Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A shot to prevent Lyme disease could be on its way

outsideonline.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 428 posts

Re: A shot to prevent Lyme disease could be on its way

#191

Post by wbl »

inter_netuser wrote: post #165
nitrogen wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

trend of anti-intellectualism and distrust of doctors As someone who knows a practicing doctor who is also anti-vax, these are orthogonal issues. Sometimes, distrusting a specific doctor is the more intellectual approach.

You'd be surprised how many physicians and nurses refuse vaccination. You'll just never hear about it. AMA is one powerful beast, I wish I had a union like that. However, sometimes fun little things like this happen that show their true colors: "Starting in early 2003, the United States government started a program to vaccinate 500,000 volunteer health care professionals throughout the country. Recipients were health…

The smallpox vaccine has a non-trivial amount of danger and the only smallpox in the world is guarded very closely.

Re: A shot to prevent Lyme disease could be on its way

#192

Post by istjohn »

misja111 wrote: post #184
uncertainrhymes wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you were young, those ticks may not have had lyme. More importantly, you removed them. They have to be attached for 24 hours before the bacteria comes back out of the tick's gut.

No, removing them early just reduces the chance of getting Lyme. There's no such thing as a 24 hour barrier.

The article states there is a 36 hour barrier. Do you have a source?

Re: A shot to prevent Lyme disease could be on its way

#193

Post by kortex »

emerongi wrote: post #164
kortex wrote: post #147

Graveyard of "not considered a real/serious disease/threat by the medical consensus until a frankly embarrassingly amount of time later" [x] "cadaverous particles" (washing hands after autopsies) [x] "hysteria" (likely a combination of various mental health conditions and/or PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome) [x] "GRID" (HIV/AIDS) [x] leaded gas bad [x] asbestos bad [x] smoking bad [?] refined sugar bad [x] Autism [x…

A lot of it is just science catching up to what is observed in the real world. I agree that many practicing doctors are operating on out-of-date knowledge, so if you happen on one of those and start talking about CFS, you might not get a positive reaction. Isn't it the same as unknowingly hiring a bad contractor, though? Doesn't mean that the engineering community is not trying to find more efficient and better ways…

> CFS is a recognized disorder by the medical community, although the causes are unkown.

My point was, it wasn't even a recognized disorder until fairly recently. As I understand it, part of the problem is a cottage industry of quackish medicine sprung up around the unfalsifiability of chronic Lyme and CFS. But instead of the medical community taking an agnostic stance "we see you are suffering but we can't explain it", there was a strong push in the opposite direction, asserting that it's psychosomatic / "only in your head" / "here's some antidepressants." And you see this pattern again and again. I think the dismissive attitude is starting to abate among the younger medical professionals but you still see this air of "anything I wasn't trained on isn't a thing" among many of them.

Re: A shot to prevent Lyme disease could be on its way

#194

Post by rdedev »

darkerside wrote: post #127
jacksonkmarley wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to detect Borrelia Spirochetes is not equivalent to linking them with chronic symptoms.

Most CDC / IDSA folks will tell you that a course of antibiotics will rid the body of Lyme in all cases. The presence of spirochetes here should be enough for them to stop using that language. But it likely won't because there appears to be a systemic organizational bias against Lyme as a chronic condition, and I'm not sure why.

Kind of reminds me of Alzheimer's disease and the pervasive insistence that it's cause by misfokded protiens even though so many treatments following that assumption failed to cure it. Sometimes an idea is just hard to introduce or root out in academia

Re: A shot to prevent Lyme disease could be on its way

#195

Post by inter_netuser »

arn wrote: post #183
inter_netuser wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised how many physicians and nurses refuse vaccination. You'll just never hear about it. AMA is one powerful beast, I wish I had a union like that. However, sometimes fun little things like this happen that show their true colors: "Starting in early 2003, the United States government started a program to vaccinate 500,000 volunteer health care professionals throughout the country. Recipients were health…

That doesn't mean distrust of vaccination in general - at least by doctors. It was for a potential bioterrorist attack. It perhaps more reflects the low likelihood or belief that there would be a small pox attack. Meanwhile, 96% of physicians are vaccinated against COVID - https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-sur...

