LymeBlog

Lyme Disease Bug Came From Europe Before Ice Age

European roots of Lyme disease bug revealed
Welcome Trust

Researchers at the University of Bath have discovered that a bacterium that causes Lyme disease originated in Europe, rather than in North America as previously thought.

The bacterium responsible for Lyme disease, Borrelia burgdorferi, originated in America, or so researchers thought. Now, however, a team from the University of Bath has shown that this bug in fact came from Europe, originating from before the Ice Age.

By understanding the origins of the bacterium and how it has evolved so far researchers hope to be able to predict how it will continue to develop, and so find ways to prevent its spread.

Photo: CDC/ James Gathany; William Nicholson

The blacklegged tick Ixodes pacificus, a known vector for Borrelia burgdorferi, the pathogen responsible for Lyme disease

In the study, researchers from the University of Bath and colleagues from the UK and USA studied the evolutionary history of the bacteria by looking at the sequences of eight so-called 'housekeeping genes', which evolve very slowly. They analysed 64 different samples taken from infected humans and ticks in Europe and America.

In all, 33 different combinations of the housekeeping genes were found. The study's findings appear to show that Borrelia burgdorferi originated in Europe but that the species has been present in North America for a long time. The researchers suggest its re-emergence there in the 1970s occurred after the geographic territory of the tick that carries the bacteria expanded, for example through the restoration of woodland.

Lyme disease is a growing problem in Europe, Asia and - in particular - North America, where it is now the most common vector-borne disease. The disease was named after Old Lyme, Connecticut, the site of a number of cases in the 1970s. There is no vaccine for the infection, which can cause arthritis and problems with the nervous system and heart if left untreated.

Lyme disease to be featured on ABC's Good Morning America Thursday

LymeBlog News
Lexington, KY USA
By LymeBlog News Staff

According to an announcement from Dr. Robert C. Bransfield, the ABC network show in the USA, Good Morning America, will be showing a news story on the Lyme disease controversy Thursday morning, July 3, 2008 between 7:30 and 8:30 AM EST.

Over the past few years the ABC network has carried a number of stories about Lyme disease including stories about affiliate reporters Noreen Turyn in Lynchburg, VA and Brooke Landau in San Diego, CA.

This most recent interest in Lyme disease coverage by ABC News seems to have been spurred by the recent release of the movie "Under Our Skin" and the release of the book "Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic" (St. Martin's Press) by science journalist Pamela Weintraub.

An interview with Dr. Bransfield was recorded by ABC earlier this week for the segment on Thursday.

Protect yourself from internet scams and quacks

Protect yourself from internet scams and quacks
Strong Health Magazine
By Tony Mobily

Unfortunately, several diseases out there still don’t have a cure. Most of them have symptoms which will affect people’s lives to a certain (sometimes extreme) degree. Some of them can be very annoying, crippling, or simply terrifying. Some of them, for example, are sarcoidosis, tinnitus, genital and oral herpes, asthma, myasthenia gravis, menopause, and so on. People with such conditions are especially vulnerable and more willing to be gullible, since they often feel that the medical world “fails them”.

Photo: lymediseasecured.com

60 Year Old Swinger Reveals

The Internet made available an amazing wealth of information about those conditions. However, a lot of people out there are in for the quick buck, at the expenses of those exhausted sufferers who are sometimes willing to believe anything.

This article will give you simple advice which will help to make it easy to find out if the information you are reading on the Internet is genuine or not.

Google is your friend

Google is a fantastic search engine. Unfortunately, it works well for everybody—including for those people who tend to provide information on “magic cures” for $19.95. On the other hand, Google is your best weapon to understand if you really can trust the information you find online. Google won’t decide for you. However, it will give you a chance to make an informed decision.

So, here is how to use Google as a weapon against untrustworthy sites.

Technique #1: text fingerprinting

Suppose you have genital herpes, and you find this site: http://www.genitalherpescured.com/. While the site doesn’t look extremely professional, it does give anybody with herpes at least some hope. Suppose that you want to find out if the site is genuine or not. The first step is to look for a sentence in the site’s content that is very unlikely to be in other sites out there.

In this case, I will take the sentence “60 Year Old Swinger Reveals”. This will be your “fingerprint”: something that distinguishes this particular page from others online.

