A shot to prevent Lyme disease could be on its way

wildmanx 2021-08-17 15:13:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]

What shocks me most with this story is that there is a vaccine (Lymerix), and it's pretty effective (76-92 percent after three injections) but apparently some anti-vax propaganda and a class-action lawsuit essentially removed it from the market. Based on a very rare side effect. Wtf? How can that be? Just tell people the risks of side effects, and if they are ok with that risk then the manufacturer is off the hook.

I'd totally take that shot. 59 cases out of 1.4 million is nothing, and even for those it's unclear how they actually were related to the shot.

Sadly, this indicates that the new shot could suffer the same fate. Give it to a million people, some will for sure have some issue, anti-vaxers come with conspiracy theories and convince a few to a class action, and there we go, another few decades without a shot. Gotta be fast this time before it's too late again.

pwenzel 2021-08-17 15:50:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I live in Minnesota and am being treated for Lyme disease for the second time in 15 months. It's no joke. The first time I got Lyme, it came with a painful shingles co-infection on top of the usual symptoms.

Now the second time, I am again worried about getting sick with something else while in an immunocompromised state. The fatigue, fever, and back pain that came along this second time was worse than the first. I needed a nap after walking up the stairs.

So, I am curious how bad and prolonged the side effects were in these 59 adverse events. If only temporary, I'd consider it worth it over getting the actual disease.

The article also asks, "Why vaccinate against something that can be cured with antibiotics?" Undiagnosed Lyme becomes harder to treat the longer you wait, and the dose of antibiotics longer and more intense.

(PS: I am so very thankful for doxycycline.)

tdeck 2021-08-17 18:15:39 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I had Lyme twice as a kid too (in suburban Pennsylvania). It's not fun and it's a bit crazy that you can get it more than once. People are usually shocked when I tell them. I knew someone who was temporarily paralyzed on one side because of Lyme that they diagnosed late - it's scary.

abakker 2021-08-17 20:33:38 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I grew up in CT. Had it 4 times, only got the bullseye once. It is no joke, and as you get older it seems to suck more and more. Last time I had numbness in my face as the only symptom, but...thrice bitten, fully paranoid, and I was treated pretty fast.

One thing which is important with a vaccine is that when I was a kid (early 90s) the rate of ticks carrying lyme was in the 10% range or less, while now it is >50%. A vaccine is critical.

tdeck 2021-08-17 21:50:06 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I didn't have the bullseye the second time either I was just extremely tired and had a mild fever. That's how it often goes, and if my mom hadn't recognized the nonspecific symptoms it could have been a lot worse.

sonicggg 2021-08-17 21:54:42 +0000 UTC [ - ]

How do you manage to get it so often? I live in an area that is endemic to Lyme, but it's something that can easily be avoided (much easier than Covid). But I do see reckless behaviour all the time as well, so maybe it is not that surprising.

piva00 2021-08-18 08:26:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I live in Sweden, I know several people who got Borrelia infections including my girlfriend, and hers developed into Lyme once. Most caught it and treated it early but some just had a fever and only discovered it was Lyme after months.

It's insidious, if you spend time in nature you are exposing yourself to it. The ticks will be on tall grass, falling from trees, crawling from the ground. How can that be avoided?

During summer we have to check ourselves for ticks every single night, my girlfriend lives in a house inside a wooded area, I have a big garden on my house where deers are commonly spotted (this past month I've been visited by one every single day).

No, it's not easy to be avoided if you leave the house, just laying on my lawn or garden grass is enough to get me paranoid about it. My housemates have already found 3 ticks stuck to them.

Please, if you know an easy way to avoid all of this I'd love to hear it but so far I only know to be cautious and vigilant.

xoa 2021-08-19 15:03:55 +0000 UTC [ - ]

>Please, if you know an easy way to avoid all of this I'd love to hear it but so far I only know to be cautious and vigilant.

I'm late to this so don't know if you'll see it, but I live in rural New England and ticks have become ever more horrendous here, yet I haven't had a single one in, a decade at least? The big thing for me has been getting a solid set of permethrin utilizing full coverage clothing (look for branding like "Insect Shield"), including socks and a hat with neck protection, combined with occasional judicious usage of repellent (I suggest 20% picaridin instead of DEET, something like Sawyer Products which has almost no smell and won't melt polymers that deet will). Having clothing that one can just put on for going out and boom high protection makes it so convenient vs applying repellent that I never fail to, and it has done exactly what was promised. They don't last forever, after 50-70 washings they need to be replaced, but if using them in a focused way for outdoor usage that can last a good while.

I'd still absolutely leap at a vaccine if available, but physical/chemical protection does work so the trick is making it convenient enough and enough of a habit to be 100% consistent about it.

ganafagol 2021-08-18 06:43:15 +0000 UTC [ - ]

If you consider enjoying nature as "reckless behavior" then the shared understanding needed as a basis for a conversation may be missing. Lying in the grass looking at sky and stars, running through the forest with your dog, go pick mushrooms. That's very natural behaviour, not "reckless". Of course you can sit indoors all day, but I prefer a vaccine and enjoy nature instead.

all_usernames 2021-08-18 00:35:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]

As someone with a dog, I can say it is not easy to avoid ticks. Even with canine medication they pick one or two up every time we go for a hike, ON the trail.

abakker 2021-08-17 23:21:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]

3 of the times I was under 15. I liked to play in the woods and did yard work. I used deet, etc, but I guess was just unlucky. The last time I was 22, had just moved back to CT from college and got a tick while mountain biking. I noticed it when I checked, but I guess it had been on long enough.

dagw 2021-08-18 10:31:23 +0000 UTC [ - ]

something that can easily be avoided

How? Just working in my garden for an hour or two and I have a a good 1 in 4 chance of getting a tick bite.

nomel 2021-08-17 17:09:11 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Have you considered hyperbaric oxygen treatment?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24726678/

pwenzel 2021-08-17 17:53:37 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I have not. Looks interesting. To be clear, I do not have chronic lyme, but rather have been bit by a tick twice in the last year and a half and got lyme disease each time.

daddylongstroke 2021-08-18 16:20:51 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You should play powerball with that type of luck!!! I pick embedded ticks off my body 6 out of 7 days each week, for about 3-4 months each year for many years, and have yet to face consequences...but then, I don't go to get medical attention often, so, who knows, maybe I've had it?

loceng 2021-08-17 22:43:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]

How was it diagnosed?

notabee 2021-08-17 17:17:10 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Shingles is caused by varicella (chickenpox) virus that's already latent in your nerves. Really unlikely that it was a "co-infection", it just reactivated because your body was busy fighting Lyme.

shockeychap 2021-08-17 17:27:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I'm not sure what you think "co-infection" means, but you just described precisely that. The reactivation of shingles meant that he was simultaneously infected with two different agents. "Co-infection" (for me at least) implies nothing about how or where the secondary infection came from.

notabee 2021-08-17 18:04:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

That's fair. It's a really commonly implied thing among the quackier side of Lyme treatment that every tick is going to unload a clown car full of pathogens (used to justify even more unvalidated tests). But, by the definition, it's just co-occurring infections regardless of vector.

Kenji 2021-08-17 20:13:34 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> that every tick is going to unload a clown car full of pathogens

They mostly are, though. Lyme is not the only horrible disease. There's Tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) and other nasty shit. As a kid, I was in the woods every day. Didn't get a tick for years, despite walking through thick woods in shorts. Then I got stung a few times, didn't think much of it. Then I got Lyme. Had terrible joint pains for months despite immediately taking Doxycycline. Since then I almost never went deeper into the woods again. You're immediately full of ticks. I once picked up a piece of trash that was on the side of the path and immediately had a tick crawling on my hand. What a nasty infestation of our woods. Did you know that Lyme is a sexually transmitted disease (STD)? Yes, if you have intercourse with someone who has Lyme, you may get infected as well. Lyme is a horror show.

irq-1 2021-08-17 18:30:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> Just tell people the risks of side effects, and if they are ok with that risk then the manufacturer is off the hook.

If a for-profit corporation includes a warning in a EULA they're off the hook?? That's definitely not the principle we should use to evaluate new drugs.

If the company decided to take it off the market, when there are always lawsuits about new drugs, what should we do? Should we liberate the drug from the company and let others sell it? The system we have now lets Medical Doctors decide when a drug should be approved, and when it should be on the market.

wildmanx 2021-08-17 19:31:22 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You're mixing up a few things here. Every drug has a list of side effects. They are known, that's what your doctor tells you, and then you make an informed decision whether you want to take the drug or not.

It's not Medical Doctors that decided to withdraw approval and then removed it from the market. The approval was all fine. What was not fine was the public perception. Because the anti-vax campaign was very effective. Too many people started to think it's too fishy, so out of caution didn't want the shot anymore, so it became unprofitable to keep it on the market, so the manufacturer pulled it. (A bit surprising they didn't sell the IP or license it cheaply to somebody more adventurous..)

That's how your life can get impacted if the anti-vax lobby gets too strong, and that's what scares me. They can mess up their own health as much as they like, but once my life gets worse because of it, I have a problem.

scotty79 2021-08-17 20:25:49 +0000 UTC [ - ]

If the product causes provable harm then company should be prosecuted criminally by the state to determine if the testing done was sufficeint and there was no faul play.

But letting random people sue manufacturer because they have some symptoms at later point in time than the time they took the vaccine is just recipie for what already happened on case of Lyme vaccine. Everybody looses except for lawyers and people loose the most.

irq-1 2021-08-17 20:42:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You're suggesting a fundamental change to the legal system in the US. The idea that we would depend on the Government pursuing criminal charges... that's scary to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort

IPTN 2021-08-18 06:10:42 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Criminal charges in the US are pursued by the Government. The idea of private citizens deciding whether to press charges is widely misunderstood; District/US Attorneys can take a victim's wishes into consideration when deciding to charge a defendant (it may be difficult to win a case when the primary/only witness is uncooperative or conversely even if someone has been the victim of a crime the DA may not pursue a case because they feel they are unlikely to get a conviction) but the decision entirely lies with the Government.

Now, as you linked. Civil Tort's are entirely within the realm of private "citizens" (companies count as people too) to bring forth on their own.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_charge

fallingknife 2021-08-17 18:45:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I do not want to have to ask doctors permission to get the medicine I need. Make them like lawyers where they are advisors only. If that has a side effect of letting companies off from some liability, then I will accept that trade off.

irq-1 2021-08-17 20:44:09 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> I do not want to have to ask doctors permission to get the medicine I need.

That's how it works in most countries, but not the US. Here we have a government regulatory agency (the CDC) to protect people from the ill effects of the free market. I like it that way.

acranox 2021-08-17 23:29:10 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There’s some more info about that vaccine that might interest you. https://www.historyofvaccines.org/index.php/content/articles...

stinos 2021-08-17 15:24:29 +0000 UTC [ - ]

More on this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/

gjsman-1000 2021-08-17 15:31:40 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There is a difference between vaccine skeptic and anti-vax. Imagine if we didn't have people watching over our tech industry because that would be anti-tech, or our banking industry because that's anti-bank. No, we call them skeptics because we realize that's very different than someone who says "abolish tech and banks."

acdha 2021-08-17 15:38:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The thing is, we have that process at multiple levels from peer-review and the many stages of government approval and it's rigorous to the point that people have questioned whether it's causing problems due to delays and costs preventing development of vaccines for less widespread diseases and increasing costs.

COVID-19 has provided a great example of how well this process works: even the emergency use authorizations required multiple levels of clinical trials and the anti-vax propagandists mining the VAERS database for talking points can do so because there's a requirement to make a public report of anything which happens after someone is vaccinated even if there's no real suspicion that it was related to the vaccine.

abfan1127 2021-08-17 17:00:11 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The process has its flaws. Poorly designed drugs make it through the FDA process. Blind following is foolish. Skepticism is healthy. I don't get software updates as soon as available because, even with the testing, peer reviews, flaws still happen.

Further, there were big political and financial reasons to push the vaccines through. Those are all conflicts of interest. Pfizer had millions of doses manufactured before approval. If trial results didn't look good, they certainly had the incentive to "massage" the results to get it approved and get those millions of doses sold rather than a huge loss.

As the original poster shared, it should be a considered a reasonable position to be skeptical of small scale results. Pfizer's position appears to have scaled well (Moderna as well). 100s of millions of doses across diverse populations show its relative safety and efficacy.

acdha 2021-08-17 19:32:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I'm not saying it's perfect but rather that the skepticism you're looking for is found within the process where many scientists who are not employed by the vendor review the test results, methodology, and side effects. By the time something gets through approval, it's been tested in thousands of people with monitoring over a substantial time period (even the EUA COVID vaccines were monitored for a period of time longer than vaccine side effects have historically been observed) and reviewed by hundreds of people.

We actually have an interesting example which I think validates that process even though it comes in the unlikely form of the FDA's recent mistake approving Aducanumab. There is a lot of criticism, including IG investigations, over the approval because it was approved despite having failed to go through the process successfully. The Phase III trials were cancelled after they concluded that the drug was not successful, the FDA's internal scientific review found it did not meet the mark, and the outside scientific advisory panel rejected it so strongly that multiple panel members resigned after it was approved anyway. That to me seems like a pretty good argument that the process was doing what we expect and the way to avoid expensive mistakes is to follow it.

wildmanx 2021-08-17 19:35:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You are welcome to be skeptical. But in the meantime, don't cause me to not be able to get a potentially life-saving drug. You may think it's a money grab or not tested enough or a conspiracy or a conflict of interest. Fine, don't take it. But I still want it. 1.4 million with ridiculously small number of question mark cases are good enough for me. They don't have to be for you. But let me have it. I pay for it.

daddylongstroke 2021-08-18 19:00:37 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I don't think any skeptics caused you to not be able to get a potentially life-saving drug. If they have, please show examples. Lyme disease is not life threatening. GSK didn't go through with distribution because it didn't make business sense.

daddylongstroke 2021-08-18 18:57:19 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There is no requirement to post reactions to VAERS; it's completely voluntary.

inter_netuser 2021-08-19 07:17:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Amazing. "Most reports to VAERS are voluntary" - https://wonder.cdc.gov/vaers.html

What's the under-reporting multiplier? Why would anyone except for those affected, or god forbid, their families pursue and report bad events?

