Lyme Disease Cases Are Exploding
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We have no idea how or when he got infected. As far as he knows, he never had a bullseye rash, although apparently that doesn't always happen. Now I slather myself in DEET whenever I go into a an even semi-woodsy environment.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/florida-revokes-medical-lic...
https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng95
"Lyme literate" seems to be a pseudoscience term related to the ME-like crypto-syndrome "chronic Lyme disease" - for example, see towards the end here:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/legislative-alchemy-2014-so...
My best understanding: parasitic infections tend to thrive due to feeding on detritus from other infections and persistent infection in spite of multiple treatments probably means she's being reinfected on a regular basis.
My chronic infections did not begin to improve until I informed my then spouse "You are never touching me again without a condom because I think you are reinfecting me." following a conversation with a friend who was a physician. He had minored in parasitology and I believed I had an undiagnosed parasitic infection. He said it was plausible, given what I was going through.
That was a major turning point in my health. After nearly a year of being at death's door, the very next round of antibiotics stabilized me and I began gradually getting better.
Prior to that, I went through two periods a few months apart of needing new antibiotics every single time I ran out for 10 or 12 weeks. Nothing was really working.
The months in between? I was bedridden, sleeping 18 to 20 hours a day and probably having a lot less sex than usual. (But I honestly just don't remember how often I was having sex during that awful, awful time. I mostly remember hallucinating conversations with The Grim Reaper.)
(Disclaimer: This is not medical advice. I am not a doctor. I don't play one on TV.)
Of course, I can't prove it and I find the question flabbergasting given that I already stated that insisting on condoms was fairly promptly followed by my condition stabilizing and improving.
For the record: I eventually divorced him. I've been celibate for medical reasons for over 14 years, in part because men I dated could not follow the simple instruction to bring a damn condom for health reasons and I was too sick and vulnerable to get up and walk out like I should have. After the third well-educated idiot pulled this on me, I vowed to myself I would be celibate until I was well, basically.
I've gotten off all drugs. I'm gradually putting in more hours on freelance work. I'm mostly healthy when doctors said that was not ever going to happen.
But that's enough about my (utter lack of a) sex life.
Again, sorry for the unsolicited advice, and congratulations on becoming healthy again.
B. This is an overwhelmingly male forum. While I'm quite comfortable blathering on about all kinds of personal things that give other people the heebie-jeebies, it's my general policy to not discuss my sex life here in a way that actively encourages such interest in me.
Suffice it to say, I'm really not in any need of dating advice. My remarks were pertinent to a meaningful discussion of health and that's the only thing I'm interested in discussing here.
oh boy, this is how you're starting this comment?
>is it really that hard for a woman...
facepalm. be mindful of your privilege. this isn't a helpful comment from the start. If you find yourself starting lots of conversations this way, I suggest taking a long reassessment on what your goals are when holding dialogue on the internet.
Thing is, most pain meds dont even work. NSAIDs don't make a dent. Opiods dont work either (not that I could get a doc to prescribe them if they did). Muscle relaxers do help quite a bit in reducing the pinching of nerves. I recently did a 7 day trial on Celebrex, and after 3 days, I was in the least pain I'd been in for years (apparently it's one of those that builds over a few days). I see my PCP tomorrow and will hopefully get an ongoing prescription.
Ive been on Lyrica and gabopentin for the nerve pain in the past. While they helped with the nerve pain, I had a lot of side effects with both, and don't want to go back on either.
Mere mention of one's own medical situation should not generally be deemed to be open season on the entire internet tossing out medical suggestions, no matter how seemingly insightful. Most people with serious, long-standing conditions know a lot more about it than the average person on the street, have tried myriad approaches to treatment and get incredibly sick of having everyone "helpfully" toss suggestions at them at the mere mention of their diagnosis.
It's exhausting to have to say over and over "I've tried that or have a good reason why I am not doing that. I'm aware of those options. My short comment here is not remotely a comprehensive medical history."
Everyone puts it on the chronically ill person to be polite and respectful and make them feel good about wanting to help. But it's an incredibly negative experience to be constantly bombarded with such "help" and the implicit expectation that you should be politely appreciative of their good intentions.
I'm one of the people that downvoted it and that's why I did so. I'm chronically ill and also post as openly female here. I'm abundantly familiar with the desire to simply say "Oh, hey! I know something about that!" only to get a slew of advice I didn't ask for. The subjective experience of that is that the entire world clearly thinks you are an idiot who isn't trying hard enough and that's the only reason you can't fix your chronic, intractable problems for which the world has no real solutions or you would have already long ago sold your soul to the devil to finance the slam dunk answer.
