May is Lyme Disease Awareness Month
Lyme is the most prevalent vector-borne disease and one of the fastest spreading diseases throughout the United States, and the subjects of diagnosis and treatment of Lyme are politically-charged.
This series of diaries is designed to provide information to the Daily Kos community both for Lyme disease prevention and for those Kossacks living with Lyme. Because the disease is often missed by physicians, these diaries may assist an individual or two in pursuing testing which might otherwise have been missed.
The Lyme Disease Awareness series is eclectic, including personal statements, informational pieces about the science of Lyme, and calls to action for community and political advocacy.
We hope you'll all join us in learning about this rampant disease and the medical/financial/political morass in which Lyme patients find themselves.
Collect the complete set of diaries at LymeDiseaseAwareness
Today's diary is by MsGrin
This is a round-up of recent articles about Lyme disease from around the country:
Distinguishing Lyme Arthritis From Septic Arthritis in Children: Presented at AAOS By SOPHIE BAINBRIDGE
Doctor's Guide Dispatch
Physicians should have a high suspicion of Lyme arthritis when a child with a swollen knee joint comes to the emergency department, researchers said here at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS).
Almost half of children with fluid in the knee in the northeastern part of the United States are likely to have Lyme arthritis, the researchers said.
"Distinguishing children who have Lyme arthritis from those who have septic arthritis can be a challenge in the emergency department but doing so is essential because their treatment is so different," said Matthew Milewski, MD, Yale University and Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital, New Haven, Connecticut. "In a paediatric population, Lyme arthritis is probably the first diagnosis to consider if you are in an endemic area," he said here in a podium presentation on March 10.
Distinguishing the 2 is important because the treatments are different. Septic arthritis requires surgical intervention; Lyme arthritis requires antibiotics.
Symptoms make Lyme disease difficult to diagnose BY HURST LAVIANA
The Wichita Eagle
Wichita, Kansas
Bob Reichenberger was perfectly healthy last June when he drove to a pasture near Andale to adjust the sights on two rifles. "I'm an athlete," he said. "I work out. I eat good food. I don't drink. I don't smoke. I've never had any health problems."
Reichenberger didn't worry about the two ticks that bit him that day.
"I felt one crawl up my neck," he said. "I pinched it in half and threw it out the window. Later that night I pulled one off my head."
Reichenberger, a detective on the Wichita Police Department's gang investigations unit, said he was used to chasing down 20-year-old gang members. But over the next several months, he was debilitated by one of the tick bites.
He spent a week at Wesley Medical Center, missed two months of work, began experiencing paralysis and watched his weight drop from 175 to 140 pounds — all without knowing the cause of his mysterious and painful illness.
In December, when he finally was diagnosed with Lyme disease, he began what has been a long and slow recovery from an illness that's not often discussed in Kansas.
Local family shares their story on Lyme disease By APRIL SCARLETT
Heritage Newspapers
Southeast Michigan
Schryver and her family are experts on Lyme disease because they have been living the nightmare of chronic Lyme symptoms since 2000, when their youngest son Jeff, then 9 years old, discovered a tick embedded in his scalp, five days after returning from a vacation in Tennessee. Wendy's symptoms began a year later.
The symptoms between mother and son were very different, but this is often the case with Lyme disease, as many people suffer in varying degrees with varying symptoms, thus the difficulty in identifying the disease.
After three painful and frustrating years of misdiagnoses and multiple treatments, and watching their son deteriorate neurologically, both were finally correctly tested and confirmed as infected with Lyme disease and still are fighting it.
According to the Center for Disease Control, Lyme disease is the most common arthropod-borne illness in the United States. More than 387,000 cases have been reported to the Center for Disease Control since 1982.
A CDC report from April 2010 also states that Lyme disease cases are unreported by 10-fold, which equates to more than 3,800,000 cases. In 2008, 76 cases were reported in Michigan. Jump forward two years and multiply that number by 10, and that is a lot of cases in Michigan.
Lyme disease advancing in Maine By Meg Haskell
Bangor Daily News
Bangor Maine
Once confined to Maine’s southernmost counties, Lyme disease in humans now has been reported in every county in the state. The number of cases reported each year has risen from about 100 in 1990 to more than 900 in 2009. Deer ticks in the nymph stage emerge in the early spring and are responsible for most cases of Lyme disease in humans.
“If you have a rash or flulike symptoms when it’s not flu season, you should call your doctor,” said Dr. Dora Anne Mills, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. “In the vast majority of cases that are detected early, people are treated with a course of antibiotics and recover fully.”
But when Lyme disease goes untreated, she said, or when treatment is delayed, it can be linked with lingering and sometimes disabling problems that include arthritis, nerve damage and heart conditions.
Minnesota Woman Talks About Her Lyme Disease By JODIE TWEED
Brainerd Dispatch
Brainerd, Minnesota
When Fadling was 5, she immediately got a fever and fell ill after being bitten by the tick. She also had a rash, but not at the site of the bite. Doctors told her dad, Dale Rapovich, that she had the flu and possibly a kidney infection. A couple months later, as a Baxter kindergartner, Fadling's legs and knees began to grow stiff and swollen; her joints ached. She would become so exhausted at school that she'd lie down flat on the floor when she got off the bus, falling asleep while still wearing her coat and backpack.