Just extra paperwork for no or little money.

lurquer 2021-08-17 18:55:15 +0000 UTC [ - ]

If the system is susceptible to anti-vax propaganda thwarting approval of a good vaccine, doesn’t it also follow that the system is susceptible to big pharma lobbying for the approval of a bad vaccine?

If this wondrously robust multi-layered process buckles in the face of a few hysterical anti-vax groups, you should ask yourself how robust it remains in the face of a billion-dollar pharmaceutical conglomerate with politicians in their pockets.

acdha 2021-08-17 19:21:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I think you're confused on several points: the vaccine was approved following extensive safety tests but the lawsuits caused the manufacturer to decide it was not worth manufacturing. The U.S. regulators consistently found no connection between the vaccine and the complaints, so the _scientific_ side worked but the legal / business side let public safety down.

Similarly, it's no secret that companies have a vested interest in promoting their products but it's not like Pfizer says “Trust us, we employ doctors!” and the FDA says “Sounds great, no need to check!”. Each step of that process involves peer-reviewed publications, public data releases, and reviews by panels of scientific experts. It is quite valid to say that companies need to be strictly regulated to keep everyone honest but we don't have any indication that this has been happening and anyone who thinks the process is just a large pharma company waving money at doctors to buy silence really needs to learn how cut-throat academic competition is — the career benefits to being the first to report that plot would be huge! Remember also that this happens in many different countries around the world so that hypothetical conspiracy needs to be kept secrete by a multinational group of hundreds or even thousands of people.

hitpointdrew 2021-08-17 20:11:07 +0000 UTC [ - ]

>but it's not like Pfizer says “Trust us, we employ doctors!” and the FDA says “Sounds great, no need to check!” Each step of that process involves peer-reviewed publications, public data releases, and reviews by panels of scientific experts.

All these "steps in the process" are completely meaningless when there is a revolving door with big pharma and FDA. This is nothing more than safety/peer-review theater.

Example: Scott Gottlieb FDA commissioner 2017-2019, currently sits on the board of directors at Pfizer.

Are you really going to put up a stink and fight on an approval if the end goal is cushy job at one of these companies? You can bet if you just "push it through" you will be looked on favorably for one of these jobs, but if you put up resistance and actually want to do due diligence, well then you will never be considered.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

freemint 2021-08-19 06:54:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Except hard evidence is created during the trial. The statistical procedures to evaluate things are standardized.

holdupnow 2021-08-18 15:47:40 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Can you please cite these safety tests?

acdha 2021-08-18 16:03:29 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Like all vaccines, they were tested in animals and subsequently by human volunteers _before_ reaching the Phase III clinical trials. Those are double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled experiments which are generally considered the gold standard for medical testing which test cohorts of people who are exposed to the threat and compare both positive and negative outcomes across those populations without either the recipients or the experimenters knowing which people are in which group until afterwards.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X0...

> An adjuvanted recombinant vaccine (LYMErix™) has been approved in the United States for the prevention of Lyme disease in adults, and has demonstrated both safety and efficacy. A clinical trial of over 10 000 adults showed 76% efficacy following the third dose of a 0, 1, 12 schedule. Accelerated schedules demonstrate equivalent levels of protective antibody. Up to 100% of children 2–14 years of age achieve seroprotective levels of antibody. Booster doses induced protective levels of antibody in more than 96% of recipients when administered at months 12 and 24. Only mild or moderate, transient vaccine-associated adverse events have been reported after immunization. The vaccine is a safe and effective method of preventing Lyme disease.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/

> The OspA vaccines proved effective in animal models and safe in human volunteers [18]. Both manufacturers conducted clinical trials in a race to gain the first license for their vaccine [19, 20]. In the LYMErix™ phase III safety and efficacy trial, researchers enrolled 10 906 subjects between 15 and 70 years old who lived in endemic areas and randomized them to receive either the three-dose Lyme vaccine regimen or placebo injections. Vaccinated individuals showed a 76% reduction in Lyme disease in the year following vaccination [20], with no significant side-effects noted. Based on these promising findings, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved LYMErix™ on 21 December 1998.

coolgeek 2021-08-18 17:48:09 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Apparently, you just created an account to challenge this comment.

Do you not understand the FDA approval process? Or do you not understand how to Google that question yourself? Or is it something else?

Seriously. What possessed you to create an account to challenge this comment without doing any research at all, yourself?

daddylongstroke 2021-08-18 19:04:07 +0000 UTC [ - ]

>Do you not understand the FDA approval process?

There are industrial-grade chemicals fully FDA approved for ingestion by the US populace which are outright banned by various European countries.

coolgeek 2021-08-18 20:29:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Which of my questions do you think you answered?

lurquer 2021-08-17 19:37:14 +0000 UTC [ - ]

In regard to the Lyme disease vaccine issue, you are glossing over a very important component of the story.

Due to public pressure, the FDA reconvened to take another look.

While the FDA did not change its opinion (except for requesting some additional labeling and studies) the effect was disastrous for marketing. Sales plummeted. And, it was no longer worthwhile to pursue. The ‘official act’ of the FDA reconvening arose solely due to pressure.

That’s my point.

If anti-vax groups can cause the FDA to “take another look” at a drug that has already passed muster, it is obvious and not fairly deniable that the agency is not immune to political pressure.

abakker 2021-08-17 20:38:00 +0000 UTC [ - ]

makes you wonder how much "public pressure" came from the operators of quack lyme disease message boards and alternative treatment providers...after 4 times having it, I'm happy to say, in Doxycycline I trust. just don't go reading Lyme disease message boards without a tinfoil hat on.

inter_netuser 2021-08-19 07:20:03 +0000 UTC [ - ]

If some dozens lunatics can do this, what can an army of sharp professionals with zero morals and a multi-billion dollar budget can achieve?

lurquer 2021-08-19 15:25:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The FDA was created because of the nefarious unethical conduct of doctors/pharma.

Yet some HN posters seem to think the organization exists to protect us from skeptics.

What a twisted view.

wildmanx 2021-08-17 19:36:15 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Oh the law firms doing all those class actions are not doing this for free either..

wildmanx 2021-08-17 15:34:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I'm all for being critical. I'd find it terrible if side effects are just ignored. I wouldn't take any vaccines if that's the case.

But in this case, the facts are on the table. There is no scientific basis in pulling the vaccine from the market. But there was enough propaganda to stoke so much fear that everybody got scared and that was that.

gjsman-1000 2021-08-17 15:36:00 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yep - and I live in Minnesota, I've had Lyme's before but it thankfully was an obvious rash that taking strong antibiotics for a few weeks took care of. I would take it if I could.

tablespoon 2021-08-17 16:49:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> Yep - and I live in Minnesota, I've had Lyme's before but it thankfully was an obvious rash that taking strong antibiotics for a few weeks took care of. I would take it if I could.

Yeah, me too. I got Lyme's (in my backyard) and just finished up my treatment a few days ago (only 10 days of doxycycline). I had the rash, but now I'm concerned that some infections don't show one. I'd jump at a vaccine in a heartbeat.

strbean 2021-08-17 17:48:49 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Spelling quibble: Lyme Disease, not Lyme's Disease. It is named after Lyme, Connecticut.

aquadrop 2021-08-17 15:57:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]

They literally killed this vaccine, so it's anti-vax by definition in result.

scotty79 2021-08-17 20:20:00 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Not even proven side effect. Just something that might be theorized to be the effect of the vaccine.

It's really haunting that exactly the same FUD that tanked safe and efficient Lyme vaccine hinders covid vaccines adoption. And people wonder why companies that make covid vaccine wouldn't budge on being exempt from litigation on the basis of percieved side effects.

mmcdermott 2021-08-17 21:59:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The difficulty with that exemption is that either a good or a bad actor would ask for it. A good actor to avoid being the target of frivolous suits and a bad actor to have cover for their actions. Because a good or bad actor would behave the same in this respect, people bring their own conceptions to the table and see what they expect to see (in either direction).

manwe150 2021-08-18 02:33:55 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I think it is presented that way by some, but in reality, the existence of the exemption and VAERS may also help with monitoring both actors more closely, by reducing the perceived stakes and costs of tracking side-effects. Thus the exemption could help catch and punish bad actors faster, and protect good actors.

Legally speaking, I expect the exemption says something about not lying to the FDA in the fine print, so true bad actors would not be able to hide behind the exemption either.

briandear 2021-08-17 23:12:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yet they don’t have such an exemption for penicillin, or aspirin, or any other similar drug.

The liability shield is precisely why I am Covid-vaccine hesitant. And Pfizer’s track record of honesty when it comes to their drugs is significantly bad. Combine that with the aggressive attempts to silence even a discussion of the vaccine’s side effects makes me extremely skeptical. When “everybody” says something is “safe and effective” and the people profiting “bigly” from that something while also being shielded from literally any liability… Well, that’s enough to make me zig when others zag.

A simple arthritis drug advertised on TV has to disclose the litany of side effects — so extensive as to be comical and yet even mentioning Covid vaccine side effects can get you silenced on social media — something is just very wrong about that. You want me to vaccinate my four kids just because the government says “trust us?” Nope. I’m a grown up. I also have a scientific research background. But when even scientific papers get removed (specifically pre-Covid papers on masks and influenza,) then I’m even more likely to mistrust the “experts.”

To be clear (not that I should have to,) I don’t have the Covid vaccine, but I have all sorts of others. So do my kids. I have vaccines covering everything from Yellow Fever to Japanese Encephalitis and everything in between. But this current vaccine effort reminds me too readily of the anthrax vaccine they were giving us in the Army in the early 2000s. All sorts of neurological issues were reported in many soldiers — often so bad they had to leave the military. And then, as now, it was “safe and effective.” And a rotavirus vaccine in 1999 was pulled from the market because of a rare but serious side effect. Yet the Covid vaccines have a much higher instance of rare but serious side effects compared to that, but everyone is running around saying that the benefits outweigh the risks. Mathematically, for my age and health, that just isn’t true. Ans it’s certainly not true for most healthy children. My point isn’t to debate the vaccine though, my point is to call attention to how the debate is censored. I could very much be wrong in my concerns. Or I could be right. But the fact that we can’t even have a discussion about it is the real problem. We could also apply this to masks. Calling attention to the lack of RCTs and the over-reliance of observational studies gets you branded as an anti-science caveman extremist. Musing as to why control groups were vaccinated (thus destroying long term safety and efficacy data points) also make you an outcast.

What we are seeing isn’t science. It’s politics wrapped in an appeal to authority. The effort to over-censor literally everything contrary to Faucian doctrine has backfired and created a significant group of resisters who, frankly, have little trust in governments.

loceng 2021-08-17 22:45:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Why don't they understand the pathway for the side effect and figure out a diagnostic test for it so people who're hesitant/worried (or everyone does it to protect everyone from the side effect) so they can be screened out from getting the vaccine then?

ganafagol 2021-08-18 06:50:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Why don't they just solve world peace and faster-than-light travel?

Because these things are hard. Lacking the ultimate solution, a small step is better than nothing.

Or do you only walk because cars and trains are too slow to get you to the next solar system so why bother ...?

loceng 2021-08-18 20:33:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I'll disagree on the behalf of people who are harmed.

im3w1l 2021-08-17 16:56:41 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> 76-92 percent after three injections

That's not a lot. Like sure if herd immunity was on the table it might have been, but lyme has an animal reservoir. Like if I had 76% immunity I would still panic every time I saw a tick, so then what is the point?

ptmcc 2021-08-17 17:54:23 +0000 UTC [ - ]

That's in the ballpark of pretty much every effective vaccine ever deployed.

They are never 100%. This misconception seems to have gotten prevalent with COVID and the mRNA vaccines being "only" 90-95% effective. That is staggeringly good, better than most.

all_usernames 2021-08-18 00:36:09 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> mRNA vaccines being "only" 90-95% effective

Against alpha...

daddylongstroke 2021-08-18 19:09:14 +0000 UTC [ - ]

...and only if you're relatively healthy already, not obese, no history of blood clots or heart conditions, and are consistently getting between 6-8 hours of sleep two weeks before and after getting your vaccines.

majormajor 2021-08-17 18:03:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

"Not panicking" is not the goal of the vaccine. The instinctive reaction of the human brain around panicking the same amount over an X chance versus a 4X chance of something happening is a brain bug, not a reason to avoid a vaccine.

That 76% (or more) reduction in risk of your panic turning into serious disease is the reason to get the vaccine even if you're still panicky.

evanmoran 2021-08-17 21:11:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I understand where you are coming from. You will be worried about ticks with or without the vaccine. I will too! But I think the vaccine isn’t for making you stop protecting yourself from ticks (it can’t do that, as you noted). The important part is it’s a small poke for a better chance at staying healthy. If you are worried in both cases, the question becomes is the time/cost to get the shot worth the result. So if you walk in the woods a lot the answer is very likely yes. If you never go near ticks then maybe not.

Another way to think about it is if there was a vaccine to stop car accidents that is only 75% effective, is it worth getting the shot even though I’ll still be afraid of car accidents? Absolutely! The shot is unbelievably easy to get and probably cheap. It doesn’t solve everything, but it is so easy to do it’s hard not to be worth it.

im3w1l 2021-08-17 22:06:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Your calculus forgets about side effects. If the gain is very minor then it only takes minor side effects to swing the balance.

ganafagol 2021-08-18 06:53:22 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You are welcome to compare the number of cases of suspected-but-not-confirmed side effects with the number of people getting Lyme every year.