This is part of why some parts of Twitter are awash with bitter complaints about Ablism and how terrible Abled people are.
Please note that you getting strong headaches while traveling due to caffeine withdrawal really doesn't fall under what I was describing.
I'm talking about people with much more serious, chronic conditions where the entire world would like to act like "Your genetic disorder would totes go away if you would just eat this thing here/take this supplement/read this article!"
And I struggle with this myself because I actually have a genetic disorder and it actually has responded well to dietary and lifestyle changes, so I am prone to wanting very much to spread the good news and it tends to not go over well with other people. So I've had to learn to curb my own enthusiasm.
I'm not suggesting no one should ever offer unsolicited feedback on Hacker News. I'm just suggesting people be a little sensitive when talking to folks with overwhelming and incurable problems who have probably heard your suggestion umpteen other times and will probably just find it to be an imposition, not a brilliant insight.
Most of the time, they aren't commenting about their condition because they are hoping some random stranger will know the miracle cure that they hadn't heard of and be able to somehow back it up credibly. Most of the time, they are just trying to distract themselves from unremitting agony by engaging in a little discussion and their medical situation is something they happen to know something about, so they offer their two cents worth in hopes of feeling like a normal human being for thirty seconds.
Intruding on that with "Have you tried X! You should totes try X!" tends to be a super negative experience in most cases for such people. It robs them of their moment of normality that they were reaching for as someone who can simply talk to other people, just like anyone else.
You have a great day.
I'm certainly engaged with my medical professionals. I see about 7 docs routinely! Saw my primary care physician just this morning. I'm more engaged now that I'm married (nearly 2 years now), before I mostly grin and bared it.
I also have a genetic condition that affects my liver, but thankfully so far, it's just a monitor it quarterly or so.
For, me, at only 38, my cervical and thoracic arthritis has been my greatest challenge. My genetic condition doesnt cause me problems day to day, and can be easily managed with diet, and if need be, scheduled phlebotomy.
The arthritis, I cannot control. Most meds dont work, and the ones that do put pressure on my liver. Opiates wouldn't even really help me, I think, because I dont think they help with nerve pain which is about 95% of my problem. I have a sufficient pain tolerance I can ignore a constant burning sensation along my spine. I cannot ignore the very sharp shooting nerve pain I get that travels down an entire side of my body.
I can cope with that to an extent when it's constant. Where it really gets bad is when I get random sharp stabbing pains in my arms and legs. Bad enough I've bruised my knees hitting them against my desk from reflex.
Like I said, I'm working with my various docs to manage things, but its tough. Medically, I see: Primary care Gastroenterologist (also his nurse practitioner) Hematologist Neurologist Orthopedist
Point is: I'm trying to make things better, but what a lot of what afflicts me cannot be made better, and has to be managed, and I'm trying. Not always succeeding, but trying.
I was fortunate to be diagnosed late in life with a relatively mild form of a serious genetic disorder. This meant I had my own mental models already for what was going on in my body before I got a label.
It allowed me to bring fresh eyes to the problem space and I've healed a lot when doctors say that cannot happen. The only real downside: The world is quick to act like I'm making that up and call me crazy.
I've had good results healing nerve damage where I had issues like numb spots in my feet, so I'm convinced a lot more is possible than is currently believed to be possible.
FWIW, it's not really intended to be some edict with zero exceptions. How it's done matters.
I don't have any pithy advice for how to do it well. I'm still trying to sort that out myself.
I like being helpful and I hate seeing people suffer and I'm chronically ill myself, so I tend to feel like that ought to count for something in terms of being viewed as a good faith effort (other people don't always agree). Nonetheless, I recently got cussed at and blocked by someone on Twitter who was having an especially rough time. (Granted, the topic in that case was suicide, but I didn't know that when I first said something.)
When you're in a lot of pain all the time, it's really easy for things to just rub you the wrong way and get on your very last nerve when you just want to participate in the conversation like a normal person and be treated like a contributor.
I've started asking people if they want suggestions from a random internet stranger and respecting it if they say "no thanks." Or offering suggestions in a low key fashion if they are actively soliciting feedback. (This list is not comprehensive.)
Have a great day.
Anything that experimentally works, being chinese or icelandese, is included in medicine so there are a fair possibily that anything working in chinese medicine is yet included in medicine. The rest is just in the category of "dubious traditions, superstitions, fairy tales and non trustable until proven".
The basis if acupuncture is to selectively "stimulate" nerve fibers so the pain dissapears, but the nerve funcion is temporarily damaged. Is not different than blue scorpion poison against cancer, or being struck by an electric current. Killed nerves can't feel or transmit pain sensations but pain is an important defense system for animals. Anesthetics do not cure nerve issues, just hide the problem, as acupuncture does.