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She suffered from horrible stomach pains and every test and colonoscopy revealed severe inflammation but doctors couldn't come up with any explanations. In fourth grade she was put on antidepressants because her doctors felt she may be causing the symptoms herself.
She often suffered silently, not letting on that she was in pain or fatigued. She tried hard to stay awake in class because she would be made fun of if she fell asleep. Even when she would suffer from debilitating headaches or was in pain and vomiting blood, she knew it didn't do much good to complain.
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At 18, she quit taking antidepressants and for the first time, she said she felt she was clear-headed. But she continued to be very sick. Over the years, she has suffered from brain swelling and has been hospitalized many times. In 2004, a Florida oncologist told her she had cancer, or lymphoma. She was later found not to have cancer.
Deer tick discovery confirms existence of the parasite in N.D. By: BRAD DOKKEN
Grand Forks Herald
Fargo, North Dakota
In researching the story, I heard from sources in North Dakota that deer tick encounters west of the Red mostly have been anecdotal. The state has documented only about 30 cases of Lyme disease, total, in the past five years.
That’s miniscule compared with Minnesota, which averages about 1,000 cases of Lyme disease annually.
In an effort to learn more, though, Tracy Miller, senior epidemiologist for the North Dakota Department of Health, said the agency is coordinating a survey with UND and North Dakota State University this summer to sample areas across the state for the presence of deer ticks.
Any ticks they find then will be tested to see if they carry Lyme or other diseases.
I had never encountered a deer tick — that I knew of, at least — but the critters were certainly on my mind Tuesday afternoon when I ventured west to Turtle River State Park to chase rainbow trout with Steve Crandall, the park manager.
We’d been off the water about half an hour and were relaxing on Crandall’s patio when I looked down and saw a tiny black tick crawling on my pants. I always try to wear light-colored clothing when venturing into areas known for wood ticks because they’re easier to spot.
This was too dark, and way too small, to be a wood tick. Crandall said he’d never seen anything like it at the park, either.
Just my luck, I’d pick up a deer tick less than a day after writing about how they were moving north and west. Now my skin was really crawling.
Chronic Lyme disease leaves doctors with mixed feelings By AMY LITTLEFIELD
The Enterprise
Brockton, Massachusetts
Melissa Kerins of Whitman awoke one morning three years ago and found she couldn’t move her body.
“I went to bed and I woke up and my life was different,” said Kerins, a former veterinary technician and mother of two.
When she went to the doctor, a blood test confirmed that Kerins had Lyme disease, a bacterial disease carried by ticks.
Since then, Kerins has endured near-constant muscle and joint pain, headaches, fever, cognitive impairment and the infuriating knowledge that the medical community does not believe that her disease exists.
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“It ruins people’s lives neurologically,” said Arthur Gertler, a doctor at the D’Arcy Wellness Clinic in Natick and a former internist and gastroenterologist at Good Samaritan.
“It doesn’t have the glamour of HIV because you don’t hear about deaths,” he said. “But it does kill people ... It’s a national emergency.”
Gertler said he has seen patients with chronic Lyme disease who struggle to walk and who suffer memory loss and other cognitive impairments once the disease has penetrated their nervous system.
“Every doctor should know how to treat it,” said Gertler. “It’s a public health menace. It’s a huge problem. It’s getting worse every year, it’s not getting better.”
Beyond the controversy, one thing is for sure: Lyme disease is on the rise in Massachusetts. There were 3,946 cases reported to the state Department of Public Health in 2008, a 10.4 percent rise over the previous year.
Advocates call Lyme disease a threat in N.C. BY SARAH AVERY
The News & Observer
Raleigh, NC
The disease has been a source of controversy in North Carolina.
Public health officials and doctors in the state have been reluctant to diagnose Lyme disease, citing evidence that ticks carrying the bacterium are scarce here and that the few that exist feed on reptiles instead of humans.
Even so, for years patients insisted they had caught Lyme from tick bites in North Carolina and faced tremendous problems finding doctors to diagnose and treat them.
TICKS!!!!
BIRMINGHAM, AL (WIAT) -- You might think that after one of the coldest Alabama winters in recent years, we might get a break from some of the usual summer pests. And you'd be wrong. In fact one little blood sucker is experiencing a population boom this spring.
Ticks usually come out in late May and early June. But some exterminators are already fielding an increase in calls about the parasites. In most cases, more than a month earlier than expected.
Video available at link - unable to embed
A quietly tick-ing time bomb BY ROBERT J. GALBRAITH
The Montreal Gazette
Lyme disease is a bacterial infection caused by the bite of the black-legged tick (also referred to as the deer tick). If untreated, it can cause serious health symptoms that affect many systems of the body, but it can be effectively treated if caught in the early stages of infection.
The longer the disease remains undetected, the more serious and debilitating the symptoms become and the more difficult they can be to treat.
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As the deer population in Quebec increases, so does the tick population. Climate change is also a contributing factor to the spread of ticks. The warmer our winters become, the more ticks survive.
François Milord, a medical consultant with the Institut national de santé publique du Québec, agrees that more must be done to raise awareness among medical workers and the public in Quebec, particularly in the Montérégie and other southern regions of the province.