You may find a difference of a few orders of magnitude.

only_as_i_fall 2021-08-17 17:18:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Doesn't this mean that if I were to get bitten by an infected tick the odds of contracting limes disease would be at least 4x lower?

Seems like a big difference to me even at the low end of the range.

Maybe I'm misapplying the efficacy stat though?

im3w1l 2021-08-17 17:22:29 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You would still have to monitor for ticks and if symptoms appear (more rare) you would treat it with antibiotics and be fine. This is a minor benefit.

edmundsauto 2021-08-17 17:30:59 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You comment makes it sound like the worst part of Lyme disease is the anxiety over having to check for ticks. This is inaccurate - preventing 3/4 of Lyme infections is a massive net win.

Lyme disease can be horrible. The value is in vaccine is to prevent most cases, not to eliminate the annoying tick checks.

ganafagol 2021-08-18 06:54:55 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> you would treat it with antibiotics and be fine.

Funny how you are confirming the sentiment in the article. I'd suggest you read it.

Talanes 2021-08-17 21:55:36 +0000 UTC [ - ]

>You would still have to monitor for ticks

This part is true no matter how effective the vaccine is. Ticks are gross, diseased or not.

daddylongstroke 2021-08-18 19:13:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Ticks are insects, not gross. They're just animals looking to eat, just like you and I.

ralusek 2021-08-17 17:03:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The point would be that every time you see a tick, you could be 76-92% less worried.

_huayra_ 2021-08-17 18:24:22 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Don't worry pal I gotcha here:

1. Form The High Church of Vaccination

2. Claim vaccination as a sacrament

3. Watch the craven fascist majority of the US supreme court (i.e. all of the ones that fashion themselves as lil Scalias, but have terrible writing that reeks of double standards, if any at all, and dog whistles to their base) try to somehow toss the case for not having standing while trying to not undo any of the religious exemptions that they've blown open in the last decade or so (e.g. from Hobby Lobby to the recent shadow docket thing in NYC against Cuomo)

pessimizer 2021-08-17 18:53:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]

How drinking bleach became a Church ‘sacrament’

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/genesis-ii-church-bleach-cure...

_huayra_ 2021-08-17 21:10:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Well their orange-haired chubby savior did say how good of a disinfectant it was. Top it off with some disinfecting UV light in a tanning bed and you have the bedrock of a healthy life....oh wait I mean cancer.

wildmanx 2021-08-17 19:42:50 +0000 UTC [ - ]

No, thank you. I've learned what science is. It's pretty cool, you should look it up.

_huayra_ 2021-08-17 21:20:30 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Do you think I'm anti-science? Hopefully the sarcasm of the parent comment was not lost on you.

I wish Lymerix was available because I no longer want to have to hike or bike in the great outdoors head to toe in clothing design to avoid tick intrusion, much less worry that I was bitten on an exposed part of my skin. Now I'll just have to do it because my skin is designed to be a solar panel for vitamin D production in the dreariest parts of the Irish winter...

daddylongstroke 2021-08-18 19:18:04 +0000 UTC [ - ]

>I wish Lymerix was available because I no longer want to have to hike or bike in the great outdoors head to toe in clothing design to avoid tick intrusion,

Unless you're in the 5% of the population that's genetically predisposed to poor health outcomes from Lyme disease, I would not worry. Even if you are, I certainly would not worry to the effect of covering yourself from head to toe on a nature hike. The stress from your worry, is likely causing the type of inflammation that would prohibit your body's natural immune system from attacking a pathogenic bacterium.

ganafagol 2021-08-18 06:58:05 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Your parent comment was written in a way to discredit vaccinations as a concept and insinuate that it is cult-like. You may want to double-check your understanding of sarcasm. It works exactly the other way around.

hitpointdrew 2021-08-17 15:22:39 +0000 UTC [ - ]

>but apparently some anti-vax propaganda and a class-action lawsuit essentially removed it from the market. Based on a very rare side effect. Wtf? How can that be?

It wasn't "very rare" and the side effect was that it literally gave people lym disease.

Why are vaccinations a political thing now, and if anyone raises any questions whatsoever on any vaccine they are "anit-vax".

wildmanx 2021-08-17 15:30:10 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> It wasn't "very rare" and the side effect was that it literally gave people lym disease.

Again, 59 of 1.4 million. I call that "very rare". About half a million Americans get Lyme from ticks, every year. You do the math. Even if there is a causal connection to the shot (which has not been established) then that's still orders of magnitude lower than the risk of actually getting the bacteria in you if you somewhat frequently visit the woods. And if you don't, just don't get the shot. Your call.

So yes, that's a textbook "anti-vax" sentiment. It's not based on the actual scientific evidence but uses people's overall fear of vaccinations. And it hurts everybody, because the result is that even people who want the vaccine can't get it. Otherwise I wouldn't actually care. Let the anti-vax people suffer if they choose to, but leave me out of this.

Teknoman117 2021-08-17 17:24:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]

My dad spent 2 months getting over a nasty Lyme infection a few summers ago. Not fun at all.

I have a few scars from tick bites that I was lucky didn't cause any infections. Sign me up for whatever vaccines I can get for tick-borne things. I'd love to see the Lyme disease vaccine come back and I'd love to see something for AGS.

koheripbal 2021-08-17 16:39:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]

hmm... we need to compare rates of infection, not raw numbers since only a small number of the population ever received the lime disease vaccine, and both populations reside only in part of the US.

In any case, I agree with the underlying point that it's a travesty that the vaccine was taken off the market due to fear-mongering and unproven allegations.

It's a testament to the failure of the judicial system to protect against frivolous lawsuits.

nawgz 2021-08-17 16:48:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

That is what was done.

> The arthritis incidence in the patients receiving Lyme vaccine occurred at the same rate as the background in unvaccinated individuals. In addition, the data did not show a temporal spike in arthritis diagnoses after the second and third vaccine dose expected for an immune-mediated phenomenon. The FDA found no suggestion that the Lyme vaccine caused harm to its recipients. [0]

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/

hitpointdrew 2021-08-17 15:31:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

>Again, 59 of 1.4 million

Source?

wildmanx 2021-08-17 15:34:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The article we are discussing here. You read it, right?

(And the article got that number from the FDA.)

tablespoon 2021-08-17 15:41:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> It wasn't "very rare" and the side effect was that it literally gave people lym disease.

It sounds like it didn't actually do that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Vaccination:

> Subsequently, hundreds of vaccine recipients reported they had developed autoimmune and other side effects. Supported by some advocacy groups, a number of class-action lawsuits were filed against GlaxoSmithKline, alleging the vaccine had caused these health problems. These claims were investigated by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control, which found no connection between the vaccine and the autoimmune complaints.[170]

> Despite the lack of evidence that the complaints were caused by the vaccine, sales plummeted and LYMErix was withdrawn from the U.S. market by GlaxoSmithKline in February 2002,[171] in the setting of negative media coverage and fears of vaccine side effects.[170][172] The fate of LYMErix was described in the medical literature as a "cautionary tale";[172] an editorial in Nature cited the withdrawal of LYMErix as an instance in which "unfounded public fears place pressures on vaccine developers that go beyond reasonable safety considerations."[25] The original developer of the OspA vaccine at the Max Planck Institute told Nature: "This just shows how irrational the world can be ... There was no scientific justification for the first OspA vaccine LYMErix being pulled."[170]

adrr 2021-08-17 16:55:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Same thing happened to silicone breast implants. Lots of class action lawsuits claiming leaking silicone caused health issues. Lawsuits bankrupted Dow Corning. There was no evidence that it caused issues and you can still get silicone implants today.

LorenPechtel 2021-08-17 17:18:25 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yeah, when the science was in the symptoms claimed to be caused by the implants were more common in women without implants than in women with implants.

anon946 2021-08-17 16:40:22 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Investigation found that the incidence was no higher than for unvaccinated individuals (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/):

>By 2001, with over 1·4 million Lyme vaccine doses distributed in the United States the VAERS database included 905 reports of mild self-limited reactions and 59 reports of arthritis associated with vaccination [29]. The arthritis incidence in the patients receiving Lyme vaccine occurred at the same rate as the background in unvaccinated individuals. In addition, the data did not show a temporal spike in arthritis diagnoses after the second and third vaccine dose expected for an immune-mediated phenomenon. The FDA found no suggestion that the Lyme vaccine caused harm to its recipients.

jefurii 2021-08-17 15:55:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]

"Possible side effects" includes any condition that arose during the trial, whether or not it was directly caused by the vaccine being tested. Source: a family member has a job that involves drug trials.

jorblumesea 2021-08-17 16:08:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> Why are vaccinations a political thing now

You could flip that upside down and ask why people are questioning the experts. Despite having almost no knowledge of statistics, epidemiology and other required skills. Vaccines with rare or almost no side effects are being called into question.

all2 2021-08-17 17:54:31 +0000 UTC [ - ]

We could flip it sideways and ask "why question anything at all?"

We should not be guileless. Whether I have a piece of paper that shows others I'm an "expert" or not, I still question. I ask things like "why is this contemporary vaccine XYZ so politicized?" and "why are companies and governments paying people to take it?"

In other arenas, we say that if you receive something for free "you are the product". So I ask "why is this contemporary case any different?"

The above is only an example. I reserve my right to question. I will note that I'm in no position to dictate to others. I will also note that very few people are currently in a position to dictate to me. I desire that status quo to remain. Anything else is despotism.

LorenPechtel 2021-08-17 17:17:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I see nothing to say it gave people Lyme disease. The *claim* is that it caused the same sort of arthritis that Lyme disease can cause.

Note that the class action suits were settled without paying the "victims" anything. That shows they were garbage from the start.

dukeofdoom 2021-08-17 16:09:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You know, its not impossible for millions of people to have long term side effects from COVID. The absolute overconfidence in its long term safety is based on nothing other than wish full thinking. There are early signs, and warning from Doctors now. They just ignored and gaslighted by corporate media, and sadly people like you that don't know the history of previous accidents with vaccines. Early Polio Vaccines caused 40,000 children, and more than 50 paralyzed.

1053r 2021-08-17 16:20:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The deep irony here is that you wrote "its not impossible for millions of people to have long term side effects from COVID."

While it's clear from the rest of your post that you meant the vaccines, you accidentally ended up making your own counterpoint! It is ABSOLUTELY possible for millions of people to have long term side effects from COVID, the disease.

It would be a brand new thing for a vaccine to give so many people side effects so long after the shot. No vaccine has ever given people side effects that didn't show up within about 6 weeks.

Yes, some people had side effects from the Polio vaccine. But you know what was far more likely to cause lifelong side effects? Polio!

daddylongstroke 2021-08-18 19:37:58 +0000 UTC [ - ]

>No vaccine has ever given people side effects that didn't show up within about 6 weeks.

Why do you believe this is?

markenqualitaet 2021-08-17 17:12:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I assume you mean the vaccine.

"Long term effects" here doesn't mean what you think it means....

In the past, long term side effects were still occuring with weeks or few month after the shot. However, the statistical signal may be delayed for years or decades to manifest.

It's very hard to think of a way how anything could cause side effect years down the line. Vaccines do not contain beryllium or asbestos. The mRNA vaccines do not even contain mercury or other heavy metals. Mind you, 'none' means less than a can of tuna. They do not remain in the body for long. None of it.

That's why people aren't too worried, rationally. Long term effects whould have shown already.

If you indeed mean COVID, I agree. There may be late long term effects, because of the diffuse organ damage and persistent infections.

Of course any strong immune stimulation may slightly increase or decrease the risk for derailing or aging the immune system. Which may sooner, e.g. autoimmune disease risk, or later, e.g. lymphoma risk, manifest.

For COVID it's a silly debate, because you will get infected or vaccinated in any case.

LorenPechtel 2021-08-17 17:20:43 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The claim was that in some individuals the vaccine caused an auto-immune reaction. It seems to me that anyone who had that problem would have developed the same problem if they got the disease.

dukeofdoom 2021-08-17 19:10:11 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Some people are worried, just you never get here from them because they are either censored or drowned out by the corporate press.

Here's a doctor, you don't usually get to hear from raising concerns you don't seem think to exit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUE5EBPt-lU&t=1128s

alexpw 2021-08-18 03:11:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Dr. Ryan Cole, a pathologist, appears to make serious claims related to covid vaccines without supporting evidence. Searching his name reveals he's being given a voice by some of the right-wing media, but if there was substance to what he had to say, other doctors, researchers, scientists, etc, would eagerly jump to verify and act on it.

https://www.factcheck.org/2021/04/scicheck-idaho-doctor-make...

inter_netuser 2021-08-19 08:36:56 +0000 UTC [ - ]

why would they?

judging from comments on this forum alone, it would be a career suicide in this political climate.

ganafagol 2021-08-18 07:01:29 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I'm confused. Do you mean the millions of "long covid" cases which already exist today? Or the estimate that about 70% of all people who got the vaccine will be dead within 3 years?

I know which of these two I consider gaslighting.

daddylongstroke 2021-08-18 19:41:38 +0000 UTC [ - ]

>Do you mean the millions of "long covid" cases which already exist today?

Long covid has yet to be scientifically proven.

inter_netuser 2021-08-19 07:42:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]

post-infection syndromes are well established, and not unique to coronaviruses. It can occur after an infection with ANY pathogen, including covid-19.

after any critical illness, doesn't even have to be an infection, with an ICU stay where intubation was required, the odds are ~50% you will be left with a permanent injury for life. However even after relatively moderate infection a permanent lifelong injury may remain.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21161-post-in...

It's not like injuries are binary: dead or alive.

you could also end up alive, but in a wheelchair with oxygen for life.

There is a huge spectrum in between, anything from vague brainfog, properly known as executive dysfunction, to partial or total paralysis due to a neuropathy often requiring mechanical ventilation, narcolepsy, organ failures, autoimmune conditions, and so on and so on.

