Does anyone know why we don't develop an immunity to lyme disease after being infected once?
They drill into crevices in muscle tissue and are able to avoid the lymphocytes. It's hard to effectively become immune.
The Lyme Wars (2013)
41–50 of 53 posts
Re: The Lyme Wars (2013)
#42I had Lyme disease and I started having symptoms (but no rash) roughly after 1-2 weeks after the tick bite (feeling unwell, shivering, joint pains, swollen lymph nodes). I then took antibiotics for almost 2 weeks. I continued to have severe joint pain for a couple of months. Now, more than a year later, I am feeling well, but sometimes I still feel a very slight joint pain in those affected joints near that tick bite…
I was on antibiotics for a year - in retrospect it may have been a tad stupid, but I had felt so terrible for so long I was prepared to take the risk - given the opportunity, I think most people in the same position would do likewise.
Re: The Lyme Wars (2013)
#43I had Lyme disease and I started having symptoms (but no rash) roughly after 1-2 weeks after the tick bite (feeling unwell, shivering, joint pains, swollen lymph nodes). I then took antibiotics for almost 2 weeks. I continued to have severe joint pain for a couple of months. Now, more than a year later, I am feeling well, but sometimes I still feel a very slight joint pain in those affected joints near that tick bite…
The complication with such short doses, and the discussion of them, is that they provide a short bout of relief, and then the infectee stops taking them - then the bacteria can reinfect them. It often isn't mentioned which specific antibiotic was used. It is typically azithromycin - known as Zithromax. Could you verify this?
There is no magical barrier. Some young children have been infected with extremely virulent Lyme after only 15 minutes of nymph tick attachment. More (experimental, not rhetorical) research is definitely necessary.
The comment about fungal infection destroying one's body badly needs a citation.
Re: The Lyme Wars (2013)
#44I had Lyme disease and I started having symptoms (but no rash) roughly after 1-2 weeks after the tick bite (feeling unwell, shivering, joint pains, swollen lymph nodes). I then took antibiotics for almost 2 weeks. I continued to have severe joint pain for a couple of months. Now, more than a year later, I am feeling well, but sometimes I still feel a very slight joint pain in those affected joints near that tick bite…
The complication with such short doses, and the discussion of them, is that they provide a short bout of relief, and then the infectee stops taking them - then the bacteria can reinfect them. It often isn't mentioned which specific antibiotic was used. It is typically azithromycin - known as Zithromax. Could you verify this? There is no magical barrier. Some young children have been infected with extremely virulent L…
I took Doxycycline which is the recommended antibiotic against Lyme disease. There is no empirical evidence that taking antibiotics for longer than two weeks helps against Lyme.
Citation needed... THERE, I finally found it http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/31/4/1107.long Okay, this was an extreme case. I was mistaken, the woman took the antibiotics for a longer time and intravenously. However, it's still true that the risk of fungal infection is increased by a substantial amount.
Here is another case displaying the dangerous effects of long-term administration of antibiotics which resulted in death http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/51/3/369.full (but not because of fungi)
This way of treating Lyme Disease literally kills people, I am not exaggerating.
Re: The Lyme Wars (2013)
#45I was diagnosed with Lyme disease when i was in elementary school, ~5th grade. No rash was noticed. It wasn't until days later than my knees had swollen so bad that I couldn't walk without significant pain that my teachers and parents actually did anything. Antibiotics and god awful syringes to extract the fluid in my knees. Even though I've been without pain in my knees since, it's left me with a life long hatred fo…
Sounds very much like my symptoms (intense knee pain/swelling and no rash), except that you don't mention low-grade fever and jaw pain (which I had). I was eventually on crutches and had an enormous amount of fluid (orange) removed from my knees. Cortisone helped a great deal.
For whatever reason they tested me for everything under the sun (rheumatoid arthritis, gout (!), etc) before testing for Lyme. I wish I knew then what I know now.
Know the symptoms, insist on the test.
Re: The Lyme Wars (2013)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
This also accurately describes the deer overpopulation in Pennsylvania, where there is also rampant lyme disease. In Pennsylvania, the deer hunters really enjoy the status quo, because of the good odds they can bag a buck every year. And because the hunters have some political influence, proposals to reduce the deer population go nowhere. I'm not sure if the political landscape is similar in New England.
Looking at this from the outside, it seems to me that deer hunters are more likely to get lyme disease and so, they should favor deer population control.
They want to be the population control
Re: The Lyme Wars (2013)
#47While undoubtedly there are some people who have undiagnosed lyme, I suspect there are a lot of people who actually have CFS instead. Reading these kind of news stories it seems there are a lot of lyme "patients" who never had the bulls-eye rash, who keep going to doctors until they are given a diagnosis (or they buy a dubious test, such as igenix), then they're cured by a dubious supplement/diet treatment (which is highly unlikely to cure a bacterial infection).
It also sounds like long-term bacterial therapy isn't any use for lyme if you start it years after infection.
Re: The Lyme Wars (2013)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding is that deer are required for long-distance transport of black legged tick populations, but are not absolutely required to complete the full two-year life cycle.
Nope. "Even though adult ticks can feed on other mammals such as dogs, cats and raccoons, the female adult tick requires a blood meal from the deer before she can lay her 2,000 to 6,000 eggs." http://www.deeralliance.com/node/10
As an aside, I grew up in rural New Jersey (yes, such a place exists), and as long as I can remember we've always called these "black legged" ticks "deer" ticks.
Edit: as opposed to "wood" ticks (quite visibly distinctive http://www.tickencounter.org/tick_identification/rocky_mount... - in spite of their name, quite common in the woody regions of NJ), which don't carry Lyme disease. In my experience, this type of tick was much more common than the "deer" or "black legged" tick in NJ.
Re: The Lyme Wars (2013)
#49My dad got Lyme on the Appalachian Trail five years ago, and still has symptom flare-ups regularly. Lyme has a habit of converting anybody affected by it into an activist, which probably stems from the controversy over diagnosis and treatment of things like chronic Lyme.
Earlier this year I founded TickChek.com, a startup that offers PCR-based laboratory tick testing that can determine whether or not a tick that bit you carries Borrelia (the Lyme disease bacteria) or other tick borne disease vectors with 99.99% accuracy. We've tested hundreds of ticks so far, and most of our customers use our lab results to help decide whether antibiotics or full blood testing is necessary.
Most people aren't aware of tick testing as an option for determining their risk of contracting Lyme, and we're going to be working hard to spread awareness before next year' tick season.
Re: The Lyme Wars (2013)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have Lyme disease. Tick bite when I was 10 years old, finally discovered I have Lyme at age 26, after years of suffering and getting more symptoms year after year. I'm now at the beginning of a long term antibiotics course. After 2 months of antibiotics, my foggy brain is starting to clear up again... for one or two hours a day in the evening I can think & focus again. The rest of the day I'm useless. So it seems 2…
My mom was bitten by a tick in Colorado and given a 2 week course of antibiotics when she started to feel ill. She got better then promptly got worse as soon as they ran out. Over the next six months she progressively worsened until she could only get out of bed for a couple hours a day. Finally she found out about Lyme disease - many doctors do not believe that it even occurs in Colorado so she didn't know what was…
Did they test her for Lyme disease? Did she have the active anti-bodies?