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Comment by xorcist | Hacker News Reader

After every bite? That is a manual how to breed multi resistant Borrelia burgdorferi, the short version.

Please be a responsible human being and consult a doctor. Common symptoms for a bacterial infections are flu like symptoms and a bullseye-like rash a few days after the bite. Be on the lookout for those and you will be fine.

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Unfortunately, these 'common symptoms' often do not occur after an infection, so this is misleading. In never had them but was positive for Lyme after dealing with joint pain for quite a while. Taking a single dose of Doxy is usually recommended if you live in an area with high prevalence of Lyme in ticks [1], and if the tick was not cleanly removed within 24h. The latest meta study I'm aware of showed that this will reduce the likelihood of infection by about 70% [2].

The fear of breeding a MR Borrelia is completely overblown. By far the highest risk of breeding MRSA are in a hospital setting, not by taking a single dose of Doxy at home. The main reason to not take Doxy is its side effects (for instance, when I had to take it against my Lyme infection, I vomited like there's no tomorrow, which fortunately is one of the lesser serious side effects. Had to switch to Amoxi.).

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/datasurveillance/lyme-disease-maps....

[2] https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s128...

Getting antibiotics maybe once a year is not excessive. Please stop being hyperbolic, I’m well aware of MRSAs and do my best to take them sparingly. Where I live between 50-70% of the deer ticks have Lyme disease so it’s not overkill.

This was in reference to after every bite, not once a year.

Antibiotic resistance is not hyperbole. It is a real problem, and potentially a big one. What would be hyperbolic is if the part of the world that lives in tick infested regions would be pretty much on a constant antibiotic binge during season.

A full dose is two weeks and you are likely to be bitten again. I don't know if the suggestion was in reference to ideas that float around the Internet that you shouldn't take the full two week dose, but none of those studies have been replicated. Given what we know from how antibiotic resistance forms, they could be potentially harmful.

Just be careful when taking medical advice.

By far the weirdest thing to me in this entire thread, as someone who had long-term Lyme disease, is the dudes bragging about how often they remove ticks from themselves and their children, yet who are more scared of antibiotic resistance the Lyme.

Simply does not compute. Do you, like, get off on risking contracting infectious disease? I feel bad for your children.

That's perhaps the weirdest insult attempt in a long time.

Perhaps not removing the tiny spider like creatures that suck your blood could be something to brag about in some overly macho context. But removing them? Of course I remove them, from myself, children, pets, and anyone else. Ticks are a fact of life, and you will get bitten if you live in their areas.

A vaccine can not some soon enough. In the meantime, Lyme can be cured by antibiotics. Staying put indoors or constantly being on antibiotics during summer is not an option.

If I contacted my practitioner and wanted prophylactic wide spectrum antibiotics I'd be kindly shown the door. That is a controlled substance for a reason. That reason is antibiotic resistance, a well studied scientific fact, and not something where our own opinions matter much.

Antibiotic resistance almost never occurs in isolated situations. It’s hospital settings and large factory farms that are the issue. Either ways there’s a Lyme vaccine on the way. It should be available by 2025.

Sorry for the akshually energy, but the acronym MRSA is specifically for methicillin-resistant Staph aureus. In this context you might have meant MDR for multi-drug resistant? There's also XDR for the apocalyptic superbugs we're inadvertently breeding.

Yeah I didn’t know the difference. Multi drug resistant anything is what I meant.

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