None of this is new, nor controversial.

spicybright 2021-08-17 10:27:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]

As a US new england-er, this is game changer for walking through woods.

For those un-informed, on a walk through any woods, you should always wear high socks, and do a full body check for ticks after.

Deer ticks can be as small as a few grains of sand, and near undetectable if they latch on unless you have sharp eyes.

Obviously they can transmit lymes.

I had a close encounter a few years ago, but very luckily giant rings appeared around the bite site, making it a very easy diagnosis.

That only happens in 30% of cases though. The rest likely have no idea, and over time the disease will work it's way into your nervous system, causing permanent damage if not treated quickly enough.

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 11:18:59 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Many report chronic symptoms, who have been laughed at for decades.

Chronic persistence (at least in some cases) has now been proven.

Took someone with chronic lyme to donate the brain for research: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2021.6280...

bobo_legos 2021-08-17 12:07:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Kris Kirstofferson was told by doctors that his memory loss was either Alzheimer's or Dementia. Another doctor finally decided to test him for lyme. Turns out he he probably got bitten by a tick shooting a movie 10 years prior to the positive test. https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/kris-kristofferson-an-o...

computer23 2021-08-17 15:17:04 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It wasn't Lyme. Kris Kirstofferson is a victim of quackery:

https://respectfulinsolence.com/2016/07/08/kris-kristofferso...

capitainenemo 2021-08-17 18:17:59 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Hm. That blog post claims "chronic lyme disease does not exist"

https://news.tulane.edu/pr/study-finds-evidence-persistent-l...

I'm reading up on all this just now due to the HN front page articles, but these 2 seem to be in contradiction.

inter_netuser 2021-08-18 07:48:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Take a look: https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/628045/fneur-12-6...

These are spirochetes in the brain/spine of a dead patient who had proven lyme diagnosis in the past, and donated the brain for research.

Full study: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2021.6280...

The onus now on the "cOnSpIraCy" camp to provide scientific evidence to the contrary.

loceng 2021-08-17 13:37:50 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Huh, I wonder if my executive dysfunction in part could be Lyme disease. I was bitten 10+ years ago - had to pull it off, though it hadn't been there long as it hadn't latched on deeply yet - it did cause a small ring; I did get and take short course of antibiotics immediately after as far as I remember.

I've heard common bloodwork done is very poor at detecting it but is there a better or sure way of detecting it?

istjohn 2021-08-17 13:54:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The article states that Lyme disease is only transmitted if the tic latches on for over 36 hours. The bacteria is latent in the tic's gut until blood is ingested, at which point it takes 36 hours for the bacteria to multiply and migrate to the tic's salivary glands.

loceng 2021-08-17 14:34:23 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Ah thanks - well, perhaps the mark was just my body reacting to its beginning attempt to attach.

2021-08-17 13:49:59 +0000 UTC [ - ]

inter_netuser 2021-08-18 19:43:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]

executive dysfunction could be due to so many things.

How did it begin and how did it progress?

ChrisMarshallNY 2021-08-17 10:56:55 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I've pulled four of the little bastards off me, this summer (so far).

They have gotten much worse, in the last few years (Long Island, NY).

I also know a few (several) folks that have had very bad, life-changing debilitation, as a result of Lyme. I'm aware of one (that I never met), who died from complications of Lyme. I also have a family member, that got it pretty badly, recovered completely, and now seems to be immune.

I'm having myself checked at the doctor, next week.

voisin 2021-08-17 11:19:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]

How are you getting checked? I understood (perhaps wrongly) that the blood tests are only accurate well beyond the window with which the medications are effective, creating a chicken and egg issue.

serial_dev 2021-08-17 13:26:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

After a couple of days in the mountains, I found four ticks, and one bite started to turn red after two weeks.

I went to the doctor, she said the tests at this phase are unreliable, my bite could be Lyme, but could be something else too (the bulls eye rings didn't form yet). She said the pragmatic approach is too treat it as if it was Lyme and take antibiotics. It's better to take some antibiotics than wait for the symptoms (which are not always easy to assign to lyme).

ce4 2021-08-17 11:45:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There's no definitive accredited lab check as far as I know. At least here in Germany the official serologic tests for late stage Lyme can come back negative for years until the disease really progresses badly - even cerebrospinal fluid results may be normal despite neurological symptoms. My specialist uses elispot lab tests for Borrelia b. OspA, antigen and LFA-1 markers.

Other practitioners use westernblot lab results and differential diagnosis.

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 11:56:09 +0000 UTC [ - ]

have you seen recent immunostaining result? albeit in research, amazingly you can actually see the bacteria.

They claim it can be cultured too.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2021.6280...

alfon 2021-08-17 17:09:04 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Thanks for that link, super interesting.

Check out also Dualdur, received 3MEur from EU in 2018.

https://lymediagnostics.com/why-dd/

ChrisMarshallNY 2021-08-17 11:28:46 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Not exactly sure. I made an appointment. First time I've done that. It may just be a "put it on the record" visit, with follow-ups in some months.

My relative didn't find out, until he had a cantaloupe for a kneecap. They tested the fluid, and found lots of Lyme.

He's always getting bit. Deer pass through his backyard, on a regular.

He said the treatment was anticlimactic. A course of oral antibiotics.

rgrieselhuber 2021-08-17 13:52:31 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I've heard that Fry Labs is one of the only labs to do blood testing, but I haven't tried them myself:

https://frylabs.com/resources/lyme-disease-and-detection/

computer23 2021-08-17 16:19:38 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Fry Labs is listed on Quackwatch's list of "Laboratories Doing Nonstandard Laboratory Tests": https://quackwatch.org/related/tests/nonstandard/

The CDC warns against nonstandard testing: https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/diagnosistesting/labtest/otherlab/i...

You'd be surprised how little regulation that some lab testing gets: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/new-fda-regulatory-role-thr...

There are a lot more predatory labs than Theranos out there...

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 11:22:25 +0000 UTC [ - ]

why is there a window? people report recovery after several years with an appropriate treatment.

voisin 2021-08-17 12:02:49 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Recovery with Lyme isn’t always forever. It apparently goes into remission and comes back later. Not sure if anyone knows why or how it does that. AFAIK it is only cured if treated very quickly, before the blood tests are accurate.

istjohn 2021-08-17 13:58:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The bacteria migrates throughout the body over time, including into the brain and spine, so it's easier to eliminate when treated promptly.

saalweachter 2021-08-17 13:02:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The bacteria can cause long-lasting damage, basically, and the symptoms of Lyme disease can just be that damage.

inter_netuser 2021-08-18 19:39:54 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yes, that can be on me situation.

The frontiers study shows bacteria persists inside the brain.

ghaff 2021-08-17 13:26:51 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I haven't seen any recently but they were really bad earlier in the summer in Massachusetts to the point that there were a couple walks that I was doing regularly that I decided to forgo for a bit. And anecdotally I've heard a similar story from others. (Fortunately, everything I've seen have been the larger dog ticks.)

spicybright 2021-08-18 10:24:05 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Dog ticks?

mauvehaus 2021-08-17 11:56:50 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I would get this vaccine yesterday if it were available.

Shit, if I were planning on spending a lot of time in the woods (like, more than I already do), I would go to a vet and see if they would give me the one that's for dogs. Untreated Lyme messes people up.

A whole bunch of people I knew who thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2010 got Lyme. I did not get it, but I don't think I was appreciably more cautious than the people I directly knew who did. Part of what makes Lyme scary is the randomness of who gets it and how easy it is to not know you've contracted it.

Fortunately, hikers are at least generally aware that it's a possibility and know to seek treatment for it specifically. Awareness in the general population is probably still much lower.

P.S. Hello from WRJ, VT, fellow New Englander!

White_Wolf 2021-08-17 15:17:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I'm not sure if this is up to date and anything else was done in terms of research but https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2020/03/30/lyme-disease-bacte...

computer23 2021-08-17 17:23:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]

That article was written by long time conspiracy theorist Kris Newby.

Newby is the producer of a propaganda documentary for "chronic Lyme" called Under Our Skin, and also spreads conspiracy theories about bioweapons:

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/a-review-of-under-our-skin-...

https://theconversation.com/no-lyme-disease-is-not-an-escape...

The article itself is about in vitro experiments funded by other chronic lyme conspiracy theorists. It has nothing to do with human disease.

inter_netuser 2021-08-18 07:35:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It has to do with spirochetes visible under microscope in human brain tissue.

Do you accept that rather obvious finding, or "cOnSpIrAcY" is your main counter-argument?

heavyset_go 2021-08-17 19:10:06 +0000 UTC [ - ]

A vet isn't going to risk their license or take on the liability of treating a human with vaccines for dogs.

sva_ 2021-08-17 11:11:41 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> That only happens in 30% of cases though.

According to the CDC, its 70-80%[0].

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/signs_symptoms/index.html

Spooky23 2021-08-17 13:49:03 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I think the “on the ground” answer varies depending on you, where you are and what insects are around. 70% of deer tick bites may carry Lyme, but the percentage of insect bites with red rings that are Lyme is probably different. If you’re walking through northeast pine forest or low density suburban woods, assume Lyme!

Red rings from bites are not uncommon in general. I know I get a reaction from horse flies that looks to professionals like a potential deer tick bite with Lyme.

moron4hire 2021-08-17 14:46:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Those of us who just went through the "Brood X" cicada emergence are now going through a glut of something called "oak mites", which apparently feed on the cicada eggs, but also just get everywhere. They are kind of like chiggers, burrowing under the skin, and are too small to see with the naked eye. The "bites" are particularly itchy and can also cause red splotching that may appear ring-like sometimes. I had a minor freak-out the first time I saw a splotch on my 3-yr-old's back, but it didn't spread and the blotchiness actually went away rather quickly. Luckily, these welts don't seem to last as long as mosquito bites.

Also, a tick-bite splotch doesn't always have to be ring-shaped.

spicybright 2021-08-17 18:15:10 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Huh, didn't know. Just quoting my dermatologist with that.

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 11:19:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Not the first time CDC would be wrong.

EDIT: why downvote facts?

Recent example on a hot topic: "CDC reverses itself and says guidelines it posted on coronavirus airborne transmission were wrong"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/09/21/cdc-covid-a...

polynox 2021-08-17 12:06:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Being wrong is the essence of science.

By contrast, lyme disease is (1) more than 40 years old, (2) not contagious, and (3) has no political headwinds. There is little reason to distrust CDC on this.

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 12:41:36 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Several states felt it was necessary to pass laws regarding Lyme and provide immunity to physicians willing to treat long haul covid...errr long haul lyme patients.

Seems rather naive to presume they had to pass new laws because Lyme has no political headwinds. It has plenty of controversy around it, for better or worse.

polynox 2021-08-17 14:00:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I was able to substantiate your comment about the laws being changed in two California bills (2013 AB1278 and 2005 AB592) amending BPC 2234.1 that appears to relax restrictions about treatment of "persistent" Lyme disease.

I do not think it is relevant to the point in this thread that is discussing whether Lyme disease does or does not result in a bullseye rash (Erythema Migrans or EM), and the CDC claiming that in 70-80% of cases the rash is present, which you baselessly disputed and edited your comment to accuse those of downvoting "facts".

As an example of what "evidence" might be, a 2009 paper [1] in Current Problems in Dermatology refers:

> EM is by far the most frequent manifestation of Lyme borreliosis. In the USA, more than 70% of patients registered with Lyme borreliosis had EM [28]. Among 1,471 patients shown to have Lyme borreliosis in an epidemiologic study in southern Sweden, EM was seen in 77% of all cases, and was accompanied by other signs of the disease such as nervous system involvement, arthritis, lymphocytoma and/or carditis in only 6.5% [29]

You can dispute those referred studies if you wish, but I think it would be hard to argue that CDC's statement that Lyme disease is characterized by EM in 70-80% of cases is untrue.

[1] Strle, F., & Stanek, G. (2009). Clinical Manifestations and Diagnosis of Lyme Borreliosis. Lyme Borreliosis, 51–110. doi:10.1159/000213070

gmiller123456 2021-08-17 14:58:50 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You should provide evidence, and when you go back and edit your response to do so, that evidence should be relevant to the discussion at hand.

There's a huge difference between data on a disease that's been studied for over 40 years, vs one that's only been around for a few months.

If you think the CDC got it's facts wrong on Lyme disease, it's as simple as saying "This source disagrees", and provide the source. Jumping to the conclusion that your unnamed source is more accurate than any other is another problem itself.

VHRanger 2021-08-17 12:12:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The downvotes are because you contradict a sourced claim with no sources then just say that the people citing research are wrong without backing

sva_ 2021-08-17 12:51:29 +0000 UTC [ - ]

16% without erythema migrans ("lyme rash") https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12543291/

80% develop EM https://www.aafp.org/afp/2012/0601/p1086.html

You can easily find a lot of sources in this ballpark.

gkilmain 2021-08-17 10:38:38 +0000 UTC [ - ]

My experience with ticks: Closer to the home is where you're going to find the small ones. I've had two on me. First one was easy to spot it looked like a freckle on my knee. The second one I felt the bite (thought it was an itch) and it was on my inner thigh. Not sure if I would have noticed the second one if it wasn't for its haphazard bite. Both latched on when I was in / near the garden.

pwenzel 2021-08-17 16:03:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Here are a few pictures of a deer tick that bit me in 2020. I got pretty sick from it. Penny and ruler for scale:

https://imgur.com/a/xgF5Zw2

Its body quit tiny is just over 1mm in width.

I got it either sitting in a field of grass that was a few inches tall, or walking through some brush for 5 minutes a Minneapolis park. I wasn't out doing anything exciting like hunting for morels in old growth forests.

ipqk 2021-08-17 13:50:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]

For those of us with dark skin, the bullseye ring may be there but be imperceptible, making it even harder to diagnose.

