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The Forthcoming Lyme Disease Explosion

ramonmercado

ramonmercado

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My shin started itching as soon as I read the headline. This is a serious problem wgich will only get wirse. Be careful of where you ramble when wearing shorts.

Lyme disease is set to explode, and you can’t protect yourself
A new prediction says 2017 and 2018 will see major Lyme disease outbreaks in new areas. This could lead to lifelong health consequences, so where's the vaccine?
By Chelsea Whyte

BY THE time he had finished his walk through the woods in New York state, Rick Ostfeld was ready to declare a public health emergency. He could read the warning signs in the acorns that littered the forest floor – seeds of a chain of events that will culminate in an unprecedented outbreak of Lyme disease this year.

Since that day in 2015, Ostfeld has been publicising the coming outbreak. Thanks to a changing climate it could be one of the worst on record: the ticks that carry the disease have been found in places where it has never before been a problem – and where most people don’t know how to respond. The danger zone isn’t confined to the US: similar signs are flagging potential outbreaks in Europe. Polish researchers predict a major outbreak there in 2018.

In theory, Ostfeld’s early warning system gives public health officials a two-year window to prepare. In many other cases, this would be enough time to roll out a vaccination programme. But there is no human vaccine for Lyme disease. Why not? And what can you do to protect yourself in the meantime?

Lyme disease is the most common infection following an insect bite in the US: the Centers for Disease Control estimates that 300,000 Americans contract Lyme disease each year, calling it “a major US public health problem”. While it is easy enough to treat if caught early, we are still getting to grips with lifelong health problems that can stem from not catching it in time (see “Do I have Lyme disease?“). ...

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...-you-cant-protect-yourself/?utm_term=Autofeed
 
ramonmercado said:
Be careful of where you ramble when wearing shorts.
Click to expand...

Yup, this has been creeping up on us. Used to walk the dogs in fields and woodland and soon learned not to wear shorts or short sleeves. Wasn't worried about ticks, although the dogs occasionally caught one, more the mozzies and horseflies.
 
We were picking up ticks all through the winter here in the upper midwest. They were smaller in size but I've never seen them active for that long. :eek:
 
From the sublime to the Lyme.

Beyond the Lyme Wars
By Suzanne Koven AUGUST 14, 2018

Sick By Porochista Khakpour. Published 06.05.2018, Harper Perennial, 272 Pages.

MANY YEARS AGO, a patient I’ll call Alice had weakness, fatigue, brain fog, and joint pains that I was unable to diagnose. Eventually she took matters into her own hands. After connecting on the internet with others who suffered similarly, Alice determined that she had chronic Lyme disease. Through this online community she found a physician with a reputation for being Lyme literate — meaning that, unlike most doctors and medical organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he believed that in certain people (the majority of them women) Lyme infection can persist after the standard 14- to 21-day course of antibiotics and cause symptoms such as those Alice experienced. He prescribed high doses of doxycycline and erythromycin over many months. Sometimes the treatments made Alice feel better and sometimes, when she sensed that the drugs were killing large numbers of borrelia burgdorferi, the spirochetal bacterium that causes Lyme, she had painful Herxheimer reactions or “herxes,” as chronic Lyme patients call them.

Depending on your perspective, Alice had either reclaimed her autonomy from a patriarchal medical system dismissive of patients, particularly of women with difficult-to-diagnose conditions, or she’d fallen prey to a charlatan who charged her large sums of money to treat a fictional disease.

Few medical topics are as divisive as chronic Lyme disease or, as it is often referred to in medical journals, “chronic Lyme disease.” ...

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/beyond-the-lyme-wars/#!
 
The singer Kris Kristofferson (aged 80-odd) was being treated for dementia until a test proved he had Lyme disease.
After treatment his condition improved hugely.

Rolling Stone article -
Kris Kristofferson: An Outlaw at 80

​

Then, earlier this year, a doctor decided to test Kristofferson for Lyme disease. The test came back positive. His wife believes he picked it up from a tick as he crawled around the forest floor in Vermont for six weeks while filming the movie Disappearances.