If you assume the low likelyhood of the attack was the reason, that means 90% of those physicians could be lying. The stated reason for refusal was concerns about side effects. It's in the quote.

What you stated as a fact, 96% vaccination rate, is actually a self-reported survey.

Why do a survey when public health CDC records could simply be matched with the physician licensing registrars?

Seems an automatic search like that would save physicians their valuable time, aren't they very busy with a pandemic right now? Instead of hard data from CDC, we get self-reported, likely anonymous, self-reported survey.

What do they have to hide?

Re: A shot to prevent Lyme disease could be on its way

#196

Post by darkerside »

megous wrote: post #187
darkerside wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most CDC / IDSA folks will tell you that a course of antibiotics will rid the body of Lyme in all cases. The presence of spirochetes here should be enough for them to stop using that language. But it likely won't because there appears to be a systemic organizational bias against Lyme as a chronic condition, and I'm not sure why.

Presence 4 years or so later. So, maybe the patient was infected again some time after initial treatment?

Occam's Razor applies.

You're not wrong, but they continue to lean on the "evidence doesn't support" angle. At some point that looks like bias.

Re: A shot to prevent Lyme disease could be on its way

#197

Post by Anthony-G »

dmos62 wrote: post #88

In some parts of the world (e.g. the Eastern Bloc) you find tick-borne encephalitis. That's a horrible disease that can cause cerebral and neural damage. What's more, the number of reported human cases of TBE in all endemic regions of Europe have increased by almost 400% within the last three decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick-borne_encephalitis

Thanks for highlighting this. While most hikers are aware of the dangers of Lyme disease, the encephalitis is less well-known. I only found out about it while hiking in Slovakia a few years ago. At that stage, the hiking trip had started and it was too late to get a vaccine.

Re: A shot to prevent Lyme disease could be on its way

#198

Post by mrfusion »

kortex wrote: post #175
mrfusion wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d wonder though if deer use your front yard more than you? Especially in the pre dawn hours. Even if you garden you’re probably only out there a couple times a week? But you could be right that quantity of deer is more important. BTW have you considered guniea fowl? Or at least something like this might help. https://www.consumerreports.org/pest-control/bait-boxes-are-...

I am pretty they do, while I haven't seen them in my yard, they love my neighbor's ~1acre lawn abutting woods across the street. I see them hanging out there all hours of the day. I actually just learned about guinea fowl elsewhere in this thread! Definitely will be looking into it. I also started doing the permethrin soaked cotton balls in tubes. Mice collect the cotton for their nest and it kills ticks. Also our do…

They could probably crawl over from your neighbors yard. Not sure how far they travel. Or hitch a ride on mice?

Wow if tick killing meds exist for dogs maybe we could get deer on those. Problem solved?

Re: A shot to prevent Lyme disease could be on its way

#199

Post by Inhibit »

Grazester wrote: post #146

Wasn't there already a shot being made a long time ago but was shut down due to a whole lot of hot air from critics and anti-vaxxers? https://time.com/6073576/lyme-disease-vaccine/

The article covers that but very pointedly doesn't bring up the angle. Just a note that suddenly there were dramatically lower projected sales the next year.

If you read closely they attribute this to medical objections without mentioning the reason you're stating. Your statement better aligns with my memory of the period.

Re: A shot to prevent Lyme disease could be on its way

#200

Post by PebblesRox »

mwigdahl wrote: post #168
Dumblydorr wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A doctor's opinion on disease isn't merely an opinion, it's an educated guess based on experience and qualifications. New diseases and research are constantly appearing, thousands of articles are written each year. We can't expect doctors to know everything, but we can expect them to have more informed opinions, on average, than non-doctors. I say this because there's a rising trend of anti-intellectualism and distru…

I'd qualify that: "...we can expect them to have more informed opinions, on average, _for any random condition_, than non-doctors." The thing I think you're missing is that the resources to do good, deep research on a condition do exist, and the sufferer has very strong motivation to do that research and become very well informed in the etiology and treatment options. The doctor, less so. They have a lot of patients…

For anyone else who isn't familiar with the Pig and Chicken story:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig

Post reply on HN