Grazester 2021-08-17 13:33:03 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I go hiking a lot in the Hudson area of New York and have my concerns about ticks too. As you said, tall sock are recommended. I also use permethrin on all my lower items of clothing including shoes. I sometimes also use Off on my exposed skin areas and then check for ticks after my hikes.

My wife was once bitten by something through her pants. That left a small ring. I do doubt it was a tick though.

My sister on the other hand was bitten by something a few years ago, she thinks it was a spider. There were multiple red rings extending far and she started having other reactions and needed hospitalization. They pumped her so full of anti-biotics(was on a drip for days), it left her digestive system screwy for months but at least she does not have Lyme disease now.

ericcholis 2021-08-17 14:27:54 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Lint rollers after a hike/walk isn't a bad idea either.

Loughla 2021-08-17 13:04:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I'm convinced you can become and/or grow immune to Lyme, though. It's purely anecdotal.

I grew up where we built our house (deep, deep in the woods). I spent my childhood on the farm there. Ticks were a constant menace, I honestly don't know how many hundreds I pulled off myself as a child.

When I was able, my spouse and I purchased it and built a house. 6 months after moving in, my spouse developed Lymes disease. I have no explanation, other than I am immune to the ticks in the area (or I have had it my entire life with zero symptoms maybe?).

uncertainrhymes 2021-08-17 13:21:10 +0000 UTC [ - ]

When you were young, those ticks may not have had lyme. More importantly, you removed them. They have to be attached for 24 hours before the bacteria comes back out of the tick's gut.

misja111 2021-08-17 13:57:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]

No, removing them early just reduces the chance of getting Lyme. There's no such thing as a 24 hour barrier.

istjohn 2021-08-17 14:02:46 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The article states there is a 36 hour barrier. Do you have a source?

misja111 2021-08-17 14:16:11 +0000 UTC [ - ]

E.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4278789/ "in animal models, transmission can occur in <16 hours, and the minimum attachment time for transmission of infection has never been established"

or

https://www.lymedisease.org/tick-lyme-transmission-time/ "Study finds nymphal ticks can transmit Lyme within 12 hours"

300bps 2021-08-17 12:04:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]

A few houses ago we lived on 2.5 heavily wooded acres in a tick endemic area. Probably got 30 ticks on me from working in the woods.

Never got Lyme disease though by following what you said - check for ticks at the end of each day. It really is true… if they are latched for less than 36 hours you are good.

My son on the other hand had Lyme disease when he was about 6 with a found tick followed by obvious bulls eye rash in the middle of his back. The one time we didn’t check him at end of the day… 30 days of amoxicillin and he’s been fine the past seven years.

hobo_mark 2021-08-17 14:45:39 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Tall socks and trousers sure, but of course they'll get wherever. The only time I had one of them little suckers I only found out the next day... under my wristwatch!

riedel 2021-08-17 12:27:56 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Actually Lyme is a huge problem in southern Germany as well. Actually it seems that a lot of inflammatory joint problems stem from it that are often wrongly diagnosed.

spiderfarmer 2021-08-17 12:30:06 +0000 UTC [ - ]

And brain problems, discovered years later.

pluc 2021-08-17 13:46:49 +0000 UTC [ - ]

and ticks in Germany are massive compared to the ones we get in North America.

rags2riches 2021-08-17 14:27:14 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Which lyme carrying species are you comparing? For Ixodes scapularis compared to Ixodes ricinus I see adult female sizes of 2.5 mm vs 3.6 mm. Not a huge difference. Are you sure you're not comparing larvae or nymphs to adults or even gorged adults?

Dumblydorr 2021-08-17 12:48:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Small edit: The article claims 3/4 have the circular rash, not 30%.

thefz 2021-08-17 13:39:56 +0000 UTC [ - ]

This is enormously good news for mountain bikers too.

jemurray 2021-08-17 11:50:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I know this is about Lyme disease, but let me add another word of caution while we are discussing ticks. Two years ago I was bit by the Lone Star tick. Since that time I developed an allergy to all red meat. It was hard to diagnose and a few of the doctors I worked with along the years still don’t believe its true. If your interested in learning more search for Alpha Gal. There is an excellent Radio Lab podcast about it.

PragmaticPulp 2021-08-17 13:26:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> It was hard to diagnose and a few of the doctors I worked with along the years still don’t believe its true.

Did they offer alternative explanations or did they simply stonewall you and deny your reported symptoms?

One of the lessons I learned far too late in life was to not waste time with doctors who don’t believe your reported symptoms.

On some level I understand how it happens — Doctors inevitably see a number of hypochondriacs and people with psychosomatic illnesses who need to be handled delicately to avoid further entrenching their perceived illnesses. However, when you’re having legitimate symptoms and your own doctor tries to deny the symptoms without offering further diagnostics, it’s time to cut ties and move on.

It can take a few tries to find a good doctor.

retzkek 2021-08-17 14:41:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I've generally had better experiences with DOs than MDs when it comes to listening and working with me to understand how and what I feel. On the other hand some people may prefer the more "clinical" (not sure if that's the best word) approach of MDs. So just something to keep in mind if you're unhappy with your current doctor.

edit: For those not aware, a DO is fully licensed to practice medicine (in the US at least), no different from an MD. Don't confuse them with chiropractors (DC) or similar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteopathic_medicine_in_the_Un...

NortySpock 2021-08-17 18:24:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]

DO: Doctor of Osteopathy , an osteopathic physician

Thought I'd de-acronym-it for you; and yes, my MD father tells me a DO is just as good as an MD.

LorenPechtel 2021-08-17 17:25:06 +0000 UTC [ - ]

And they're far too eager to dismiss it as psychomatic if it doesn't fit their pigeonholes.

crypot 2021-08-17 12:52:46 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I was bit by a tick in 2010. I pulled it off my forearm and it left a protrusion that lasted about 2 weeks. No rings. I got sick with a flu around this time. Went to the doctor, the lyme test came back negative.

Shortly after this I started to develop lesions in my mouth and scalp. Then they spread to my entire body. 6 months later got a diagnosis of an autoimmune blistering disease. The specialist said it was a usually a disease for old people, very unusual for an otherwise healthy 35 year old to develop it. 8 years of oral antibiotics and some steroids for flare ups and I was in remission.

In my opinion, everyone should be leery of tick bites.

gknoy 2021-08-17 18:02:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> 8 years of oral antibiotics

Holy cow. That is a frightening amount of time to have to take those.

wildmanx 2021-08-17 20:33:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]

And a prime recipe for antibiotic resistance to develop.

If an MD prescribed antibiotics for that long a continuous time period, they should lose their license.

inter_netuser 2021-08-18 00:09:06 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Did you see the scientific evidence of persisting spirochetes after repeated courses of antibiotics?

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2021.6280...

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 11:53:22 +0000 UTC [ - ]

This cannot be repeated enough: "few of the doctors I worked with along the years still don’t believe its true"

a medical opinion is just that. an opinion. consensus often takes decades to change.

gilbetron 2021-08-17 13:38:15 +0000 UTC [ - ]

We, as patients, pass around these apocryphal stories around, but don't look at the opposite experience of doctors. Doctors constantly, and I mean multiple times per day, get patients in that tell them their symptoms are due to disease or condition or complex X. Time and again, the patient is completely wrong. No, you don't have cancer, your lymph node hurts because it is fighting off an infection, and besides if it was cancer, the node wouldn't hurt. No, you don't have lyme disease, you're sore because you started gardening again and you are 50. No, you don't have an ulcer, you're just eating too much ice cream before going to bed.

As humans, we forget about the times we were wrong, and also don't share those stories. "I went to the doctor thinking I was dying of cancer, but it turns out I'm allergic to mushrooms" is much less likely to be passed around as a story than, "No doctors would listen to me until one did and tested me and found out I have Lyme disease."

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 13:55:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Hilarious you brought this up: "No, you don't have an ulcer, you're just eating too much ice cream before going to bed."

Reflux is a very common food allergy symptom and milk is one of the most common allergen, if not THE most common.

I've had 3 or 4 scopes that showed some mild inflammation, and GIs were simply lost. I've managed to locate a 90 year old allergist who probably began practicing before there was benadryl. After recounting the symptoms I was told "it's milk. it's always milk". I was taken aback, how can anyone be so sure? Literally 5 minutes later that was confirmed by a skin-prick test.

Most physicians are garbage. The allergist was quite thorough.

The billing rate to dismiss you in 30 seconds pays about the same as a 30 min appointment. The incentives just aren't there.

gilbetron 2021-08-17 14:32:10 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I agree with the systemic problem that our healthcare system doesn't want to get to the bottom of symptoms. It drives me crazy, especially the "most cancer is treatable if caught early, but no we won't give you a diagnostic test to actually catch cancer early". I have direct experience with this, pushing through multiple doctors that ended with my thyroid cancer diagnosis.

My doctor at the time was actually really good, not because he was good at diagnosing, but he had enough experience to recognize his inability to do so and would always send me to an expert. He literally was 100% wrong about all of my major diagnoses (my hurt knee actually was a torn ACL, my abdominal pain actually was a hernia, my throat nodule actually was cancer), but he always sent me to a specialist to be sure. And he knew really good specialists. "I don't think it is X, but lets have a specialist verify" was his common refrain.

But, yeah, the system sucks now.

Dumblydorr 2021-08-17 12:52:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]

A doctor's opinion on disease isn't merely an opinion, it's an educated guess based on experience and qualifications. New diseases and research are constantly appearing, thousands of articles are written each year. We can't expect doctors to know everything, but we can expect them to have more informed opinions, on average, than non-doctors.

I say this because there's a rising trend of anti-intellectualism and distrust of doctors in the US, which leads to massive self inflicted wounds in Covid and vaccines. Doctors aren't infallible, but they're far better than random online sources.

nitrogen 2021-08-17 13:35:19 +0000 UTC [ - ]

trend of anti-intellectualism and distrust of doctors

As someone who knows a practicing doctor who is also anti-vax, these are orthogonal issues. Sometimes, distrusting a specific doctor is the more intellectual approach.

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 13:40:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You'd be surprised how many physicians and nurses refuse vaccination. You'll just never hear about it. AMA is one powerful beast, I wish I had a union like that.

However, sometimes fun little things like this happen that show their true colors:

"Starting in early 2003, the United States government started a program to vaccinate 500,000 volunteer health care professionals throughout the country. Recipients were healthcare workers who would be first-line responders in the event of a bioterrorist attack. Many healthcare workers refused, worried about vaccine side effects, and healthcare systems refused to participate. Fewer than 40,000 actually received the vaccine.[29]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine

over 90% refused.

arn 2021-08-17 13:55:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

That doesn't mean distrust of vaccination in general - at least by doctors. It was for a potential bioterrorist attack. It perhaps more reflects the low likelihood or belief that there would be a small pox attack.

Meanwhile, 96% of physicians are vaccinated against COVID - https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-sur...

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 14:06:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

If you assume the low likelyhood of the attack was the reason, that means 90% of those physicians could be lying. The stated reason for refusal was concerns about side effects. It's in the quote.

What you stated as a fact, 96% vaccination rate, is actually a self-reported survey.

Why do a survey when public health CDC records could simply be matched with the physician licensing registrars?

Seems an automatic search like that would save physicians their valuable time, aren't they very busy with a pandemic right now? Instead of hard data from CDC, we get self-reported, likely anonymous, self-reported survey.

What do they have to hide?

arn 2021-08-17 14:34:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It's always cost-benefit. Relative risk of side effect directly relates to likelihood.

Risk of side effects vs benefit of vaccine.

I am not likely to take an HIV vaccine, since my personal chance of contracting HIV is incredibly low. So any side effect isn't "worth it" -- even a sore arm. But that doesn't mean I'm anti-vaccine.

I also don't wear a bullet proof vest around because it's too heavy ("side effect"). Does that mean I'm anti-bullet proof vest? No. But I would wear a bullet proof vest in a war zone -- even if it's heavy.

If there was a widespread small pox outbreak in the U.S., I'm certain more than 10% of physicians would take the vaccine. Does that mean they were lying before? No.

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 14:49:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]

did you read my comment?

covid 96% status is from an anonymous survey.

Why not just get CDC to provide actual hard data? Surely they keep vaccination records?

Should vaccination status of physician, as verified by the CDC, be public data?

arn 2021-08-17 15:05:50 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Because even if I did point to official stats, you would say they are just lying?

A few months prior to the AMA survey, Long Term Care Facilities reported a 75% vaccination rate amongst physicians at their facilities. So presumably higher now.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7030a2.htm

nitrogen 2021-08-17 14:35:49 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The stated reason for refusal was concerns about side effects.

As another comment already mentioned, smallpox vaccines (at least historically) tended to have undesirable side effects, like permanent scars. Smallpox vaccination is probably not a good proxy for vaccination overall. It's not worth getting vaccinated for smallpox unless you expect a decent risk of exposure.

What do they have to hide?

Privacy should be the default.

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 15:01:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]

they have a monopoly license, these things come with strings.

Do you want to go to anti-vaxx doctor?

wbl 2021-08-17 14:02:38 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The smallpox vaccine has a non-trivial amount of danger and the only smallpox in the world is guarded very closely.

mwigdahl 2021-08-17 13:42:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I'd qualify that: "...we can expect them to have more informed opinions, on average, _for any random condition_, than non-doctors."

The thing I think you're missing is that the resources to do good, deep research on a condition do exist, and the sufferer has very strong motivation to do that research and become very well informed in the etiology and treatment options. The doctor, less so. They have a lot of patients and a lot of demands on their time.

Will a good doctor put in the effort, do the research, and come up with a superior treatment plan? Certainly! But not all doctors will do this.

If you use the allegory of the pig and the chicken, the sufferer is the pig, the doctor is the chicken. It is reasonable that the average pig will put in more work and be better informed about their own condition than the average chicken.

wildmanx 2021-08-17 20:54:50 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The English language has a serious deficiency in the term "research".

