I prefer to keep questions to yourself or your immediate family however I will answer this 🙂 I will break down your question into several parts.

First of all, Lyme disease is not always related to EBV.
Generally, EBV, CMV, HSV-1, HSV-2, etc. are all members of the herpes virus family. There are three basic virus families, retroviruses like HIV, herpes family, and flu type viruses.

If a patient has a significant elevation of a herpes family virus, it can drive up the level of lab results for other herpes virus family members. In other words, if the HSV-1 lab result is 58x the top of the range, and the CMV lab result is 9x the top of the range, the HSV-1 result is the one to pursue. There may not actually be a CMV infection there at all. The CMV lab result may be triggered by the robust HSV-1 infection.

For EBV, the VCA and EBNA test components tell you the level of viral burden (more virions with higher lab result numbers). The early antigen level tells you if the virus is in the lytic stage of its life cycle. VCA and EBNA reflect a possibility of chronic disease when they are 5x the top of the range or more. Higher levels equate with greater likelihood of chronic infection. Early antigen is only present when the virus is in the lytic phase of its life cycle, the more active stage. So, high EA suggests more active chronic infection (unless IgM is also high, suggesting active new or newly reactivated infection vs. chronic).

Now, next topic… viruses are known to drive autoimmunity. I discuss this in most my videos. However, it’s important to understand that this relationship between viruses and autoimmunity involves the viral infection acting as a trigger. Once the immune system has made the signaling error involved in development of autoimmune disease, the virus no longer needs to be present. The T cells, B cells, antibodies, etc. involved in autoimmune attack no longer require the presence of the virus. The relevance of the virus at that point is that, if the virus is continuing to infect a tissue and therefore continuing to drive the creation of tissue debris, that debris could become the object of interest for a new T cell clone, in addition to the T cell clone that is driving the current autoimmunity. The development of new clones is called epitope spreading and I discuss this on holisticspring.com BLOG.

So, if you erradicate EBV, it doesn’t mean you can cure someones autoimmunity. However, persistently high viral loads will drive persistent chronic inflammation. The NFkB of the inflammatory process co-activates with the STAT3 that drives Th17 cell activation, driving autoimmune destruction. So, lowering viral loads can be very helpful with quieting down the extent of autoimmune activation against already established self-tissue targets.

Now, as regards your aunt specifically, the oral allergy syndrome she has developed was first manifested when she ate the blueberries. Unless the blueberries had a pesticide or odd fungus on them, let’s assume this is oral allergy syndrome. The task is to test the environmental allergens (birch, ragweed, timothy and bermuda grass, mugwort, latex) that we talked about in the webinar. For any of those that are abnormal, do IgE testing on the cross reactive foods. See if you find culprits. Hope this helps 🙂