Sticking needles in a finger maybe could be acceptable. Touching the spine with several hot metal objects has a much higher risk and probably unaceptable in the balance of benefits and cons IMHO.
Personally, I'm skeptical of it. My wife, while also being skeptical, has recently tried it and she reports she's aeeing benefits, so I might try it, but I have not so far.
Some tests to get on a regular basis include: C4a, C3a, TGF-B1, MMP-9. Igenex is the best test lab for Lyme.
I didn’t have Lyme but I had mold toxicity, and pretty much every doctor and test came back saying, “everything’s fine” when I clearly knew it was not. If his treatment recommendations for Lyme are half as good as his recommendations for mold, this book is worth 1,000x the price.
Toxic: Heal Your Body from Mold Toxicity, Lyme Disease, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, and Chronic Environmental Illness https://www.amazon.com/dp/1628603119/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_Sv...
One thing I learned in the process is that the bullseye rash is often just a broad, flat red area, and in some people (as you point out) doesn't show at all. Any summertime flulike symptoms in tick country should lead you to suspect Lyme disease (or the group of similar related tick-borne infections).
Treatment is with antibiotics, usually doctors will use a combination of two types of antibiotics (eg doxycycline and cefdinir) for which there is some research suggesting better results. In rare cases IV antibiotics may be required, especially if evidence of cardiac or neurological involvement. Duration of treatment is for 1 to 4 months. There’s next to no evidence you should go longer than that.
After treatment patients may also need immune modulation treatment due to autoimmune reaction to the infection. High dose ivig in serious cases. Some patients also find benefit using low dose naltrexone for this though it can have a very nasty side effect of causing depression so watch yourself using it.
Almost everything else is a scam. And unfortunately with Lyme, while the patients are clearly very sick, there are an aweful lot of quacks ready to part them with their cash so be weary.
It’s important to know there are other illnesses that people need to rule out too, check for dysautonomia, POTS, ME/CFS, MS, and aaSFPN for example.
I thought you could test for bacterial nuclear material in the blood?
Edit found it: Its a PCR Assay: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26469112
I have a different condition where a high salt diet is a standard medical recommendation. I benefited from getting really picky about salt quality, though that's not anything doctors ever talked about.
I eschewed table salt in favor of sea salt containing a mix of natural minerals and micronutrients, not just sodium chloride.
I also generally recommend keeping a journal to track diet and symptoms in the face of any chronic condition.
Take a look at a video on YouTube by a Harvard doctor Anna Louise Oaklander called Small Fibers Big Problem about the association they are making with something they label aaSFPN. Also take a look at some results for adrenergic and muscinaric auto antibodies, which are showing up in patients with POTS and other dysautonomias.
Relevant Plug: https://www.tickcheck.com/
As mentioned in other comments, serological tests fall short in various ways (accuracy, time). If you keep the tick that bit you, we can test it for the presence Lyme, and several other pathogens. If negative, we can effectively rule out much of the risk. Super quick & accurate, too.
Separately: Bay Area hikers beware -- change your clothes immediately after getting home, do complete body checks after hiking -- ideally, shower immediately.
IMO health insurance should be paying for everything preventative. It's in their financial interest to stop fretting about what kind of lab you are, encourage early diagnosis and reduce long-term medical costs.
the pharma companies won't be happy with that
I wouldn't trust the CDC data. Notice that there is no primary source on their webpage.
Here is a paper by someone who took an independent look into it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4278789/
For storage, a Ziplock bag works well (especially for mailing). Just make sure it's sealed air tight. A prescription pill bottle works great too because of the secure lid.
When I got home, I transferred him to a double ziplock labelled with the date and where on the body I found him and tossed him into the freezer for a few months until I figured I was in the clear.
It is intended for clothing and not the skin. The best way to apply it is to soak your clothes and let it dry. Spray on applicators are also available. Once it is dry, it is very stable and safe. It does breakdown with UV and washes, so it will need more applications. It is also available for sale and the pre-treated clothing does last through more washes.
Note: Permetherin is harmful to cats when it is wet so if you have cats at home, please read up more on it. Once it is dry, it is safe around cats.
Also from what I've read just applying it to your shoes is hugely effective on its own vs ticks, with socks adding another large percentage, as the majority of ticks will jump onto your feet and climb up your legs.
The rest of your clothes are worth treating too certainly, but even if it's just your feet it will be a major help.
This is very interesting advise. I always thought ticks drop from trees? no? I actually wear a hat sometimes in the forrest because of this. Am I stupid?
