CDC and NIH: "Lyme/Relapsing Fever is persistent and kills fetuses"
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: CDC and NIH: "Lyme/Relapsing Fever is persistent and kills
fetuses"
Date: Aug 3, 2010 11:21 AM
LOL; IDSociety.org/ALDF.com/Kaiser-Medicine
is *done* and GAME OVER.
http://www.relapsingfever.org
http://www.actionlyme.org
==================================
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2010/08/03/biting-back-at-tick-borne-diseases-including-lyme-and-relapsing-fever/tab/print/
* August 3, 2010, 8:51 AM ET
Biting Back at Tick-Borne Diseases — Including Lyme and Relapsing
Fever
Federal and state health officials are taking steps to halt the
growing spread of tick-borne diseases, even as they identify new
threats from a growing number of tick species, today’s Informed
Patient column reports.
Many preventive steps, such as spraying yards for ticks, wearing long-
sleeved clothes in wooded areas or while gardening and checking family
members and pets for ticks (especially in areas where there are large
deer populations) are just common sense. Ticks can easily migrate from
pets to their owners, Paul Auwaerter, clinical director of the
division of infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine, tells the Health Blog. “One of the most common things I ask
is not just do you have a dog, but where does your dog sleep?” he
says.
Most diseases, including Lyme, are spread by hard-backed ticks which
embed themselves in flesh and can grow to the size of a quarter while
they feast on blood.
But another species under study is the soft-backed tick, which bites
human victims in the night and then slinks off. Tom Schwan, a medical
entomologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases’ Rocky Mountain Laboratories, is investigating the soft-
backed ticks’ transmission of relapsing fever, a debilitating disease
caused by Borrelia hermsii, a type of bacteria associated with
rodents.
Victims often don’t know they’ve been bitten, and relapsing fever (as
its name suggests) can resolve and then recur as many as a dozen times
over. The ticks live in mountains and coniferous forests, and can
survive in woodpiles and rodent nests inside cabins for years without
feeding. In North America, Schwan says, the disease is primarily “an
middle-upper class recreational disease” but it is still “under-
recognized and under-reported.”
Schwan identified the a 2002 outbreak of relapsing fever among
inhabitants of summer cabins on Wild Horse Lake in Northern Montana —
the first cases ever identified in the state — and is conducting
field studies there now to determine whether birds and small mammals
like squirrels play a role in spreading the disease.
He was also was also lead author of a paper published last year in
Emerging Infectious Diseases about a 2006 case of relapsing fever in
an employee of the Mt. Wilson Observatory in California. Though the
disease has been seen on and off for years elsewhere in the state, the
case was the first reported in Los Angeles County. Schwan has put the
word out to doctors to consider relapsing fever as a possible
diagnosis in patients with an acute, recurrent fever, especially if
they’ve visited the mountains of Southern California or other regions
where the disease has been pegged as a threat. Relapsing fever is
treatable with antibiotics and is generally not fatal, though it can
kill the fetus of an infected pregnant woman.
Photo of bulls-eye rash characteristic of Lyme Disease: CDC
KMDickson