Search this sentence in Google. It’s absolutely crucial that you search it with the speech marks around it.

Google fingerprinting in action

The results for “60 Year Old Swinger Reveals”
are shown in this figure:

Here are the sites:

http://www.genitalherpescured.com/
http://sclerodermadefeated.com/
http://ganglioncystcure.com/
http://www.laryngitiscured.com/

Clicking on those sites will give you a very strong deja-vu effect: they all seem extremely similar, based on the same template. More disturbingly, the woman in the photo (who is supposed to be the author of the document) seems to change her name from one template to the other:

Photo: ganglioncystcure.com
Here she is Amy Archer…

Photo: sclerodermadefeated.com
…and here she is Maria Menendez!

Once you have found more sites, you can use other parts of the documents (which seem to stay the same) as your next fingerprint. For example, you could take “you are about to Learn the easy 3 Step” as your next fingerprint, and find:

http://www.hivescure.com/

From there, you will notice that the text at the top has changed: it now has “Sex Crazed 60 Year Old Reveals” etc. Using that as your fingerprint will reveal more sites:

http://www.lymediseasecured.com/
http://www.anemiadefeated.com/
http://www.menopausedefeated.com/

The list goes on and on. They all look incredibly alike, and there seem to be one of them for each annoying and hard-to-treat condition. This is a semi-complete list for ...

Book details family's struggle with Lyme disease

Book details family's struggle with Lyme disease
Austin American-Statesman
By Susan Morse, The Washington Post

In the war of information on Lyme disease, patient activist groups have started from a marked disadvantage to the medical establishment in terms of visibility and credibility. That might be changing, and science journalist Pamela Weintraub's new book, "Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic" (St. Martin's Press), could be one reason.

Weintraub, a senior editor at Discover magazine, uses her family's protracted Lyme odyssey as the jumping off point for an exploration into the history, politics and, predominantly, the patient experience of the tick-borne disease.

In 1993 Weintraub and her family moved to woodsy Chappaqua, N.Y. Soon after, she writes, she, her husband and their two sons all developed persistent fatigue and joint pain that worsened over time. The hardest hit was her older son, who took a medical leave from high school and saw a slew of specialists before one diagnosed Lyme disease in 2000. An infectious-disease expert confirmed the diagnosis, then challenged it later when the boy failed to respond to standard antibiotic treatment.

Other patients she interviewed described similar frustrations.

Weintraub explains what she considers the failings of commercial tests for Lyme and attacks the divisiveness in the medical community that she says interferes with finding better treatment.

Tick leaves more than a mark on Bay area girl

Tick leaves more than a mark on Bay area girl
WTSP - Tampa Bay's 10 News, Tampa, FL USA
By David Leonard,Tampa Bay's 10 News

Tampa, Florida - 21-year-old Skyler Pursifull can hardly remember a time when her body didn't ache.

"I remember being fouror five and my neck started hurting really ban and the doctor couldn't find anything wrong."

Photo: tampabays10.com

Skyler Pursifull - Click here to watch: Video Story

For 15 years, Pursifull says her joints felt like someone was searing them with a blow torch. Several years ago, she started to lose her memory and language comprehension. "There were times when my friends would talk to me and I couldn't even understand them," she says.

Doctors finally discovered she had Lyme disease, a bacterial infection passed on by ticks, specifically a small tick about the size of a pin known as a deer tick.

So small that Pursifull, and others, don't even realize when they have been bitten.

"If you miss it, it could be fifteen years down the road before you get treatment and get better," she says.

Preventing the disease is ...

Of suffering and sounds

LymeBlog News
Lexington, KY USA
By Glenroy Wolfsen, LymeBlog Staff

Poem featured today:
"The House of Suffering" and "Sounds"
By Glenroy Wolfsen

Second Thoughts is a column on LymeBlog News featuring poetry by Glenroy Wolfsen.

Lyme suffering has been different for me than any other kind of suffering. It is the most lonely suffering. So much of it happens "inside" where no one else sees.

It is the least understood suffering and it turns others away, even family members. It creates a special longing that makes it worse - the longing for just one person to come into that house with you and stay there to keep company and ease the solitary and endless pain.

