Hacker News Reader

Comment by uniformlyrandom | Hacker News Reader

> If you live in a lyme-tick area

So, continental US, excluding maybe Nevada and New Mexico (because desert).

> you should have antibiotics on hand at all times.

So, here is a problem: in US, antibiotics are prescription-only. And no doctor would prescribe antibiotics preventively. They will prescribe antibiotics after a tick bite, but you need an office visit (or online office visit). The only way to get antibiotics preventively is to stash some after a tick bite, or simulate symptoms over a video call.

TL/DR: if you are in US, you're fucked.

View on HN

http://www.happypreppers.com/fishantibiotics.html

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746509/

The desert certainly doesn't stop the suckers, speaking as a New Mexico resident. Ticks abound, Lyme equally so.

Really? The CDC [0] shows a total of 4 cases of Lyme in NM from 2012-2017. Looking at that map, it appears to me that the desert does seem to stop the suckers.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/stats/maps.html

Not to mention:

> Each dot represents one case of Lyme disease and is placed randomly in the patient’s county of residence. The presence of a dot in a state does not necessarily mean that Lyme disease was acquired in that state. People travel between states, and the place of residence is sometimes different from the place where the patient became infected.

95% of cases come from 14 states, none of which are western. Mountain and Pacific (WA, OR, CA, ID, NV, AZ, MT, UT, NM, CO, WY) states together are around 0.6% of lyme cases nationwide. Many people in these states contract the disease out east, come home, and then visit a doctor in a western state. New Mexico had 3 confirmed cases in 2017, out of nearly 30,000 in the entire US. So no, Lynne disease does not even close to equality abound in New Mexico or the West.

https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/datasurveillance/tables-recent.html

An overworked doctor will prescribe them for "acne" or a "UTI" without too much fuss.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com