Inadvertently wandering through (or for a puppy sleeping in) a deer nest where there's hundreds or thousands of nymph ticks is a real life horror.
Ticks do not jump run hop or make any fast movements. They are slow crawlers and do not drop out of trees onto you. They do have a very sensitive organ called a Haller's organ[0] which is an olfactory organ that can also sense humidity, C02 and Temperature.
Lyme's disease isn't the only thing you have to worry about getting from Ticks. They can also carry Tularemia fever, Powassan virus, Ehrlichiosis and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
Ticks are resistant to cold weather but one of their primary hosts, mice, are not. So after a particularly cold winter there may be less ticks the following Summer. However, many people would say the Northeast U.S. had a long cold and snowy winter but the early and long lasting snow cover provided the mice and other subnivean zone animals with lots of cover and protection from the cold so this Summer is actually turning out to be a bad one for ticks (at least in the NE U.S.).
In our household, we do thorough tick checks on everyone after a day spent outside or in the woods. This includes meticulously checking hair and armpits and a self-check around the groin.
You can help your own property by cutting 1.5 inch PVC pipe into 3-5 inch sections and stuffing it with permethrin soaked cotton balls. Mice will use these to build nests and any ticks coming into contact with the mice will die on contact[1]
Do not get Permethrin near any invertebrates or aquatic wildlife that you do not want to kill[2]
Edit: product we use in our household which we buy at the local outdoor store but is also available online[3]
[0]https://entomologytoday.org/2018/01/16/up-close-look-tiny-se...
[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1941927
[2]http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/metiram-propox...
[3]https://sawyer.com/products/permethrin-insect-repellent-trea...
They don't really have a mechanism to alert them to the presence of animals walking below them fast enough for this to be practical for them.
This was before Lyme had spread, though. I still remember sitting in class feeling my hair and feeling the back of a tick.
So .. I think they must be on trees and bushes, I’ve never had one elsewhere.
https://tickencounter.org/faq/tick_habitat#tickhabitat_quest...
Put it on swatches of cloth, and suspend those around your tent/tarp entrance. Also put it near your head where you sleep to keep all the biting insects away from your face.
Anecdote: I was camping with a buddy. Rain-storm happened. The protected area under his tarp with thick with mosquitoes trying to hide from the rain (there must have been thousands), I had none under my tarp. The only difference was a couple of cloth swatches of Permethrin under my tarp.
Treating things like hats, or headbands does wonders too.
The most effective method of not getting bitten is not to go in to the woods at all.
Better to just not go outside, right?
Avoidance is not particularly useful advice, but effective long lasting protection that you don’t need to think about putting on is.
your profile reads:
He who lives without folly is not as wise as he thinks. -- Rouchefoucald
Agreed. I'm not worried about ticks since I only go between work and my mom's basement.
For me, this is the key to surviving hay fever season.
If you want really safe external repellant, you could probably go back to sulfur powder. It stinks like eggs, but it seems to work okay. Maybe that's why all the bigger campgrounds seem to have sulfur-water.
Can you explain how that works?
I don't know about ticks, but my military spouse had good results from eating a match head once a day to discourage chiggers when he was in the field in Georgia. He later replaced this policy with taking garlic supplements.
I bought his supplements. He specifically asked for the smelly garlic pills, not the ones that advertise low odor.
From what I gather, his co-workers were insanely jealous of his general lack of miserable bug bites in spite of laying in the same grass as them. He was very introverted and closed mouth. Unlike me, he was entirely disinclined to helpfully blather on about such things to people unlikely to believe him.
He was probably wiser than me in some sense. I would likely get a lot less flak if I didn't remark on such things myself, kept it to myself and privately gloated.
[0]https://sawyer.com/products/permethrin-insect-repellent-trea...
[1] from a source cited here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrethroid#Biodegration
Use both for best protection.
DEET has a tendency to damage synthetic clothing such as spandex and rayon, and at higher concentrations can actually melt plastic and paint. Even lower concentrations can mess up your sunglasses.
It was awful, something I wouldn't wish on anyone.
If you do get a deer tick (they are the small ones, not the giant gross ones) save it, there are a number of places you can send it for peace of mind that it was not infected.
Also consider brief antibiotic prophylaxis: 1-3 doses of doxycycline are often recommended. I'm not in favor of anti-biotic overuse, but if lyme can turn into chronic lyme and that was indeed what I dealt with for 10 years of pain and crushing fatigue, then you want to avoid it.
(edit: typos)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4477530/
This isn't to say you haven't been dealing with a lot of garbage, just that you might need to seek different medical care if your doctors are telling you that you have chronic lyme disease.