You can do "research" by spending your days in a lab, formulating hypotheses, doing experiments, reading related academic work, drawing conclusions, publishing their findings.

You can do "research" by googling, reading blog posts and wikipedia articles, watching Youtube videos, following telegram links and possibly reading a popular-science book.

These two things are very different activities and produce very different bodies of knowledge. "Do your own research!" is a common sentiment in Covid skeptic circles. It doesn't mean being in a lab. It means following links in your Google bubble. That doesn't necessarily produce useful knowledge. Properly trained researchers are aware of things like confirmation bias, selection bias, recollection bias. The "I did my own research crowd" is not and suffers seriously from it.

Using the term with the doctor is blurring the line between both versions. They don't stand in the lab and "do their own research", but they are more educated in the medical field than the common patient and have context.

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 23:51:37 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> they are more educated in the medical field than the common patient and have context.

Pompous credentialism.

This is a hacker forum. Are people outside of universities unable to learn computer science, applied math, sw dev? Sure, biomed is a different field, but that’s all it is. A different knowledge base, there are more and more biomed hackers out there too, not to mention quite a few patients are PhDs and MDs themselves.

Geez, from your words patients are simply all permanently dumb as bricks and unable to ever learn, where as MDs always know more than patients, despite having never ever done any actual research in their entire training and subsequent career.

Nice set of preconceived notions and biases there, fellow researcher.

wildmanx 2021-08-18 08:17:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> Geez, from your words patients are simply all permanently dumb as bricks and unable to ever learn, where as MDs always know more than patients, despite having never ever done any actual research in their entire training and subsequent career.

Wow, it's hard to misconstrue my post more than that. Impressive!

Of course there are patients with more clue than the average patient. And of course there are incompetent doctors. But the common doctor is more educated in the medical field than the common patient.

Don't believe that? Next time you have surgery, just demand that instead of the surgeon, the next patient in the waiting room does the surgery on you. That's roughly what you are babbling about. Nothing they couldn't learn with a bit of youtube, eh?

> despite having never ever done any actual research in their entire training and subsequent career.

The post you replied to literally contains the words 'They don't stand in the lab and "do their own research", '

PebblesRox 2021-08-17 14:15:31 +0000 UTC [ - ]

For anyone else who isn't familiar with the Pig and Chicken story:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 13:34:00 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Indeed, there is plenty of distrust. If they are doing such a great job though, why the distrust?

I don't know a single person with a significant chronic condition in the US who would say the health system and all their physicians are amazing and great. Usually you hear the exact opposite.

However, stories about that gem of a doctor they finally found over the years are very common. Most physician suck, not sure why.

Loss of trust is indeed very unfortunate, counterproductive and indeed leads to unnecessary suffering.

Physicians are highly educated professionals in a legally protected rent-seeking monopoly, backed by a powerful trade union, AMA, and the corresponding social status/wealth/authority that comes with all that. Seems to me it's only fair that the onus is entirely on them to win that trust back. I'm not holding my breath though.

Medicine is just another business. Remember that next time you see a doctor.

wildmanx 2021-08-17 20:58:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> I don't know a single person with a significant chronic condition in the US who would say the health system and all their physicians are amazing and great. Usually you hear the exact opposite.

> However, stories about that gem of a doctor they finally found over the years are very common. Most physician suck, not sure why.

Great example of reporting bias. Nobody goes around telling everybody "all is fine". That's not news and nobody wants to hear it. Something needs to be special, out of the ordinary, a sensation even. "All my doctors suck, listen to my 10-minute rant about my odyssey" is what people _think_ will be interesting.

Ever heard a news anchor say "Nothing remarkable happened today. Have a good evening." Of course not. They will report something, no matter how unimportant, ridiculous, sensationalist.

chubot 2021-08-17 12:36:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yeah I think of it almost as a mathematical problem. There are simply more ways for a human body to go wrong than any number of doctors possibly can comprehend :) There is a very very long tail of diseases and disorders.

So it's not just easy to find something that ONE doctor has never heard of or seen, but you can find many that ALL doctors are unfamiliar with!

Dylanfm 2021-08-17 12:40:19 +0000 UTC [ - ]

This also occurs in Australia, resulting in mammalian meat allergy. Some more information here https://allergy.org.au/patients/insect-allergy-bites-and-sti...

fullstop 2021-08-17 13:46:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I was bit by one of those about ten years ago, but no unusual effects thankfully.

kortex 2021-08-17 13:20:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Graveyard of "not considered a real/serious disease/threat by the medical consensus until a frankly embarrassingly amount of time later"

[x] "cadaverous particles" (washing hands after autopsies)

[x] "hysteria" (likely a combination of various mental health conditions and/or PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome)

[x] "GRID" (HIV/AIDS)

[x] leaded gas bad

[x] asbestos bad

[x] smoking bad

[?] refined sugar bad

[x] Autism

[x] ADHD

[x] COVID-19 (from ??-2019 until Feb/Mar 2020)

[ ] chronic lyme/other tickborne illness

[ ] ME/CFS

Hopefully, the skyrocketing case load of the latter two (due to explosive spread of tickborne illness, and "long covid", respectively ) will get the gears actually turning and change consensus.

I don't get what's wrong with the medical community acknowledging "hey we have all these odd cases, we can't pin down a cause, but here's the leading theories." Instead, just look at the "Myth/Fact" thread elsewhere in the comments here. Stating with such authority "antibiotics totally cure Lyme". Since when is anything in medicine a sure bet? You're telling me it's impossible that an evolving lifeform can't possibly evade the immune system and selection pressure and become persistent? What?

Ok, please rebut me, tell me how this line of reasoning, "these currently 'orphan' diseases deserve taking a closer look, and not dismissed out of hand" is wrong.

PragmaticPulp 2021-08-17 13:38:54 +0000 UTC [ - ]

“Chronic Lyme” is a very challenging topic because it has become a mix of legitimate symptoms (those suffering post-treatment Lyme disease) but also a pseudoscience catch-all diagnosis promoted by bad alternative medicine practitioners.

Contrary to popular belief, the CDC and medical community do actually continue to research the topics of potential Lyme persistence and post-treatment Lyme symptoms. We’re discussing this under the headline about a new Lyme disease vaccine, aren’t we?

However, there is also an out of control pseudoscience/quackery community that has attached itself to Lyme as the go-to explanation for unexplained symptoms. They’re drawn to the theories of Lyme persisting in undetectable ways, which they use as an excuse to diagnose people by vague symptoms alone. There are now a number of well-known scam Lyme disease labs that claim to use proprietary techniques to identify Lyme disease that the reputable labs can’t catch. Virtually everyone who submits a sample to these scammy labs comes back with a “positive” result.

I once tested positive for Lyme using the CDC criteria from a reputable mainstream lab. The specialists I saw did not mess around with treatment as well as follow up, but they did go to great lengths to ensure I wasn’t trying to get in with a pseudoscience or self-diagnosed “chronic Lyme” case. One of them explained that she was inundated with appointment requests from people who self-diagnosed as “chronic Lyme” after reading Internet forums despite multiple negative test results and refused to believe any other explanation. The “chronic Lyme” online communities are a terrible mess of misinformation, but the actual medical community around Lyme treatment is quietly continuing to do good work. It can be difficult to separate the two from the outside due to all of the noise made by the pseudoscience quacks that have attached themselves to the topic.

kortex 2021-08-17 13:54:50 +0000 UTC [ - ]

That's fair. But I'd rather humor the quackish side of chronic lyme and see some progress being made, rather than lean to the side of dismissing them, along with people with legitimate complaints.

The inability to adequately assay Lyme speaks more to how bad we are at assaying diseases, than to the (il-)legitimacy of the disease.

PragmaticPulp 2021-08-17 13:57:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> But I'd rather humor the quackish side of chronic lyme and see some progress being made,

That would have the opposite effect, because many (or likely most) of them never actually had Lyme disease.

That’s the problem: “Chronic Lyme” has attracted too many pseudoscience practitioners who lazily blame everything on undetectable Lyme. They diagnose based on symptoms alone and/or employ tests with known extreme false positive rates while dismissing mainstream tests that have been validated.

The more you mix those false patients into the real Lyme population, the more you dilute the real signal from actual patients.

Humoring the quackery doesn’t advance the science.

If you want progress to be made in a field, it’s important to be diligent about keeping the quackery out.

babyblueblanket 2021-08-17 15:27:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The issue with humoring the quackish side of chronic lyme is that you swiftly get into supposed treatments that are, in fact, quackery or can be actively harmful to patients (such as extremely long antibiotic treatments). So you risk both wasting money and harming people by humoring stuff you know is nonsense.

emerongi 2021-08-17 13:40:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]

A lot of it is just science catching up to what is observed in the real world. I agree that many practicing doctors are operating on out-of-date knowledge, so if you happen on one of those and start talking about CFS, you might not get a positive reaction. Isn't it the same as unknowingly hiring a bad contractor, though? Doesn't mean that the engineering community is not trying to find more efficient and better ways of construction. CFS is a recognized disorder by the medical community, although the causes are unkown. That is not surprising considering the complexity of the human body.

Tick-borne illnesses are talked about a lot in Europe, ever since I was a kid (~20 years ago). Can't say I have received much conflicting information in all those years.

kortex 2021-08-17 14:03:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> CFS is a recognized disorder by the medical community, although the causes are unkown.

My point was, it wasn't even a recognized disorder until fairly recently. As I understand it, part of the problem is a cottage industry of quackish medicine sprung up around the unfalsifiability of chronic Lyme and CFS. But instead of the medical community taking an agnostic stance "we see you are suffering but we can't explain it", there was a strong push in the opposite direction, asserting that it's psychosomatic / "only in your head" / "here's some antidepressants." And you see this pattern again and again. I think the dismissive attitude is starting to abate among the younger medical professionals but you still see this air of "anything I wasn't trained on isn't a thing" among many of them.

dkarl 2021-08-17 18:09:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> there was a strong push in the opposite direction, asserting that it's psychosomatic / "only in your head" / "here's some antidepressants."

As a counterpoint to this, my first exposure to chronic fatigue syndrome came while I was dealing with depression and getting psychotherapy for the first time. CFS popped up in the news, and a friend guided me to a web forum where I'd get the "unfiltered" version from people who suffered from it. What jumped out to me about that community, given my struggle with depression at the time, was that it was a cesspool of stigma against mental illness. The experiences people reported varied over a wide spectrum, but there was a significant contingent of people with classic symptoms of depression along with the vague physical complaints that most people have, outraged that doctors would be so insulting as to suggest depression or other psychological explanations. If there was one belief that united the community, one shared credo, it was that they deserved a physical diagnosis because their dignity required it, and they would not accept a psychological diagnosis because it would render them unworthy of sympathy. One person summed up the consensus succinctly by saying it was an outrage for doctors to suggest that they were "just too lazy and too stupid to get their lives together." That was unwelcome, but valuable, confirmation of how some people saw depression, and it made me more guarded about when and how I talked about it.

So it cuts both ways. I'm sure there are doctors who arrogantly label any patient they can't figure out as "crazy," but I'm just as sure there are patients who overreact, angrily, to any mention of psychological causes or treatments.

emerongi 2021-08-17 14:37:29 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Right, I understand your point better now and agree. I'm not sure what medical training consists of today, but improvement on this issue should start there.

ollifi 2021-08-17 14:00:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Isn’t Hysteria the other way round than those other diagnoses on the list? It used to be diagnosed but since doctors don’t believe in it anymore.

Whitespace 2021-08-17 11:41:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I caught Lyme earlier this year. Recently moved to upstate NY (20 miles from Lyme, CT) and tick checks are a daily thing. Found an adult embedded in my side. Developed a 103ºF fever and fatigue. Dr. took blood for the Lyme test but didn't wait for a positive and prescribed 2 weeks of Doxycycline.

A few days later I found a bullseye rash on my leg (not near the bite area) which pretty much confirmed it.

I felt 100% around 5-7 days after developing fever symptoms.

technothrasher 2021-08-17 13:13:25 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> Recently moved to upstate NY (20 miles from Lyme, CT)

Wait, what? The only part of NY 20 miles from Lyme is the tip of Long Island. It's at least 60 miles from anything upstate.

doctorhandshake 2021-08-17 13:59:34 +0000 UTC [ - ]

For folks in NYC, ‘upstate’ is used loosely to mean ‘a place in NY state you access via queens or the bronx’.

Whitespace 2021-08-17 17:55:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Ahh you're correct, I'm 90 miles from Lyme, not 20.

vimy 2021-08-17 13:18:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The tests look for antibodies which only are measurable after weeks so a test immediately after a tick bite is useless.

tcoff91 2021-08-17 19:55:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]

If you collect the tick itself, is there a way to check the tick instead of checking the person that's bit?

vimy 2021-08-17 21:44:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yeah, you can send it to a lab. This should be the default move after every tick bite.

contravariant 2021-08-17 11:25:04 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> a relatively uncommon treatment for Lyme in which doctors siphon some blood, blast it with electromagnetic waves, and then drip it back into the bloodstream

That's a weird description, depending on what kind of waves this could be anything from microwaving the blood to blasting it with UV or just shining some rainbow coloured lights on it.

rogers18445 2021-08-17 16:29:36 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Ionizing radiation. Ingenious approach, sort of a pseudo-vaccine, kills and breaks apart a pathogen in the blood that was taken and when re-injected it presents a greater attack surface for the immune system to learn about the pathogen. Also whatever active measures the pathogen cells in the sample were taking to evade attention are no longer in effect since it's dead.

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 11:49:22 +0000 UTC [ - ]

transfusion blood gets gamma irradiated. maybe that?

also there was some research on UV-C irradiated blood.

akyu 2021-08-17 11:54:34 +0000 UTC [ - ]

>microwaving the blood to blasting it with UV or just shining some rainbow coloured lights on it.

