The Lyme-disease infection rate is growing. So is the battle over how to treat it

[xchrom]

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/07/01/130701fa_fact_specter



The disease is carried by the black-legged tick, now found as far south as Florida. Photograph by Kenji Aoki.

KKaleigh Ahern was twelve years old when a tick bit her. She noticed it “perched” on her shoulder when she was taking a shower one morning. “I thought it was your average, everyday bug,” Ahern told me recently. But, when she tried to brush it off, the tick wouldn’t budge. “The legs wiggled but it was embedded in my skin. I freaked out and started screaming.” Kaleigh’s mother, Holly Ahern, came running and removed it. “I took the kid and the tick to the doctor,” she said. “I told him, Here is my kid, here is the tick, and there is the place where it was attached to her.” That was in 2002. The Aherns live near Saratoga Springs, New York, where Lyme disease has been endemic for years. The infection is transmitted by tick bites, so Ahern assumed that the doctor would prescribe a prophylactic dose of antibiotics. But he said that he wasn’t going to treat it. “If a rash develops or she starts to have flulike symptoms, bring her back,” he told her. At the time, Ahern, an associate professor of microbiology at suny Adirondack, didn’t know much about tick-borne illnesses. She took Kaleigh home and watched for the signature symptom of Lyme disease: a rash that begins with a bright-red bull’s-eye around the tick bite.

No rash developed, and Kaleigh was fine—strong enough to become an all-American swimmer both in high school and at Union College. There were times during high school when she felt mentally hazy and not quite right physically, which she attributed to allergies or a teen-age bout of mononucleosis. But at the end of her freshman year in college she found herself crippled by anxiety, depression, and insomnia. She was beset by searing headaches, her muscles often felt as though they were on fire, and her brain seemed wrapped in a dense fog. Kaleigh tested positive for Lyme disease. Like most physicians, her doctor followed the standard medical practice, endorsed by public-health officials throughout the United States, and prescribed a three-week course of antibiotics. “I was so happy to know what was wrong with me,” Kaleigh said. “For a while, I didn’t mind the pain.”

[Warpy]

1. I'm "lucky," Lyme shot my temperature to 103+

and I had a beautiful bulls eye rash and had seen the tick and pulled the bugger off. Three weeks of high dose antibiotics worked.

What's really been amazing is finding out just how old this disease is, Oetzi the "ice man" tested positive for it, his infection being 5300 years old.

"Chronic Lyme" patients usually test negative for the spirochetes. What seems to be happening is what happens to some unlucky trauma victims, their brains causing them to feel acute pain long after injuries have healed. It really needs to be approached from this angle instead of with questionable diets and treatments.

[Dorian Gray]

2. That article was fascinating

a good friend of mine was diagnosed with Lyme after suffering for years with vague symptoms. Since she never reported the tick, they didn't test for it. When they finally did, she responded well to the antibiotic treatments. But until they figured out what was wrong with her, she truly thought she was dying from cancer, she was in so much pain.