the Lyme infection.
I really hope the alternative medicine people don't start abusing this headline to push diets and supplements.
Deliberately inducing manganese deficiency (which I doubt you could pull off while still eating food) isn't "self care". It's a misunderstanding of what this article is saying.
Your body needs manganese and MnSOD (one of the target enzymes mentioned in the article) just as much as Lyme disease does.
You could theoretically kill the Lyme by killing the host body, like that classic XKCD about destroying anything in a petri dish if you don't care about collateral damage. The key to making a successful treatment is finding a way to kill the infection without killing the host.
Calling anything you're suggesting "self care" is dangerous and wrong.
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem ubiquitous.
The idea would be to look at all of the components that regulate manganese in B. burgdorferi and then look for drugs that might disrupt how they operate.
Any solution would act indirectly by disrupting manganese balance in a targeted manner directed at B. burgdorferi, not by flooding the whole body with manganese. The cells regulate their internal manganese anyway, so supplementing manganese wouldn’t force it to go into those cells anyway.
This is a PR release for some research that tries to stretch it into a promising treatment, but it's really more of an interesting discovery than a path to a new treatment.
That's where you would be wrong. By the time you posted your comment there are already people hawking manganese bracelets on FaceBook as a cure for Lyme disease.
Any interventions would have to be targeted directly at the B. burgdorferi to disrupt their internal regulation of manganese. It's a long shot used to make this research discovery sound more impressive, not an actual cure.
Your own body uses manganese for critical processes like your metabolism, critical brain functionality, and generating important antioxidants in your mitochondria (MnSOD, the same one mentioned inside of Lyme in the article).
Your body also regulates manganese absorption and excretion. Manganese deficiency is extremely rare outside of genetic conditions or other medical problems which interfere with this regulation. You can't really starve yourself of manganese by adjusting your diet or even by periods of fasting.
So if you're reading this and thinking you could defeat Lyme by starving yourself of manganese or overdosing on manganese, don't. That's not what this article is saying.
But you are dead wrong that interventions would need to be directly targeted at B. burgdorferi.
The standard and effective treatment for TB back in the 1950s was a combination therapy with Streptomycin, Isoniazid (INH), and PAS. The purpose of PAS was to create a low manganese environment in the body, which put stress on Mycobacterium tuberculosis - the bacteria that causes TB. This stress did not kill the bacteria by itself, but it did make it more vulnerable to the rest of the treatment. Because of this treatment, we have a lot of data showing how well people do with low manganese for a period of 1-2 years. (That was the time that this treatment required.) It wasn't pleasant (in particular it came with nausea), but it was definitely survivable.
If low manganese really does stress B. burgdorferi, then a similar combination is worth trying today. Better yet, this combination would not require the development of a new drug that needs FDA approval. It can be tried using only drugs that have been long approved, and which are already part of standard medical practice. (Granted, PAS is no longer used for TB. But it is the standard treatment for an excess of manganese.)
Do you have a source for this?
I searched, but this recent paper on the mechanism of action for para-Aminosalicylic Acid (PAS) doesn't even mention manganese. It says it targets Dihydrofolate Reductase pathways: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5395024/
Searching for manganese and TB leads me to papers showing that manganese is an essential cofactor for Isoniazid's anti-TB action: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31319159/ but nothing about inducing low manganese states would be helpful or intentional.
So I don't think I'm dead wrong at all. Unless you have some sources, I don't think inducing manganese deficiency is actually the mechanism of action for PAS.
> we have a lot of data showing how well people do with low manganese for a period of 1-2 years. (That was the time that this treatment required.) It wasn't pleasant (in particular it came with nausea), but it was definitely survivable.
Again, do you have any source for this? Preferably a source that indicates what manganese levels were reduced to during treatment?
The side effects are likely due to the 3 drugs in combination which have their own side effects, not low manganese (if it occurred).
EDIT: This commenter was making the same claim down thread and admitted they couldn't find a source for their claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45932379 It seems like they're making assumptions and presenting it as scientific fact.
Alcohol suspension tincture of the following antibacterial herbs together, which target Lyme's various coinfections:
a. Cryptolepsis sanguinolenta
b. Polygonum cuspidatum (aka: Japanese knotweed)
c. Artemisia annua (aka: Sweet wormwood)
d. Uncaria tomentosa (aka: Cat’s claw)
Begin with one drop two times per day, increasing to tolerance/under advisement of your ND/MD, or wellness consultant.
anon's herbals have SOME clinical evidence generally : https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2956313/
It's important to demarcate flavors of medicine at play here:
- MD "allopathic medicine" this is what we all consider normal medicine. They have hardcore requirements for clinical evidence.
- ND "naturopathic medicine" is a fully government licensed form of medicine (in certain places such as pacific northwest). They generally have less hardcore requirements for evidence, but do use evidence nonetheless, sometimes pre-clinical. All this recent interest in "senolytics"... a lot of what exists such as quercetin or fisetin, those are herbals, the ND's domain. And these have preclinical evidence against cancer. SOME are pretty cool and scientific people, of course, some are crazy hippie dippies what with the mushrooms and the healing crystals
- leeches "humoral medicine". This is an ancient and non-empirical form of medicine based on primarily the works of Roman physician Galen but bears similarities to medicines in other nations like China - "hot" and "cold" disease states vs hot & cold food, four humors, one of which is blood. If the disease is "too much humoral blood" the treatment is then the leech to lower that blood. This is very much distinct from the ND (at least I hope)
you may be left unimpressed with allopathy as well.
I was.