“He was taking all these medications for things he doesn’t have, and they all have side effects,” she says. She is wearing one of her husband’s tour merchandise shirts.

After he gave up his Alzheimer’s and depression pills and went through three weeks of Lyme-disease treatment, Lisa was shocked. “All of a sudden he was back,” she says. There are still bad days, but “some days he’s perfectly normal and it’s easy to forget that he is even battling anything.”
Click to expand...
 
DID the Lyme disease explosion of 2017-18 manifest? I must admit I've picked the odd tick off the old dog, but Teal has never really been subject to them. We have plenty of deer round here (she frequently chases them across the fields), but I've not seen a tick for ages.
 
catseye said:
DID the Lyme disease explosion of 2017-18 manifest? I must admit I've picked the odd tick off the old dog, but Teal has never really been subject to them. We have plenty of deer round here (she frequently chases them across the fields), but I've not seen a tick for ages.
Click to expand...
Dunno, it might've been a scare story. It worked on me anyway! Having owned and de-ticked dogs I never wear shorts anywhere ticky.
 
catseye said:
We have plenty of deer round here (she frequently chases them across the fields), but I've not seen a tick for ages.
Click to expand...

I've seen a lot about CWD (chronic wasting disease) in the U.S. deer and elk population over the past few years.

With the numbers involved, a good number of people are likely to have eaten the meat of infected animals, but there doesn't seem (yet!) to be a chance of a zoonotic leap.

Is this disease yet present in the UK?

Edit: basics here.
https://bowhunting360.com/2018/11/08/chronic-wasting-disease-what-you-should-know/
 
From the thread:

https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/audubons-five-mystery-birds.66111/

Is this link

https://kottke.org/17/03/john-james-audubons-five-mystery-birds

Which contains this paragraph about the USA:

"But the sad echo of the loss of passenger pigeons still reverberates today because its extinction probably exacerbated the proliferation of Lyme disease. When the passenger pigeons existed in large numbers, they subsisted primarily on acorns. However, since there are no pigeons to eat acorns, the populations of Eastern deer mice — the main reservoir of Lyme disease — exploded far beyond historic levels as they exploited this unexpected food bonanza."
 
Yithian said:
I've seen a lot about CWD (chronic wasting disease) in the U.S. deer and elk population over the past few years.

With the numbers involved, a good number of people are likely to have eaten the meat of infected animals, but there doesn't seem (yet!) to be a chance of a zoonotic leap.

Is this disease yet present in the UK?
Click to expand...

No.

The latest government info:

“Update on Chronic Wasting Disease in Europe
25 April 2018

In March 2016, the cervid Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSE), or Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) was reported in reindeer in Europe for the first time with a case in Norway. The source of infection and time and route of incursion is not known. There have been no detections of CWD in Europe outside Norway and Finland to date and no cases of cervid TSEs in the UK.”

https://assets.publishing.service.g...t_data/file/703368/sa-cwd-norway-20180425.pdf

Practical advice from the British Deer Society, dated 2021:

https://www.bds.org.uk/wp-content/u...aflet-2-final-final-12-March-2021-BRANDED.pdf

maximus otter
 
A case of long Lyme disease.

Yen Lau caught Lyme disease from an infected tick bite during a camping trip to Loch Lomond almost four years ago.

She says she is living with an "invisible disease" that today still causes her days-long bouts of sickness, migraines, dizziness and chronic fatigue. But she is determined to enjoy her "good days" when she does not feel ill, and also wants to raise awareness of the risks posed by the tiny arachnids.

"People say I don't look ill," says Yen, 35, from Glasgow. "But they see me on days when I am well. They don't see me when I'm vomiting, or dizzy or fatigued."

Lyme disease is an infection that can be spread to humans by ticks carrying the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria.

The Scottish charity Lyme Resource Centre says the disease is increasingly being recognised by GPs, and suspects the number of people affected is likely to be higher than levels recorded by laboratories.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-57693815
 
Some potential good news.

