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At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis

#21

Post by dofm »

maxerickson wrote: post #18
aliljet wrote: post #17

Does diagnosis offer a better prognosis for those that are infected?

Yes, it's treatable with antibiotics and people that are treated get less sick. As stated in the article, prophylactic treatment with Doxycycline is the standard of care. Testing the tick is an alternative to that rather than something that should be expected to increase treatment... The article also mentions that symptoms sometimes persist after treatment with antibiotics.

It also has the broader public health benefit of reducing the preventative use of that class of antibiotics, which lowers the risk of antibiotic resistance generally. (In an ideal world we'd never use them preventatively.)

Could be a very big deal if it could be made properly inexpensive. COVID tests were, after all.

Re: At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis

#22

Post by lokar »

vintermann wrote: post #15
lokar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Vaccination

All those people who claimed to get autoimmune problems after the vaccine, must have been people who went to quite a bit of trouble to get the vaccine in the first place, so I'm not so sure it can all be written off as health panic.

A problem with vaccines and the public is that when you perform any intervention on many many people, some will happen to (randomly) suffer some issue. To them, it is obviously causation, regardless of what the math (that they do t understand) says.

Re: At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis

#23

Post by vaylian »

The most interesting part:

> After carefully removing the tick with either tweezers or a tick-removal tool, you place it into the kit’s “Tick Crusher.” The grinder pulverizes the tick’s chitinous exterior, exposing the internal contents where the Borrelia burgdorferi is located

Re: At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis

#24

Post by beej71 »

jensensbutton wrote: post #3

As a parent in the US northeast who likes taking their kids camping and hiking, ticks have been an ongoing conversation this year. I think this is going to sell well.

When I think about moving to the NE from out west, ticks are one of my main reservations. I think, given how many people and dogs recreate out there, I might have it blown out of proportion.

Re: At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis

#25

Post by lima »

Unfortunately, there are major issues with this approach.

The vendor claims "lab-level accuracy" (conveniently omitting the actual accuracy numbers), but the test is a lateral flow test, which means its Limit of Detection is going to be orders of magnitude worse than molecular tests. Tick tests do not require FDA clearance, so their claims are most likely unreviewed.

Existing lab tests for ticks are almost universally based on PCR.

Ticks are small (especially nymphs) and extracting enough material can be tricky even for molecular testing, so I can't imagine an LFT test working terribly well, especially for nymphs, which are responsible for a lot of Lyme infections due to being easy to miss.

The other, bigger problem is that the test result is mostly useless.

The risk of Lyme transmission from an infected tick ranges rougly from And you can't trust negative results either due to limited sensitivity, so you can't rule out transmission either.

In my opinion, tests like this can lead to worse overall health outcomes due to unnecessary treatment or withholding prophylaxis from someone who otherwise qualifies.

Re: At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis

#26

Post by KellyCriterion »

afavour wrote: post #5
dofm wrote: post #2

Wow, this seems a pretty big deal. Here in the UK, Lyme traditionally been a marginal problem (tick bites aren't) but we now have such rapid climate change, along with rapidly increasing wild deer and boar populations, that some areas in the UK are becoming risk zones on more or less the same level of risk as some US regions. Alas the difference here is that education has not caught up to the USA: very few people hav…

I have a friend who got a tick bite on holiday in America many years ago. Turns out they got Lyme disease but no doctors in the UK were experienced with it so they dealt with years of misdiagnosis. I really hope any education effort can get out ahead of that.

Thats interesting, since there is a lot of research around face palsy & recovery in UK.

Re: At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis

#27

Post by KellyCriterion »

lokar wrote: post #9
hedora wrote: post #7

Why can't the government or a generic drug manufacturer just produce the Lyme Disease vaccine? It is safe and the patent has expired! (Also, I have the same question about the poison ivy immunotherapy pills that were common in the US before the FDA.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Vaccination

There was a link on HN some years ago which reported entering a phase-III trial for a vaccination created by one of the big pharma.

Re: At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis

#29

Post by Aurornis »

hedora wrote: post #7

Why can't the government or a generic drug manufacturer just produce the Lyme Disease vaccine? It is safe and the patent has expired! (Also, I have the same question about the poison ivy immunotherapy pills that were common in the US before the FDA.)

There is a long, sad history here. Lyme disease is a popular topic into alternative medicine as an explanation for unexplained symptoms. There is a belief in these communities that the standard tests for Lyme disease are not accurate, so people diagnose themselves by vague symptoms like feeling tired or having headaches. It’s a sad situation where people who aren’t finding an explanation for their symptoms get drawn into forums or Facebook groups where groups of people confidently tell them that their symptoms sound like Chronic Lyme Disease and that normal doctors can’t help them.

This has created an intense fear of Lyme disease among people who don’t trust doctors and “do their own research”. That group overlaps a lot with anti-vax groups. You can see where this is going. Some people who got the Lyme vaccine because they saw it as the lesser of two evils and then subsequently had medical issues blamed everything on the vaccine, and it blew up into lawsuits and a belief that the vaccine causes these problems. If there was any real problem we’ll never know because the storm was such a mess that it made actual research impossible and scared so many people away from the vaccine that it was withdrawn from the market.

Re: At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis

#30

Post by maxerickson »

vintermann wrote: post #15
lokar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Vaccination

All those people who claimed to get autoimmune problems after the vaccine, must have been people who went to quite a bit of trouble to get the vaccine in the first place, so I'm not so sure it can all be written off as health panic.

It's a bit of a stretch to describe These claims were investigated by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control, which found no connection between the vaccine and the autoimmune complaints. as "written off as a health panic".

Of course you can just say they didn't investigate it enough or whatever, you aren't trying to make a reasoned argument and thus don't need to exercise reason.

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