The House of Suffering

The house of suffering is a lonely place
Confined, left out,
Shut in.

Life goes in and out of its gardens
Without us,
Sometimes picking a few flowers
For our doorstep
To remind us it is still there.

Maybe our souls, you and me,
Found each other on that doorstep
The day no more flowers came,

Glenroy Wolfsen

Second Thoughts: A column featuring poetry by Glenroy Wolfsen

Glenroy Wolfsen has lived a life filled with pain: of Lyme disease and the illnesses and losses of loved ones. But he has also experienced the profound pleasures of learning, teaching, music and academics.

Raised on a farm, yet schooled in music and religion (Master of Divinity) and with interests in religions, psychology, mind-body healing and Eastern Sacred Texts, Glenroy’s spirit shines through in his works of fine poetry and wise prose.

After regaining much of his health, Glenroy remains busy teaching, studying and writing several books: one about his life story, others with poetry. He is pleased to share some of his works with you in an ongoing basis here at Lymeblog.

Feel free to contact him at Secondthoughts@lymeblog.com

Maybe it wanted us

To become desperate enough -

Alone enough - lost enough -

Empty enough

To open the door.

Maybe we were invited to cross

The threshold together

By invisible hands

Born and raised by years

Of pain

And a few secret hopes

That were the last to die.

Maybe the house of suffering

Kept its rooms empty

So we could move in together -

You and I -

To build a fire of light

And warm flowing love only for two.

Maybe at the last hour

An arm of mercy swept us in

And closed the door forever.

Working most of my life as a musician, I am very sensitive to music and sounds, even tones of voice and intonations in speaking, or even peoples breathing or the quiet clues given in sleep. Being so long in silence and ...

Lyme disease sufferers claim experts miss the mark

Lyme disease sufferers claim experts miss the mark
Georgia Straight - Vancouver,British Columbia,Canada
By Charlie Smith

Westbank resident Jim Wilson hasn’t forgotten the misery of driving across Canada with Lyme disease in 1991. It was two months after a tick bite had left a telltale sign of Lyme disease: a bull’s-eye rash. At the time, Wilson didn’t know anything about the disease, which is named after the town of Old Lyme, Connecticut, where an outbreak occurred in the 1970s. The debilitating bacterial disease causes flulike symptoms, rashes, loss of energy, swelling and pain in the joints, tingling and numbness, memory loss, and, on occasion, facial paralysis.

In a recent phone interview with the Georgia Straight, Wilson recalled that his rash disappeared after three weeks. But during his cross-country trip, he felt tingling and numbness in his legs. He also felt incredible fatigue. “Finally, I had to stop driving every two to four hours for a nap,” Wilson said.

Photo: straight.com

A bullseye rash is just one of the many symptoms of Lyme disease.

Over the next three years, his condition deteriorated. A biopsy concluded that his lymph nodes were fighting an infection of unknown origin. It was only after his wife started studying diseases in the library that they learned about Lyme disease.

Fortunately, he found a doctor in Squamish, L. C. Kindree (now retired), who treated patients with the disease. Wilson said that after eight years of taking antibiotics, he recovered his health.

Now, as president of the Canadian Lyme Disease Foundation, Wilson is battling the medical establishment over the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. He told the Straight he believes that Lyme disease is vastly underreported in B.C. and the rest of the country; it’s a position that has been rejected by the B.C. Centre for Disease Control.

Perry Kendall, the provincial health officer, told the Straight in a phone interview that he has been trying to work with BCCDC officials and Wilson to resolve this dispute. However, Kendall acknowledged that a solution is “not immediately obvious to me”.

Antibody tests called ELISA and EIA are used to diagnose the disease, which is caused by a spirochete called Borrelia burgdorferi. “The ELISA or EIA tests have been shown in every major body of research not to be sensitive enough for an appropriate screening test,” Wilson claimed. “There are a whole lot of reasons why people don’t mount an antibody response. It may be genetic. It may be that the test was done too early or too late.”

Wilson said that there were only ...

Protect yourself in tick habitats

Protect yourself in tick habitats
Amador Ledger Dispatch, Amador City, CA USA
By Steve Diers
Ranger/Naturalist II
Mokelumne Watershed Unit

The California Legislature has unanimously designated May as Lyme Disease Awareness Month.