Or you could just say, "blast it with electromagnetic waves".

dmos62 2021-08-17 12:00:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

In some parts of the world (e.g. the Eastern Bloc) you find tick-borne encephalitis. That's a horrible disease that can cause cerebral and neural damage. What's more, the number of reported human cases of TBE in all endemic regions of Europe have increased by almost 400% within the last three decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick-borne_encephalitis

nanis 2021-08-17 12:06:38 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> umber of reported human cases of TBE ... have increased by almost 400%

Specifically, following the now routine mass bird/chicken massacres of the Bird Flu panic.

Dma54rhs 2021-08-17 13:34:55 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It's a bad disease in the region but there's a vaccine for it readily available that you should take if you are connected to woods and nature.

snemvalts 2021-08-17 13:41:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]

And a booster lasts around 5 years I believe? So not as bothersome as a flu shot even.

Anthony-G 2021-08-17 14:07:22 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Thanks for highlighting this. While most hikers are aware of the dangers of Lyme disease, the encephalitis is less well-known. I only found out about it while hiking in Slovakia a few years ago. At that stage, the hiking trip had started and it was too late to get a vaccine.

dmos62 2021-08-17 17:50:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]

My area has a relatively high infection rate, but most people I know aren't vaccinated, even if they're somewhat aware of the dangers. Having a vaccine is not enough, you also need people to use it.

arpa 2021-08-17 12:03:34 +0000 UTC [ - ]

there have been vaccines against that for a long time.

cesnja 2021-08-17 19:09:05 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Fun fact, since I've been vaccinted against TBE, I haven't found even a single tick biting me. And I spend even more time in the nature now since the pandemic has started.

mind-blight 2021-08-17 11:24:22 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I'm so happy to see this. My dad suffered from Lyme's for years. He died 3 months ago due to Lyme's related complications. I really hope more people don't have to go what he went through.

It's also comforting (I'm a misery loves company kind of way) to know other other people are dealing with, and trying to fight, the disease. It makes dealing with everything feel a bit less lonely

zekrioca 2021-08-17 14:16:51 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I’m sorry for your loss. I hope these trials go further to help more people in need.

zz865 2021-08-17 11:19:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Lyme is just one of the horrible diseases ticks carry. Would be nice to cull most of the deer in the North East. A few decades ago they were rare, now they're everywhere.

exhilaration 2021-08-17 15:00:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Ticks are on all small mammals - field mice [1], rabbits, etc. Culling the deer won't be enough.

[1] Check out these tick tubes: https://blogs.cornell.edu/nysipm/2019/06/28/dont-make-your-o...

patall 2021-08-17 15:38:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Ticks and Lyme are also transmitted by birds (i.e https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210127093213.h...). Especially migrating birds are a big issue as more and more 'tropic' ticks end up north.

magpi3 2021-08-17 12:23:41 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There are deer feeders that kill ticks. This solution seems more humane then trying to kill most of the deer.

rory 2021-08-17 12:42:56 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Most may be too far, but I also see a bunch of postings that a cull is needed to slow the spread of CWD.

pcmaffey 2021-08-17 13:08:43 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Or reintroduce wolves.

driverdan 2021-08-17 15:03:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Mice are the bigger problem, not deer.

jankotek 2021-08-17 11:23:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Better to eradicate ticks.

somehnacct3757 2021-08-17 11:30:58 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The deer themselves are a problem in the northeast. They are greatly overpopulated and eat the native understory, preventing the next generation of trees from growing past adolescence. As the existing trees slowly die, there will be none younger to replace them.

This also clears out the competition to the benefit of non-native plants, which the deer don't eat. Some of these plants are invasive, such as japanese barberry, and render large areas untraversable. Not to mention the bramble is an excellent home for rodents, another major tick carrier.

If you want to reduce ticks, deer are a critical element of their lifecycle.

giantg2 2021-08-17 11:51:11 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The mice are the main component to the lyme lifecycle. There is a researcher working to give mice immunity using crispr.

Generally, the deer are only overpopulating (at least to the extent you describe) in areas that aren't hunted, which also tend to be highly populated. It seems many people enjoy seeing the deer in their backyards and don't want their almost-pets to be killed, especially if it means it might have to be done on their land. How do you propose dealing with that opposition?

somehnacct3757 2021-08-17 12:17:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Show them a close-up of a deer's face in an ad campaign, lol. They're covered in ticks, it's like a Ren & Stimpy zoom shot.

You could also get more ppl into gardening. Gardeners end up hating deer after their gardens get raided once or twice.

technothrasher 2021-08-17 13:49:49 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> Generally, the deer are only overpopulating (at least to the extent you describe) in areas that aren't hunted

Central Massachusetts has a very active deer hunting community. I never have any trouble filling my freezer with free venison every fall. But the deer population is still four times the sustainable level as set by the state Wildlife dept and local conservation groups.

Hunting isn't necessarily enough to control the population.

giantg2 2021-08-17 15:06:54 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It depends on a number of factors. Access is a huge one where I'm at. Public lands can be basically hunted out while the deer have moved onto private lands where nobody hunts and created huge herds (30+).

If your area doesn't have the access issue, then I would guess it could be an issue with the number of hunters - if there aren't enough, then they can't harvest the number required to bring down the population (or the limits make it difficult - seems like that's the case the way they handle doe permits). Many states have a program that allows hunters to donate their deer to a food bank through a participating butcher. This can make a big impact in areas that allow more harvests (MD allows 10 doe per year/season without any special permits).

gkilmain 2021-08-17 12:12:54 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Definitely. I bought tick tubes which target the mice. I've had one on me since putting them out in late April. I think they're working but need more time to test.

quesera 2021-08-17 18:02:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Both small mammal and large mammal hosts are required in the deer tick lifecycle.

White-footed mice are the most common host for the small mammal portion (but there are many options), and deer are the most common host for the large mammal portion.

Deer are easier to count and control than mice/voles/moles/chipmunks/etc.

So controlling deer populations is more likely to be successful in breaking the deer tick lifecycle.

So sayeth a publication from researchers at the University of Connecticut, at least.

I'm sympathetic with the almost-pet Bambi-loving crowd. But Lyme is real and not at all cuddly. Bring back the wolves!

giantg2 2021-08-17 22:23:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Coyotes have been introduced in the east in the past. They generally don't kill healthy adult deer (maybe), but they do kill a decent number of fawns. They aren't enough to fully control the population, especially in the suburbs.

The advantage of going after the mice is that they can use crispr to give them immunity. It could be used on deer, but would probably have more push back. Tick tubes have already been shown to be effective at the small mammal level.

It will likely require a combination to control.

quesera 2021-08-18 01:17:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yep, coyotes are not pack hunters in the way that wolves are.

Interestingly, the coyotes in the US East are apparently hybrid "coywolves". They are larger than western coyotes, but still not big enough to take down an adult deer, and they still do not hunt in packs.

If you have a large area to cover, Tick Tubes(tm) can get expensive. You can make your own pretty easily for about 1/20th of the price: toilet paper rolls, cotton balls, and Permethrin diluted to ~3%.

giantg2 2021-08-18 11:29:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]

"Yep, coyotes are not pack hunters in the way that wolves are."

"...but still not big enough to take down an adult deer, and they still do not hunt in packs."

Coyotes will hunt in packs or alone. They generally go for fawns, but they do occasionally take adult deer (there's even video of it).

https://www.pgc.pa.gov/Education/WildlifeNotesIndex/Pages/EC...

https://www.trappermag.com/article-index/deer-predation-coyo...

quesera 2021-08-18 22:11:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There is no comparison between the organizational coherence of coyotes (or coywolves) and full wolves.

Wolves are bigger, stronger, and cooperative in larger packs. Coyotes are more opportunistic and ad hoc, and easily scared off.

The net is that wolves have far more success with large prey.

Feral (or wandering) domesticated dogs will sometimes hunt together too, but their coordination is limited. Wolves are impressive creatures.

cmrdporcupine 2021-08-17 12:23:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Eastern red fox populations need to be higher. They're amazing mouse hunters.

gilbetron 2021-08-17 13:43:41 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Don't forget to give part of the blame for the forest woes on worms: https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/the_dirt_about_earthworms

jf22 2021-08-17 11:41:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I'm sure deer populations have been higher in the past and the forests survived.

somehnacct3757 2021-08-17 12:30:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

In my area there are over 120 deer per square mile currently. This number was historically 10, when predators existed. Studies have shown that around 30 deer per square mile is when biodiversity starts to suffer.

I live in the forest and manage my lot with guidance from foresters and nearby park rangers. It may take a hundred years for these current trees to die, but there's nothing to replace them. You can walk the understory and see knee-high trees that can't grow further because the deer prune their leaves.

bjoli 2021-08-17 13:21:42 +0000 UTC [ - ]

120 deer per square mile?!

In thought the moose problem in Sweden was big. That is just ridiculous. We have a moose population that is waaay higher than ever before because we killed most large predators, and the people responsible for keeping the population down (hunters) want a much larger population than is environmentally defensible.

zz865 2021-08-17 11:45:05 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There used to be Wolves and Mountain lions to keep the deer under control.

giantg2 2021-08-17 11:58:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There have been times of higher deer population. The population was much higher in PA when my dad was a kid. It currently sits around 30 deer per square mile, which 3 times higher than pre colonial times.

echelon 2021-08-17 11:49:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There's nothing unethical with culling an overpopulated species. We do it to deer, wolves, etc. all the time via hunting permits.

As long as wild biology subsists on killing and eating, there's no problem with humans doing the same in order to restore balance.

It also helps to reintroduce natural predators when possible. But in absence of that strategy, humans can do the job too.

a-saleh 2021-08-17 10:32:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yep, last summer I knew more people in my friend group that had lyme disease than people with covid.

vinnymac 2021-08-17 10:43:06 +0000 UTC [ - ]

This article gives me hope. My grandfather has Lyme disease and it took a very long time to identify, he’s very old and spends a lot of time outdoors, so the disease has made life much harder. I live in an area with a lot of white tailed deer. I get at least 600 on my property a year, as it’s a highly trafficked area with a lot of bedding and running water. Last winter my wife had one embedded in her that I had to pull out, and I immediately got worried about Lyme disease. Every day around 5pm a baby doe comes to our backyard to eat some greens and I receive my reminder that the summer season is coming to a close and ticks may become rampant again.

More than anything, I hope we can improve our identification of this disease, a vaccine would absolutely be a game changer, if they can make it happen.

jacobr 2021-08-17 09:51:06 +0000 UTC [ - ]

TBE is another terrible tick borne neurological disease that’s increasing rapidly, currently only in Eurasia. There’s no cure, but at least a decent vaccine. It requires booster shots every 5 years though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick-borne_encephalitis

foepys 2021-08-17 10:50:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]

While it might turn deadly, there are many asymptomatic cases, too, so it's not like Ebola or something.

One should still get the vaccine when living in or traveling to an affected area and plans to go into nature, though. When I was last vaccinated it took 3 months for the vaccine to reach ~70% efficacy after 2 shots and 12 more months to reach 99% efficacy after 3 shots, so people should not wait until they travel to get it.

giantg2 2021-08-17 11:42:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There's also the researcher using crispr to give mice immunity to lyme, thus interrupting the life cycle. It would be great to wipe it out that way.

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 11:59:43 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Please link.

giantg2 2021-08-17 12:31:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I saw it on Netflix, but here is a similar article.

https://elemental.medium.com/the-mouse-cure-48f81e7a3fec

2021-08-17 12:34:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]

yodsanklai 2021-08-17 11:18:54 +0000 UTC [ - ]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_Lyme_disease

> Chronic Lyme disease (CLD) is the name used by some people with "a broad array of illnesses or symptom complexes for which there is no reproducible or convincing scientific evidence of any relationship to Borrelia burgdorferi infection" to describe their condition and their beliefs about its cause.

(TLDR; lot of misinformation about Lyme disease)

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 11:30:03 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Take a look: https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/628045/fneur-12-6...

These are spirochetes in the brain/spine of a dead patient who had proven lyme diagnosis, has been given the standard treatment in the past, never recovered, developed dementia, died.

Full study: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2021.6280...

The wikipedia article you are quoting is outdated misinformation, please stop spreading it.

the wiki article is indeed misinformation.

yodsanklai 2021-08-17 11:44:58 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I'd encourage anyone interested to do their own research. The scientific consensus today is what is stated in the linked wikipedia article. There are lot of myths around Lyme disease.

https://eu.delawareonline.com/story/sponsor-story/nemours/20...

Myth #5: Lyme disease can have debilitating, lifelong effects.

Fact: When treated with antibiotics, Lyme disease, at any stage of presentation, is curable.

Myth #6: My child will be at risk for chronic Lyme disease once he’s infected with Lyme.

Fact: Although some people report lingering or recurrent symptoms after Lyme disease, there is no evidence that chronic Lyme disease exists. Prolonged courses of antibiotics are not needed and can do more harm than good. Follow the recommendations of trusted sources such as the Centers for Disease Control and the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society.

Myth #7: Alternative therapies are valuable treatment options for my child’s Lyme disease infection.

Fact: Lyme disease is a hot topic on the internet with many people sharing both successes and horror stories about alternative treatments, but keep in mind that it is hard to verify the legitimacy of internet sources. Instead, talk to your child’s pediatrician, or consult with a pediatric infectious diseases physician at an academic medical center.

darkerside 2021-08-17 12:42:51 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Garbage misinformation.

Myth #5: Lyme disease can have debilitating, lifelong effects.

Fact: When treated with antibiotics, Lyme disease, at any stage of presentation, is curable.

The fact provided in response assumes that people are getting antibiotic treatment, which is not always the case. If you go untreated, then you can have lifelong debilitating effects. I don't think even the author of the article would dispute that. So why is the author using weaselly arguments to imply that you can't? Seems like an attempt to confirm a biased judgement.

akyu 2021-08-17 11:51:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

>The scientific consensus today is what is stated in the linked wikipedia article.