I agree that "alternative medicine" can be a hotbed of pseudo-science and sketchy treatment, but I also think that in terms of a lot of these chronic auto-immune related conditions, our evidence base is still pretty small and there's a lot we don't know. And the dominant Western medical system tends to do much better with acute conditions with a clear etiology of cause/effect than nebulous clusters of symptoms (see also, all of mental health).
My hunch is that chronic lyme, just like for example chronic fatigue that lasts for years after Epstein-Barr, is some sort of auto-immune condition triggered by the initial infection, even if the initial infection is gone. With Lyme it is a little more complicated because there are spirochetes involved.
I assure you I've probably read everything that the NIH has put out about Lyme all the way to some of the wackiest all caps blinking sketchy sell-me-vitamin treatment websites out there, as well as chronic fatigue (I spent the first 7 of those years considering it CFIDS). It nearly destroyed all of my 20s.
Treat prophylatically or not, but try not to get Lyme, that's all I'm saying.
All these things were linked, yet separate. You cannot tell me the chronic fatigue was just my depression, as I can tell a difference, but neither was my depression just from not being able to be active for more than about 2-3 hours each day. Mental health issues pre-dated chronic fatigue, but chronic fatigue intensified them.
I did many treatments, though I chose to never have a PICC line installed for months of IV antibiotics - that seemed like chemotherapy to me then and now, and not without its own risks. Everything from antibiotic regimens to homeopathy to humming with crystals in my hands. Sometimes I was raw vegan, other times I smoked heavily, drank heavily, because nothing worked anyway, why not have fun, etc.
Too long for one comment here, but find me privately if you are struggling with chronic immune stuff.
I'm unsure what eventually worked, and what was time. A lot of it, cliche as it is, was the very strong love of a very supportive partner that saw I could still live, even if I thought I couldn't.
I would say the following things all had major effects, though I don't use any currently - many of them provide symptomatic relief for some things, I'm not sure why things shifted underneath it all.
#1) regular injections of methyl-B12 even with normal cyano-b12 levels
#2) low dose Abilify and modafinil and (sparingly) stimulants
#4) regular yoga practice that provided low-impact exercise, mindfulness amidst the fear that my life was over, and a way back into an awareness of my body that didn't only have me think it was the enemy that was killing me, and of a self that transcended whatever I thought I was
#5) treatment for orthostatic hypotension including low dose steroids, salt pills, compression stockings, etc
#6) psychotherapy
#7) A few times rounds of abx when I was at my worst seemed to help a lot
#8) supplemental testosterone for 2 years when mine was low-normal (is normal-normal now without supplements)
#9) eliminating all processed anything from my diet for about 4 years, all gluten for about 5, all refined sugars for about 5 (can eat anything now without ill-effect) and drinking home made bone broth regularly
(I also know some people will read this and hone in on a few things and be like oh! he just needed some psych drugs, therapy, and exercise! Those can def all be helpful things, but I assure you it was a strange and complicated journey through the mindbody, I still have no sample size other than me, and the methyl-B12 was by far the most helpful even though that largely falls under the pseudo-science perpetuated by people searching for autism cures...)
I hope anyone who suspects they or someone they love has chronic lyme will dig deeper than just reading scholarly review articles. A professional scholar tends to write only about things that they anticipate will advance their career.
In particular, I hope anyone who suspects chronic lyme will meditate on some of the comments on HN written by people who claim to have recovered from chronic lyme or what they suspect was chronic lyme. If you search the web for information on chronic lyme you will encounter a lot of material by people who make a living trying to persuade various segments of the public in one direction or another. (Some of the professional persuaders have MD after their name.) On HN comments in contrast I am satisfied that almost all the substantive comments about chronic lyme are currently not written by professional persuaders.
https://www.healthline.com/health/lyme-disease-chronic-persi...
https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/chronic-lyme-d...
Both rodents and deer are part of the lifecycle of the tick. Suppressing deer populations and encouraging red foxes and other rodent predators would have to help.
However we might not be awash in deer if we hadn't first 'culled' all the predators. Wolves for example.¹
1: http://www.uky.edu/OtherOrgs/AppalFor/Readings/leopold.pdf
Here's some wolf news for those who enjoy that sort of thing, in Dutch: http://www.welkomwolf.be/node/238
We need to cull them ourselves.
This time, the symptoms were completely different. I assumed it was a new illness. Doctors were mystified. One said it was psychosomatic. I was off antibiotics for more than 6 months. I got sicker and sicker. I was in bad shape when I decided this illness was the same as the previous illness. I took a combination of Cipro and Zithromax for 1 year. I got better. Then I stopped. I got sick again.