Erol Fikrig had spent 10 years pursuing a vaccine that would take a new approach to protecting people from Lyme disease, a growing bane in the United States:

He wanted to target not the pathogen, but the tick that transmits it. Then, at a June 2019 meeting in Killarney, Ireland, he heard immunologist Drew Weissman of the University of Pennsylvania describe what was then a little-known technology: messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines. In a flash, Fikrig saw a way forward. The Yale School of Medicine infectious disease physician collared Weissman and asked whether the technology might work against the deer tick that transmits Lyme disease in the United States. “I’d like to pursue that,” Fikrig recalls Weissman saying.

MRNA technology is now famous for delivering vaccines against COVID-19, and this week it achieved another distinction with an experimental Lyme preventive announced by the collaboration launched in Ireland. “It’s the first vaccine [intended for humans] against an infectious disease that does not target the pathogen,” Fikrig says. The mRNA vaccine, administered to guinea pigs, turned tick bites red and inflamed. The ticks fed poorly, fell off early, and often failed to transmit the Lyme-causing bacterium. Researchers hope the vaccine will one day work the same way in humans.

It’s “a beautiful study,” says Ruth Montgomery, a cellular immunologist at Yale who was not involved with the work. “Potentially a mechanism like this could be very important in a number of tick-borne diseases.”

Others are impressed by the team’s technological feat. The researchers packed 19 distinct mRNA snippets, each encoding a protein, or antigen, from deer tick saliva, into a single vaccine; COVID-19 mRNA vaccines deliver just one. “The mRNA vaccine saved us from COVID for sure,” says microbiologist Jorge Benach of Stony Brook University, who co-discovered Borrelia burgdorferi, the tick-borne spirochete that causes Lyme disease. “Now [Fikrig] is using stunning technology … with more than one antigen simultaneously. … I think it will be very very useful for future vaccines.”

https://www.science.org/content/article/hope-lyme-disease-new-vaccine-targets-ticks
 
The mRNA vaccine, administered to guinea pigs, turned tick bites red and inflamed. The ticks fed poorly, fell off early, and often failed to transmit the Lyme-causing bacterium. Researchers hope the vaccine will one day work the same way in humans.

I read this thinking that the guinea pigs were human guinea pigs, then tripped up at the end. Maybe we need another term to describe guinea pigs in medical experiments where literal guinea pigs are used?
 
catseye said:
…guinea pigs in medical experiments where literal guinea pigs are used?
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il_570xN.776151279_e8oo.jpg


maximus otter
 
On a camping trip in September I realised I had a tick attached to my calf, no worries, as I had a tick removal tool in my survival tin. Open the tin and there was no tick removal tool.

I hurry to Aviemore, book a hotel room, and post on Facebook that I have a tick and (jokingly) say I am going to use my Swiss army knife to gouge it out. Instead I rush to Tesco for tweezers but they have none.

I then get some string from my survival tin and try looping it round the little bastard, but my leg hair kept getting in the way, so I shaved round the bite with my Swiss army knife, then managed to get the tick out with the string.

Then I went back on Facebook to boast of my triumph, only too see a wise old man, a guru who lives in a cave in Cromer, had said don't Swiss army knives come with tweezers? How silly did I feel then....
 

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titch said:
On a camping trip in September I realised I had a tick attached to my calf, no worries, as I had a tick removal tool in my survival tin. Open the tin and there was no tick removal tool.

I hurry to Aviemore, book a hotel room, and post on Facebook that I have a tick and (jokingly) say I am going to use my Swiss army knife to gouge it out. Instead I rush to Tesco for tweezers but they have none.

I then get some string from my survival tin and try looping it round the little bastard, but my leg hair kept getting in the way, so I shaved round the bite with my Swiss army knife, then managed to get the tick out with the string.

Then I went back on Facebook to boast of my triumph, only too see a wise old man, a guru who lives in a cave in Cromer, had said don't Swiss army knives come with tweezers? How silly did I feel then....
Click to expand...
Also, cutting a notch in an old credit card may turn it into a tick removal tool.
 
titch said:
Then I went back on Facebook to boast of my triumph, only too see a wise old man, a guru who lives in a cave in Cromer, had said don't Swiss army knives come with tweezers? How silly did I feel then....
Click to expand...
This wise man's name? It wouldn't be 'Swifty', would it?
 
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