Bury me, don’t care, doesn’t change the fact I have my life back due to addressing infection with antibacterials - hardly controversial.
Biohacking only includes electronics, for this crowd?
As far as we know it's rather: you got your life back and happened to take some herbs at the same time. Basic correlation. Could be causal but no controls nor proof whatsoever. Hardly controversial indeed.
You’ve cracked the case, detective!
As far as you know: nothing.
Same as before.
I see this all the time in various social media communities: For example, people with an autoimmune diseases that got better after eliminating dairy or starting to take willow bark supplements or whatever. The moment they see a benefit, they jump on Reddit or YouTube or whatever to promote it as a cure and tell everyone to do the same thing as them.
Promoting an extremely specific medical treatment without evidence larger than N=1 is both unethical and scientifically sloppy. At least you could bother to temper the advice with some caveats.
But apparently everyone on social media can be a medical authority these days, and giving out medical advice without a license is okay.
Notice how I said nothing about a "cure" – that was actually only found in the contents of your trigger-happy response.
You're correct about the phenomenon you're referring to existing.
You're not correct about everyone you think you're observing it in. Obviously.
As and outdoor-hobbies type person I've had it 3 out of 4 previous years and have begun sourcing antibiotics from agricultural suppliers, or directly from India. Contrast this to my childhood in the same region, when tick-borne diseases were never even a blip on the radar. Supposedly this is because of climate change and much warmer winters allow deer ticks to spread rapidly.
From my own anecdotes and research, none of the traditional guidance is accurate:
-Never had a bullseye rash
-Never had a tick attached more than 24 hours
-When a tick was attached around 24 hours, infection rate was close to 50% and symptoms appeared within 10 days. Contrast to ~3% infection rate per cdc average.
...I suppose the sad irony here is that lyme is not getting attention because well... current generations never touch grass and the outbreak never appears as bad as it actually is.
Very covid-like symptoms, to the point where I initially did a quick home covid test (or multiple tests if I remember) that was negative. Very distinct soreness around the crease of the hip/leg joint, probably a lymph gland.
Second year: exact same symptoms but less intense, still started antibiotics immediately
third: again same but less intense, I ignored it until general full-body joint pain occurred then immediately went on antibiotics, after a few months of that it started to clear up.
The recommended course of action seems to be disulfiram to bust those biofilms + antibiotics to finally kill it all off.
Lucky him.
He was at the doctor's office because of severe symptoms that he suspected were due to lyme disease since he had received several tick bites years ago.
[1] https://nobite.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Nobite_Kleidun...
> -When a tick was attached around 24 hours,
These comments directly contradict the other. Either you've never had a tick for 24 hours which means the second comment isn't true, or your first comment is not true.
The error bars on around 24 hours and more than 24 hours over lap at least a bit.
If I had a tick for 23 hours and the guidelines say ‘more than 24’ I’d be treating it the same as ‘more than 24’ for practical purposes.
There is at least some natural variation in the host and the pathogen for there to be at least some people for who the guidelines aren’t strict enough.
Public health policy is a balance of factors, one of which is trying to not overwhelm services with trivial / non maladies.
So in other words, this was my experience, and it was at least 50% worse in timescale than the cdc predicted
I must say, I played in tall grass a lot as a child, catching insects and whatnot. Now I won't go anywhere near them without pretty serious protection, and I spend a great deal of time outdoors
It isn’t too bad in the Mountain West comparatively in my experience, though you have some bad areas in California. I am an outdoorsy person. While I live in the western US my experiences in the woods of the eastern US still stick in my mind. In some areas it was literally crawling with ticks.
I currently live in Seattle. The western side of the Cascade Mountains are essentially devoid of ticks and no one knows why, it is a bit of a scientific mystery. Years of tromping through the bush and I’ve never seen one here, which is great. It does make me wonder if there is something in the ecosystem here that could be adapted to mitigate tick populations elsewhere.
The Morgellons outbreak is also much worse than it appears, or so I've heard.
HOWEVER
Linus Pauling was also a legit brilliant chemist that won two nobel prizes and authored over 1000 papers
He created "quantum chemistry" and "molecular biology"
And was also a big peace activist
So he is forgiven for the Vitamin C stuff
One such assumption is that borreliosis is always the same. But researchers have been able to capture on video the morphosis of borreliosis spirochets to biofilm, and also spirochets hiding inside red blood cells. Antibiotics apparently only work on some of these forms, thus if you are using antibiotics to cure yourself, you need long-term antibiotics to permanently kill borreliosis.
There is actually a whole subculture of hobbyists investigating their own blood samples, prepared in certain way, to capture on video how the borreliosis emerges when the red blood cells die.
Lyme is actually not a single disease but a syndrome of borreliosis together with some co-infections. These co-infections appear to work synergistically together. If you reduce the amount of one of them, others increase in numbers, weakening you so that the original co-infection can make a comeback.
Also, sometimes curing borreliosis or co-infections can make you feel worse. This is called the Herxheimer reaction. One of the reasons for this seems to be that sometimes the symptoms are actually not due to the co-infections themselves, but toxins that are released in your body when the co-infections die within the body. Thus, the more effective the cure, the more toxins, and you feel worse.
If I remember correctly, there are around 40 subspecies of borreliosis. The tests can recognize only few of these.
I also remember reading about research where random people (without symptoms) were tested for certain types of borreliosis. If I remember correctly, around 15% tested positive. This means that actually many of us may carry these diseases, but at a level that does not cause symptoms. But if our body is weakened, these diseases may become active.
8 more comments available on Hacker News
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.