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Comment by mrfusion | Hacker News Reader

But isn’t Lyme disease just in the eastern us? How would 70% of worldwide alz sufferers acquire it?

Lyme disease is not just in the eastern US. It is mostly diagnosed in the eastern US because doctors there are more familiar with it. There is a huge under diagnosis problem in the rest of the US. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/new-jersey/articles/...

There is actually quite a lot of lyme disease in Northern California. http://ipm.ucanr.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn7485.html

Good question!

That’s why we need research. We don’t know if they have a common cause or just a common mechanism of action. They very well could be the same disease; Lyme Disease is not well understood and has been implicated in all sorts of neurological diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis and Alzheimer’s.

But the link isn’t quite obvious enough and the potential treatments, which rules out government money; and aren’t considered to be profitable, which rules out commercial money. Good for Gates stepping in here

Thanks. I’m still not understanding how so many people could acquire Lyme disease and not have any of the other symptoms.

Because Lyme is often asymptomatic, other than the initial rash!

Lyme can be asymptomatic for _years_ and in many cases it doesn't even cause the initial rash!

What about this town in South America that has the highest concentration of Alzheimers in the world? The genetic mutation E280A seems to guarantee you get early onset Alzheimers ( at least I think it's 100% , couldn't find any info on what percentage with the mutation get it )

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4019728/

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28514-conquistador-br...

Wasn't there a vaccine for lyme disease btw? My understanding was that it was not high in demand so it was stopped being manufactured. So if lyme disease is implicated in any of this, the is already a treatment.

https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/history-l...

In short, they stopped manufacture because the demand was not high enough to defend the lawsuits - even though science was on the side of the vaccine (though this is partially hindsight, it takes years to do good science much less time to file a lawsuit based on a correlation)

There is a new vaccine entering trials now. I hope it works, but only time will tell. (for all I know it may have failed trials - success will take more time, but failure can be quick and I wouldn't always find out)

Lyme disease is just one of a major class of bacterial infections. Syphilis is another. And there are several others...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirochaete

They aren't just limited to the Eastern US.

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