I was eager to get back to my career so I tried a few antibiotics that might be light, cheap, easy and sustainable. A friend of mine, as a teenager, had acne and the doctors had them on antibiotics for 4 years to deal with the acne. They’d taken something similar to doxycycline. I tried it but it did nothing for me. I tried hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which gave me great energy but did not cure me. Then I tried Amoxicillin. That worked great. I took that for 11 years. Then I quit and got sick again. I went back to Biaxin, and took that for another 2 years. My business was going well so I could not focus on my health. I was busy. The simplest thing was to take antibiotics, which kept me healthy so I could focus on work. So long as I took antibiotics the illness kept its distance. In that sense, the illness was similar to leprosy — I could live a normal life but only if I took antibiotics every day.
But I was irritated with my business partner (I’ve written about that elsewhere). So I sold my share of the business.
Now I had time to focus on my health. What had I not yet tried? What about fasting?
I went 2 weeks without food. I took antibiotics the first week but not the second. I felt sick. The fast ended. I had a vegetarian meal. I fell asleep. I woke up the next day and had a large vegetarian meal. That night I felt funny. The feeling was similar to that moment, if you have a flu, when the fever breaks. With a flu, you get sicker and sicker till a moment the fever breaks and then you know that your immune system has kicked in. That was exactly the feeling that I had then.
I have not taken any antibiotics since that fast, and I’ve been blessed with excellent health.
Have you followed up with any of the doctors since? What did they say in response to your recovery?
Those teenagers, who take antibiotics, with a microscope at home can do this simple experiment: prick your finger with a needle and put a drop of blood on steriled glass, then put that under a microscope. Do you see bacteria? Yes, of course you do. Even if you take antibiotics for 20 years, your body will still be seething with bacteria. There is no way to get rid of the bacteria on your body. That isn’t what antibiotics do. Antibiotics work with your immune system to bring bacterial load back to a reasonable level. If antibiotics killed all bacteria then people with compromised immune systems could be kept safe from bacteria with antibiotics. But there isn’t a doctor in the world who thinks that’s possible.
Please, if you can find a microscope, go look. Use your eyes. Your blood system is absolutely not sterile, that is a wildly non-scientific thing to say. Your immune system can not possibly go after ever protein it meets, otherwise you would be allergic to all food, and you would die. When you see an article such as "The dormant blood microbiome in chronic, inflammatory diseases" ask yourself, what is a dormant blood microbiome?
Maybe antibiotics kept under control a bad microorganism, but which had resistance not to be killed. Maybe fasting helped kill it.
I'm not a doctor.
For those unaware, it causes a person to develop an allergy to red meat and there's currently no treatment for it other than to wait. Granted, it's not as serious as Lyme Disease, I hope it gets to be well known so there's increased chances of finding a cure for it.
They said that the tics which spread Lyme disease get spread onto runners from Tall Grass that people run through as you make contact with the grass they get onto you.
Now the article is very light on the main question: why did ticks multiply that much recently?
1. Different weather patterns caused by El Nino(warm pacific equatorial temperatures resulting in increased precipitation) along with similar weather patterns in other areas of the world. This is especially noticeable during the winter with increased snow fall providing denser snowpack and a more protected subnivean zone for one of ticks primary hosts, white footed and field mice. Warm weather in general also helps. Ticks are not greatly affected by cold weather but their hosts are and when there are more hosts, there are more ticks.
2. Increased temperatures has a complex affect on tick habitat. While a rise in temperature can increase forest biomass and increase growth rates of transitioning forest, it decreases biomass at the forest edge which is a place where low lying scrub grows the most and provides ideal "questing"[0] habitat for ticks. So that seems like wash but it's actually more complex even that that.
3. This one is more Anthropocene than specifically climate related. Many prime tick hosts have adapted well to human crowded space including deer, mice and small mammals. Their predators such as wolves, foxes, and birds of prey have not fared as well.
4. Related to 3 above, sprawl puts people in closer proximity to habitats once favored by tick hosts so there may be a factor where ticks are not increasing so much as human/tick interaction is.
[0]https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/life_cycle_and_hosts.html search for questing
It's because of warmer winters and an exploding deer population. People need to take up hunting again to reduce the numbers of those tick motherships.
> If the urban rat was the primary carrier of bubonic plague, the country mouse is it for Lyme disease.
... or, as others have said elsewhere in the thread, restore a balance to the ecosystem by reintroducing and protecting natural predators (wolves, foxes, etc.).
"Bird populations in steep decline in North America, study finds"
> North America has more than a billion fewer birds than it did 40 years ago
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/report-fi...