"Lyme disease, which is caused by the bacterial spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi, is a public health threat of major proportions. The majority of Lyme disease cases result from bites by infected nymphal ticks that may be as small as the period at the end of this sentence. Only 14-35 percent of patients recall a tick bite.

Ticks have been called "sewers of infection." They feed primarily on birds, rodents, and deer and can transmit to humans many of the diseases carried by these animals. Hence, patients with Lyme disease may be infected with multiple pathogens. The most widely known co-infections acquired from Western Black-legged ticks are Babesia, Bartonella, Ehrlichia and Mycoplasma fermentans.

Not all pathogens have been identified. Patients with coinfections may have more severe symptoms and an extended course of illness.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, only one in 10 cases of Lyme disease is reported, which means the 23,763 cases nationally reported in 2002 reflect 237,630 actual cases. The annual incidence of Lyme disease, which accounts for 95 percent of vector-borne illnesses in the United States, has increased almost 50-fold since national surveillance began in 1982.

Birds have been identified as reservoirs of infection on the west slopes of ...

Lyme Disease In The U.S. Originated In Europe

LymeBlog News
Lexington, KY USA
By LymeBlog News Staff

New Haven, Conn. — The epidemic of Lyme disease in the U.S. is caused by a bacterium that has European ancestry, according to a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that is co-authored by scientists at Yale School of Public Health and the University of Bath in England.

Some researchers had believed the Lyme disease bacterium Borrelia Burgdorferi, which is less common in Europe, originated in the United States.

Yale researchers and their English colleagues studied the evolutionary history of the Borrelia Burgdorferi strain by examining the sequences of eight "housekeeping" genes, which are known to evolve very slowly. The researchers analyzed 64 different samples of bacterial DNA from ticks collected in the field and from infected human patients at locations across Europe and the U.S. A computer-generated evolutionary tree shows that European strains are more closely related to a common ancestor than are the North American strains, indicating a European origin for the Lyme disease bacterium in the U.S.

The type of genetic analysis used in this study, called multi-locus sequence typing, or MLST, reveals the evolutionary history of microbes by looking at mutations in genes essential to metabolism. It has been previously used in epidemiological investigations of directly transmitted human pathogens, but this is the first time MLST has been used to study a pathogen that is transmitted to humans from wildlife through the bite of a vector such as a tick. Since wildlife and vectors do not move as much as humans, these pathogens leave an evolutionary trail tied into their local environment.

“Understanding the evolution of pathogens is a key epidemiological tool,” said Durland Fish, professor of epidemiology and principal investigator on the Yale research team that took part in the project, funded by the National Institutes of Health. “By understanding the evolutionary history of pathogens, we can better predict their evolutionary future.”

The team in Bath was lead by ...

Filmmaker took subject of Lyme disease personally

Filmmaker took subject of Lyme disease personally
Knoxville News Sentinel, Knoxville, TN USA
From The Washington Post

Photo: Open Eye Pictures

A dramatic tale of microbes, medicine and money, this eye-opening film investigates the untold story of Lyme disease, an emerging epidemic larger than AIDS. Each year thousands go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed, told that their symptoms are "all in their head." Following the stories of patients and physicians as they battle for their lives and livelihoods, the film brings into focus a haunting picture of our health care system and its ability to cope with a silent terror under our skin.

Filmmaker Andy Abrahams Wilson first heard of Lyme disease in the late '90s when his twin sister, living in Upstate New York, contracted it. He didn't take it very seriously.

"I remember thinking she was being kind of lazy, malingering, because it was never anything specific," says Wilson, 44, who lives near San Francisco. "She was just tired."

After shooting 375 hours of footage of Lyme patients, doctors and scientists over three years, Wilson's opinion about the disease has changed. Wilson's documentary about Lyme is "Under Our Skin."

"My point of view is there's a big problem here, and the problem is not being addressed," he says. "There are thousands of people in this country, and internationally, who are not getting diagnosed and not getting treated."

The film chronicles some Lyme patients' long road to diagnosis and the debate over Lyme treatment. Like Michael Moore's "Sicko," Wilson explores patients' struggle for health-care coverage. Wilson explores other aspects of Lyme, including whether mothers can transmit it to children and its relation to neurological diseases.