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Caitlin Raymond: How STOP-BABESIOSIS Just Rewrote 40 Years of Practice

Caitlin R./LinkedIn

May 6, 2026, 02:12

Caitlin Raymond: How STOP-BABESIOSIS Just Rewrote 40 Years of Practice

Caitlin Raymond, Assistant Professor of Pathology and Transfusion Medicine at University of Wisconsin-Madison, shared a post on LinkedIn:

“We’ve been performing RBC exchange for severe babesiosis since 1980.

Until 2026, the entire controlled evidence base for that practice was 28 patients.

The STOP-BABESIOSIS investigators just changed that.

629 patients across 82 sites, 15 years of data
Sequential target trial emulation to minimize bias
Nearly 5-fold reduction in death or 30-day readmission with exchange (aOR 0.22, 95% CI 0.09–0.51)
Consistent across 8 sensitivity analyses

The caveats are real – residual confounding, small death count, readmissions driving most of the composite.

And an RCT is almost certainly never coming.

But for a procedure built on case reports and mechanistic logic for four decades, this is about as close to a definitive answer as we’re going to get.

New post breaks down the evidence – including where the O’Bryan 2021 Yale data fit in – for the overworked fellow trying to make sense of it.”

Caitlin Raymond