A New Front in the Lyme Wars By Michael Specter - New Yorker And yet, it is impossible to deny that there is a third group of patients: thousands of people—possibly tens of thousands, or more—who never get a rash, who don’t realize at first they are infected, or for whom the normal treatment of oral antibiotics does not succeed. They see the disease as difficult to diagnose, rarely cured, and widely ignored. Moreover, at least four pathogens, in addition to the Lyme bacterium, can be transmitted by the black-legged tick: Anaplasma phagocytophilum, which causes anaplasmosis; Babesia microti, which causes babesiosis; Borrelia miyamotoi, a recently discovered genetic relative of the Lyme spirochete; and Powassan virus. Some of these infections are more dangerous than Lyme, and more than one can infect a person at the same time. Simultaneous infection, scientists suggest, may well enhance the strength of the assault on the immune system, while making the disease itself harder to treat or recognize. I have an instinctive loathing for the middle ground, but that area, somewhere between the medical establishment and the activists, is exactly where I find myself. One would have to ignore emerging scientific data to argue that Lyme disease is a settled problem, and that all those people have simply turned to a Lyme diagnosis because they don’t know what is wrong with them. There are too many people who have been infected and too much that is unknown about the epidemiology of the disease. We need better tests, so that there is no doubt about who is, and who is not, infected, and better treatments for those who are.
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 19:16:39 +0000
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