Edit: I had a scary experience. After rain I was hunting in the woods with bushes a metre tall, shotgut over the head to avoid accidents. Then a snake hiss ahead, tried to turn right, another snake hiss that way, same to left and... same back.
I panicked and got out of the bushes as fast as I could, I was panting. Then I noticed I was covered by hundreds of ticks. I shouted and my father came alarmed. He managed to brush all of them except one that I found at home. It took my mother about ten seconds to take it off with olive oil.
Coating them in oil blocks their oxygen exchange, so they release, but sometimes they vomit back into the bit when they do.
And you didn't hear the jaws snap when you pulled it off, you heard the mouth parts tearing. You have to be careful pulling a tick off or the mouth parts will stay in your skin, causing irritation and inflammation.
Obviously we need to be very careful about trying to rebalance what we've put out of balance, and study to be sure that we are not eliminating a critical food source for other links in the food web.
https://psmag.com/magazine/deleting-a-species-genetically-en...
You shouldnt yank it, more along the lines of the force you'd use to open a zipper.
Yeah, he's mentioned once or twice that his is so bad that he can't even write reliably, let alone do speaking gigs or consulting work. Stuff like this scares the shit out of me.
Today, the population in New England has been shockingly decimated by ticks... researchers are pulling upwards of ten thousand ticks off of dying moose. They've been bled dry, thanks to warmer winters and reduced tick dormancy periods.
I can pick 2010 (22,561) vs 2017 (29,513)
Their data set begins at 1997 and ends in 2017 though:
1997: 12,801
2017: 29,513
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/7/17314716/lym...
I would definitely pay money for this if they brought it back. Probably up to hundreds of dollars.
I wish there was a Lyme vaccine but imho the case of Lymerix is closer to Rotashield than an innocent victim of anti-vaxxers.
My younger brother had the bullseye as a very young child. My mother had a different very debilitating tick borne illness, Babesiosis, but was only treated for Lyme for months.
I had a blood test when I was 20, and was told I was positive for Lyme. I had zero symptoms of Lyme, and had been spending most of my time living out of the region at college, though I had complained of some general fatigue. They put me on doxycycline, and I dutifully took it. I still don't know whether I actually had Lyme. My father, a chronic hypochondriac, was put on a Lyme regimen at one point too, though it was never clear exactly what symptoms he had.
I'm not entirely sure the point I'm getting at with these anecdotes. Doctors in Lyme hotspots may diagnose Lyme too readily. More specifically, they may order too many blood tests, which from my naive research do not look to be especially accurate for Lyme.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anti-Brumm-Forte-150-ml/dp/B006ZL4H...
[0] - https://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Conte...
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-xpm-2013-aug-20-la-ol-lym...
I haven't had any physical symptoms since, but I'm pretty sure my mood and cognitive ability has taken a hit. There are of course so many factors not controlled for, but it's always at the back of my mind.
I've become violently genocidal towards these little bloodsuckers. If it was up to me, I'd wipe them out with almost any means, and at whatever cost ;-)
After looking into the anti-tick options I actually started fantasizing about some kind of super lightweight "earth suit" (like an astronaut's space suit).
Something that you could put on, fully seal yourself in, and then just enjoy the outdoors with reckless abandon. I know it sounds a bit crazy but I think it could potentially be a transformative way of exploring the outdoors.
I love the idea of being rattlesnake/tick/spider/thorn-proof. I could sleep outdoors in the middle of fields, under trees, in puddles, etc.
But you would also sweat a lot and generally be quite uncomfortable. Tradeoffs...
Though I am nearly there when I go for walks in mosquito country. Big hat, with netting all around, socks half way up my legs, trousers stuck well inside them...
I do really hate ticks. Ruins summers for me.
We now live in a world where you can vaccinate your dog for Lyme disease but not yourself.
Dogs have short, and I guess less valuable, lives. So this is considered an acceptable practice for prevention. And there are many many dogs with severe reactions to these medications, including some fatalities.
Would you really want to do that to yourself?
> For vaccination of healthy dogs 8 weeks of age or older as an aid in the prevention of clinical disease and subclinical arthritis associated with Borrelia burgdorferi.
Lyme and other tick-borne diseases have yet to receive anything like that sort of attention. In 1998, the Food and Drug Administration approved a Lyme disease vaccine called Lymerix, administered in a three-injection cycle, that reduced infections in adults by nearly 80%. But it was discontinued three years later after sales bottomed out, due in large part to public fears driven by negative news reports over its side effects (most notably arthritis) and a class-action lawsuit whose claims were debunked. It was an early victory for the anti-vaccine movement, which gained momentum thanks to a now-retracted study linking autism to the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine that was released the same year as Lymerix.
