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At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis
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Re: At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis
#62According to evidence based medicine, infected tick's bite is not equal to infection of the patient. It means that the test can be false positive and based solely on it, people would start exhausting treatment for nothing
The "exhausting treatment" is a single pill, once.
Re: At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely yes, because the most severe risks are associated with the bacteria reaching the heart and into the nervous system, which is a relatively slow process. There's a window of a couple of weeks. If you could know as soon as you were bitten whether there was any risk of infection at all, that would be very valuable information. I think it's only a one in ten chance that an infected tick would transmit the infec…
As long as you’re not getting bitten by a tick more than once a year if you do get bitten every time take the high dose antibiotic seems simple enough that’s what we do here at at least
Not everyone is in a position to take that approach so freely, alas.
So one more tool in the toolbox is a very good thing.
Re: At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Publicly founded health systems are terrible whe. dealing with Lyme disease. It is impossible to simply and clearly diagnose, and separate ill people from "simulants". Something like "back pain" ormother chronic illnesses.
Nothing really to do with public healthcare. It is literally that there is almost no medical or social experience in the UK of actually seeing developed Lyme disease up close, because it has historically been so unusual, so there are no protocols.
A few thousand cases every year now, when the first indigenous case ever properly recorded in the UK was only in 1986, and it's not like in the USA where really wide areas are high risk. Some of the pockets of highest risk Lyme in the UK are no more than a few miles across.
Nurse stations and pharmacy clinics are great at properly removing ticks if you know you have been bitten, and from there you will now get good advice about Lyme.
But a system that has no endemic experience of Lyme is just not going to test for it. Because it's remote, and people are usually unaware they have been in risk areas, and often unaware they've even been bitten.
Re: At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis
#65Buried way way down:
LymeAlert, which will sell for about $50, is designed to detect the presence of Borrelia burgdorferi, the pathogen known to cause Lyme disease, in a tick.
The test kit, which remains effective for up to 12 months, is simple to use. 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. A patent-pending buffer solution readies the sample for testing. The user then inserts a test strip into a slot in the grinder. The strip’s chemically treated nitrocellulose paper functions as an immunochromatographic assay that can detect the presence of Borrelia burgdorferi.
Re: At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis
#66[dead]
Re: At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis
#67Wow, 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…
Maybe it is a raise of dog ownership in UK as well. They bring ticks inside houee, and shed it in public parks. Our dog used to have like 50 ticks everytime it returned from run.
People are more aware of ticks because of dog ownership, I think, but I don't know if this is a real risk because of the widespread use of tick repellent treatments for dogs (which are their own little eco-disaster).
COVID lockdowns changed us and we're a bit more outdoorsy.
But mostly it is the deer population. There are now four times as many wild deer in the UK as there were before the first indigenous case of Lyme was detected. From under half a million to well over two million over that timeframe.
In the south east around where I am, wild boar are now a potentially significant vector in the high risk areas, too — we've gone from literally zero to a couple of thousand wild boar in the same forty-year period of time just in the 20 miles around me. They apparently can carry upwards of a hundred without suffering.
Re: At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
CDC recommends prophylaxis only if the tick is engorged. In my country, guidelines do not recommend prophylaxis at all (for better or worse - personally, I would take a single doxycyclin dose for a >24h high-risk tick bite, Lyme is no joke). However, guidelines universally recommend against testing ticks. For instance, IDSA says this: > Knowing tick characteristics (ie, species, life stage, and an assessment of the d…
CDC recommendation is more interested in preventing antibiotic resistance than in preventing Lyme disease for the patient. Obey CDC at your own risk
Antibiotics aren't free of risks to the patient either, including doxycycline. There's always a risk tradeoff.
Re: At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis
#69There are MANY facebook groups filled with people fully convinced that they have Lyme disease. These groups teach that virtually any and every symptom is caused by the infection and that basically everyone has it. As if this wasn’t insane enough, the people in the group will push each other to go on antibiotics - via so called lyme literate doctors - until they are on the verge of death due to the side effects. Worse: if a lab test is negative they say you should treat by symptom (referring people back to the massive list of virtually every known symptom as proof that they have lyme). It gets worse: even if you get really bad reactions to the treatment, they say you are having a herxheimer reaction and to keep pushing. It gets worse: having followed many of those groups for years, it’s rare that anyone actually gets better from whatever symptom they were having that led them down the self destructive path of lyme self-diagnosis. Well, it actually is a bit worse: even if by some chance you did had a positive lyme test, and if by chance you did got years worth of antibiotics, SOT treatments, etc etc etc… and now you have finally a clean test- well actually it’s bartonella, or parasites, or babesia, or EBV or whatever … so you must carry on. And, it’s not that these people are idiots, it’s just that they fall into a very specific category: 1) have real symptoms, 2) have no real answers from medicine, 3) have internet access, 4) have no notion, not even a tiny spec, of the existence of a concept called falsifiability. So when i read that there’s a new at home test for lyme… on tics(!) i can only imagine the massive amount of suffering this will cause on these poor people… and i imagine many if them will put their blood on the test and come up with all kinds of ways to use this to find yet another proof that they have it
Re: At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis
#70Unfortunately, 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 universall…
"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."
Even smaller and less noticeable are the larvae. And I know I learned that they cannot transmit the disease, because they only do so, if they have biten an infected animal before - so I never worried about small ticks, but apparently new research indicates, that this is wrong.
"However, newer research suggests that some pathogens, including Borrelia miyamotoi, may be transmitted from the adult female tick directly to her offspring.
This means larval ticks may already be infected before their first bite."
https://danielcameronmd.com/larval-ticks-borrelia-miyamotoi/