“That actually scared me,” says Joyce Sakamoto, an entomologist at the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Pennsylvania State University who has researched public engagement strategies to improve tick-borne disease literacy. “That was a case where the anti-vax community was able to effectively kill something entirely without a lot of scientific evidence.”
Damned depressing.
You're conflating two terms. PTLDS exists, in patients who had Lyme but experience post-treatment symptoms.
"Chronic Lyme" is different, and is largely problematic because the folks who believe they have it tend to have never actually been exposed to Lyme in the first place.
https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/chronic-lyme-d...
https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/faq/index.html
> The term “chronic Lyme disease” (CLD) has been used to describe people with different illnesses. While the term is sometimes used to describe illness in patients with Lyme disease, in many occasions it has been used to describe symptoms in people who have no evidence of a current or past infection with B. burgdorferi (Marques, 2008). Because of the confusion in how the term CLD is employed, experts in this field do not support its use.
https://www.fasebj.org/doi/10.1096/fj.10-167247
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/does-everybody-have-chronic...
and I also almost fell for "chronic Lyme" few years ago. There's something seriously unsettling around websites/online communities dedicated to chronic Lyme. From Lyme friendly doctors, to people doing and interpreting their own tests, to people ascribing all kind of ailments to this "condition", etc.
A reason for possible increases in reported cases is that Lyme infected ticks are now found in every state, and also it is a more widely known about disease possibly leading to more testing for it and thus more reporting of infections.
One problem is this test isn’t perfect. For example in my case I am five bands positive. I tested myself twice six months apart on Quest with the same five bands positive both times. But being a thorough person I also at the same time tested myself using the IgeneX test, which had no (zero) positive bands the both times. I reported this pretty bad anomaly to the CMS but haven’t heard a response.
It is my impression from most of the research and talking to a pretty awesome neurologist who deals with a lot of “chronic Lyme” cases that make their way to him: that most chronic Lyme is actually an autoimmune reaction. Possibly caused by a prior Lyme infection (possibly not) but if so then the Lyme probably long ago was defeated, as patients with those symptoms tend to improve once put on high dose IVIG.
Bill Pardy: What?
Jack MacReady: Lyme disease. You touch some deer feces, and then you... eat a sandwich without washin' your hands. You got your lyme disease!
Bill Pardy: And that makes you look like a squid?
> Moreover, a Department of Agriculture spokesperson, Sandy Miller-Hays, told the news service that -- counter to Carroll's claims -- Lyme disease was never studied at Plum Island.
As for symptoms, it was described in the 1760s as "exquisite pain [in] the interior parts of the limbs", neurological symptoms in the 1920s, etc. That it took a while to recognize the cause of these things doesn't mean the disease didn't exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#History
Either way, if you're trying to provide a source against the point being made, it needs to be better than that one. Is there any other?
Edit: I did a bit of looking into it.
Tick-borne diseases were definitely studied there, which means general subject was being researched. (a bunch of pubmed studies are listed here [1], and pubmed shows in the author information that they were from Plum Island. Ignore the site if you like, just look at the pubmed articles.)
The geography of the disease also fits a spread from the Plum Island facility. See the same article for a map.
I obviously can't go order and read a physical book off the cuff, but it seems like the Lab 257 book by Carroll is decently reliable, as far as can be expected when making claims counter to an official government position. From wikipedia: "The review in Army Chemical Review concluded 'Lab 257 would be cautiously valuable to someone writing a history of Plum Island'".
Anyway, in summary, there is enough evidence to ask a reasonable question: which puts the onus back on the government, or you, to provide credible evidence that Lyme was not developed there.
No, it doesn't, considering it was documented in Scotland in the 1700s. The Plum Island facility was started in 1954.
> From wikipedia: "The review in Army Chemical Review concluded 'Lab 257 would be cautiously valuable to someone writing a history of Plum Island'".
The actual quote is:
> The review in Army Chemical Review concluded "Lab 257 would be cautiously valuable to someone writing a history of Plum Island, but is otherwise an example of fringe literature with a portrayal of almost every form of novelist style."
In other words, "it gets the biographical stuff mostly right, before it goes nutty".
> Anyway, in summary, there is enough evidence to ask a reasonable question: which puts the onus back on the government, or you, to provide credible evidence that Lyme was not developed there.
Lyme's historical record predating the very existence of the lab is fairly conclusive proof that it wasn't developed there.
Yes, it does. This strain was before unseen in the US so much so it's very name references where it was first seen in the US, regardless of where it may have been elsewhere in the world.