Simply saying this doesn't make it true. This is not true and that Wikipedia article is outdated.

giantg2 2021-08-17 12:03:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I think even the article makes a mention that there is not scientific consensus on many aspects of Lyme disease. It seems it is one of many topics that have studies that may contradict other studies, or explore additional angles.

DetroitThrow 2021-08-17 16:43:34 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The article seems to indicate that consensus does not support Chronic Lyme Disease, instead preferring Post Treatment Lyme Disease as a pathology (which doesn't seem unlikely if the disease causes nervous system damage). It also mentions reinfection has been recorded. I'm only really seeing one data point being posted to counter that idea, and that doesn't seem to exclude the reinfection scenario.

I guess the hope for promoters of CLD would be that it's possible to treat the currently irreversible PTLD symptoms using antibiotics, rather than accept something akin to a fibromyalgia diagnosis.

giantg2 2021-08-17 18:01:31 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Ah, I didn't see that this was strictly a comment about chronic Lyme. It seems pretty well settled, but that single conflicting case does leave the door open for further study, even if only to determine how a fluke happened.

yodsanklai 2021-08-17 11:56:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Just like saying it's not true doesn't make it untrue. Which is why I'd encourage everybody to do their own research, and at least know that there are a lot of controversies around this topic.

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 12:00:41 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Please do YOUR research and read the paper that went thru peer review and was published.

once YOU read that paper, please post YOUR peer review summary here.

enough with appeals to authority. wikipedia is not even an authoritative source to begin with.

freshpots 2021-08-17 12:44:38 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Are you also a big fan of the scam Dr. Sponaugle and the multitude of forums about chronic Lyme, and consider those charlatans scammers the truth?

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7jk9q/rick-sponaugle-pots-c...

Edit: Is Lyme-literate another term you and your internet friends use?

Look at the case against him: https://mqa-internet.doh.state.fl.us/MQASearchServices/Healt...

Scam Dr's like this are causing the FUD you are spreading.

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 13:11:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Take a look here: https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/628045/fneur-12-6...

These are spirochetes in the brain/spine of a dead patient.

She had proven lyme diagnosis in the past, has been given the standard treatment and had good response(!), only to relapse, never recover and went on to develop neurological issues years later, and died.

The brain was donated and autopsied.

Full study: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2021.6280...

Are you saying the lead scientist on this paper, from the Tulane National Primate Research Center is a scammer? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulane_National_Primate_Resear...)

Seems like a big accusation.

DetroitThrow 2021-08-17 16:53:39 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I had recently read a paper by a professor in Stanford Psychiatry that made very exaggerated claims that would go on to not be replicated to the degree originally made, which I had expected as the treatment used was not a major improvement on the existing methods and that researchers from even prestigious universities might be incentivized to not investigate or report the full truth if they might benefit from it in some way.

While it's interesting that the treatment was "successful" and that symptoms continued, this isn't really a strong statement of support for something like Chronic Lyme Disease or at least its widespread presentation - much more likely a statement of support for Lyme Disease bacteria not always being treated by the regimen, or potentially even that it's easy for someone to get a second infection and have no significant immunity.

coding123 2021-08-17 12:30:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yeah did you read his links?

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2021.6280...

Pretty damning.

garyrob 2021-08-17 14:46:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I know where you're coming from. I believe it is the appropriate attitude in discussing misinformation with, for example, covid.

BUT I really did do my own research with respect to Lyme, reading deeply into the peer-reviewed literature, and I came to the conclusion that the "scientific consensus" was formed by people too lazy or misguided to read it themselves.

For example, the consensus was that Lyme couldn't persist in humans after antibiotic treatment. But it DOES persist in other animals including primates. They could easily discover that because they could euthanize those other animals to see if it was there in their tissues, and it was. They couldn't do that with humans. The conclusion is OBVIOUSLY not that it can't happen in humans, but rather that we haven't proved it could. The "scientific consensus" got those outcomes confused, and assumed it couldn't.

But consider this quote from the OP article: "In May, her research team published their strongest evidence to date of persistent Lyme symptoms. In a unique finding, they discovered Lyme bacteria in the tissues of a deceased 69-year-old woman who contracted the disease, was treated multiple times with antibiotics, and still couldn’t clear the infection from her body.”

I was impressed by related evidence a couple years ago, such as an examination of the brains of people who had died of Alzheimer's. I don't remember the exact number, but something like 25% of those brains contained Lyme spirochetes. Note that there is a theory gaining traction recently that Alzheimer's is caused by the brain's attempts to manage active infections.

There is much, much more to say, and a LOT of research that goes in the opposite direction of what you're assuming in your post.

An anecdote: researchers tested hundreds of FDA-approved drugs in test tubes to see which ones worked best at killing Lyme spirochetes. Disulfiram won. My wife, who had lost her career as a retinal surgeon and researcher due to a chronic illness we thought might be chronic Lyme, took disulfiram under the care of her doctor who had treated Lyme patients for decades, and who was one of the first to try disulfiram in patients.

After the treatment, her illness disappeared. Our older son also had the same illness, which led to him taking a year off from school because he just couldn't function. He had been taking antibiotics for a couple years. At one point we stopped the antibiotics, and he felt great for a week, worse the next week, and in week 3 he was all the way back to being pretty nonfunctional with the symptoms attributed to "chronic Lyme". He, too, took disulfiram and was cured.

Note that we had long spent summers on Little Deer Isle, Maine, known for its deer and deer ticks.

Quinner 2021-08-17 16:54:07 +0000 UTC [ - ]

A decade ago Lyme disease landed me in the hospital with carditis and neurological issues. I still worry that my brain doesn't work as well as it used to, but I don't have symptoms severe enough to make me seek out additional treatment (yet).

It should be noted that while there is some evidence that Disulfiram has effectiveness against Lyme, it's not yet well-studied and the incidence of significant side effects, particularly neurological side effects, during treatment is high enough that I wouldn't risk it. Both the risks and benefits haven't been studied enough to quantify, though I'm glad it worked well for your family.

Source on high incidence of side effects: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7184924/

garyrob 2021-08-17 17:49:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]

"It should be noted that while there is some evidence that Disulfiram has effectiveness against Lyme, it's not yet well-studied and the incidence of significant side effects, particularly neurological side effects, during treatment is high enough that I wouldn't risk it."

Oh man, don't I know it. My post was about the question of whether chronic Lyme actually exists, not whether taking disulfiram is a good idea.

Both my wife and son had a VERY difficult time with the disulfiram treatment. My son, in particular, ended up in the ER one night, basically having a psychotic break. That was the day he stopped taking the disulfiram.

BUT it happens that he was almost at the end of the recommended treatment duration anyway, and EVERY indication is that both he and my wife were completely cured by it. This was probably about 2 years ago, and so it's very encouraging that there is no evidence of any recurrence.

As I mentioned, my wife and son were early in the treatment experiments, and they had high doses. The doctor who treated them has now treated a good number of people and has much more experience with different doses. With a lower dose for the same amount of time, cures are less reliable. But there are experiments with low doses for longer times.

I worry that you may have Lyme spirochetes in your brain that may predispose you to Alzheimer's. So it might not be a bad idea to look into more treatment even if you can deal with your current state.

If you do, I'd recommend talking to my wife and son's doctor, https://lymediseaseassociation.org/blogs/lda-guest-blogs/ken...

DetroitThrow 2021-08-17 16:56:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]

>Note that there is a theory gaining traction recently that Alzheimer's is caused by the brain's attempts to manage active infections.

I think it's always been noted that Alzheimer's risk can increase significantly after certain infections. I don't think this really takes out the genetic component and other environmental components to be contributors, though, and I've not heard much on the front of it being the primary contributor of Alzheimer's risk.

jacksonkmarley 2021-08-17 11:50:38 +0000 UTC [ - ]

From that study:

> These results however do not clarify whether the Borrelia infection had anything to do with her progressive neurodegenerative disorder

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 12:05:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Impossible to do this reliably on a single patient with multiple conditions and advanced age. One could take a guess, but the error bar would be 0.0-1.0

This study set out to prove chronic persistence of the pathogen despite standard treatments, which is rather hard to dispute.

jacksonkmarley 2021-08-17 12:27:07 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Being able to detect Borrelia Spirochetes is not equivalent to linking them with chronic symptoms.

nicoburns 2021-08-17 12:44:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I think the key thing is that it disproves the idea that the bacteria which cause the disease are reliably eliminated by antibiotics, which is typically a key point that those in the "it's not cause by lyme" camp rely on.

Doesn't prove that it is lyme, but it shifts the balance of probablities considerably.

jacksonkmarley 2021-08-17 13:30:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I don't have an opinion on what the "it's not caused by lyme" camp rely on, but the wikipedia page complained about above actually already references another study that found spirochetes in animals after antibiotic treatment.

No doubt the language in that wikipedia page is pretty triggering if you already believe chronic lyme disease is a thing though.

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 13:44:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The human study was literally done because denial of chronic lyme persisted despite multiple reliable studies in animal models.

It's quite disgusting and begets further questions as to why such attitudes towards Lyme exist in the first place.

darkerside 2021-08-17 12:46:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Most CDC / IDSA folks will tell you that a course of antibiotics will rid the body of Lyme in all cases. The presence of spirochetes here should be enough for them to stop using that language. But it likely won't because there appears to be a systemic organizational bias against Lyme as a chronic condition, and I'm not sure why.

megous 2021-08-17 13:59:19 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Presence 4 years or so later. So, maybe the patient was infected again some time after initial treatment?

darkerside 2021-08-17 14:06:31 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Occam's Razor applies.

You're not wrong, but they continue to lean on the "evidence doesn't support" angle. At some point that looks like bias.

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 14:16:15 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The study is a follow-up study on primates that confirmed the exact same thing, only to be dismissed "because not in humans duuuuh"

Now we have human brain autopsies. Plenty of denial right in this thread.

And then people wonder why people don't trust physicians and do not vaccinate.

rdedev 2021-08-17 14:04:56 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Kind of reminds me of Alzheimer's disease and the pervasive insistence that it's cause by misfokded protiens even though so many treatments following that assumption failed to cure it. Sometimes an idea is just hard to introduce or root out in academia

2021-08-17 13:48:46 +0000 UTC [ - ]

computer23 2021-08-17 20:05:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Inter_netuser: That Frontiers paper is about as reliable as Big Foot hunters claiming they finally found him. The authors Brian Fallon and Monica Embers have been trying to prove chronic Lyme beliefs for many years.

They are funded by their antiscience movement: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4489928/

The Frontiers paper is a single case report that admits that the woman's Lyme ELISA (and hence total antibodies to Lyme) was negative when she started experiencing dementia. Without antibodies against Lyme, it would be a mistake to claim that she had "chronic Lyme" (which isn't real regardless.) The paper is consistent with someone who had lyme disease (a not-uncommon illness) and then years later was diagnosed with dementia, but you can't say Lyme caused the dementia.

There is a scientific consensus against chronic Lyme based on decades of research.

It's disturbing that chronic Lyme has become a dangerous social phenomenon based on conspiracy theories, fake diagnoses, and fake treatments.

https://www.thecut.com/2019/07/what-happens-when-lyme-diseas...

inter_netuser 2021-08-18 07:34:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The study contains rather painfully obvious images of the pathogen under the microscope in the brain/spine.

Seems your assertion here is that a professor of immunology at Tulane has committed fraud.

That is a very serious accusation and the onus is on you to prove that. Do you have any evidence? Can you point me to any histology experts that have disputed these findings?

1. Was the slide image in the study real? 2. Was pathogen visible in the slice? 3. Why is there a pathogen in the brain several decades later?

kortex 2021-08-17 12:50:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The recalcitrance of the broader medical research community to acknowledge that spirochetes can persist after antibiotics and continue to wreak havoc, is truly astounding. You'd think after all the "whoops, my bad" moments in history - handwashing, thalidomide, GRID/AIDS, to name a few, they would learn to be a bit more conservative in their stance, e.g. "we have not found direct evidence of chronic Lyme, but it has a plausible mechanism and widespread reports."

I've already seen the needle shift from "Lyme is impossible after antibiotics" to "well I guess some cases escape first round of treatment."

skocznymroczny 2021-08-17 10:20:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I think a good test for Lyme disease would be more important than a vaccine (which is welcome too if it works well). The problem with Lyme disease is that it's symptoms are very wide and generic, and the commonly used tests are not very reliable. This means that many people live with the disease not aware of it, while others self-diagnose Lyme disease and cure it even if they didn't have it (because they had symptoms like longterm brain fog).

elric 2021-08-17 10:31:10 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted. Testing for lyme really is pretty unreliable. Given how hard it is to reliably test for, we really don't have a good grasp on how prevalent lyme infections are.

Another thing that would great, in addition to a vaccine and better testing, is prevention. Infected ticks are way more wide spread than they used to be. I've heard various reasons for this, including habitat loss of all kinds of animals. Simple measures can help, like eating more deer, or letting chickens roam free in high-tick areas.

bregma 2021-08-17 10:46:39 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I don't understand why there would be a problem testing for borreliosis. It's caused by the borrelia spirochete, which is almost identical to syphilis. The variant of borrelia that causes relapsing fever was one of the very first causative micro-organisms diagnosed because it it so obvious under a low-power microscope. Surely the variant of borrelia named after a town in New England should be as easy to diagnose: if you have the spirochete you have the infection, otherwise you don't.

Granted I'm just a rando on the internet and not an expert in infections diseases. On the other hand, I've diagnosed with and successfully treated for Lyme disease. I still get dozens of tick bites a year. A reliable test would be a boon for people like me.

cmrdporcupine 2021-08-17 12:30:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

We keep chickens and I can tell you a domestic chicken roaming free in a high tick area would be gone in a few days. Hawks, foxes, raccoons, coyotes, whatever. They're domesticated and flightless.

What you want is guinea hens. They're voracious tick eaters. And will hide in trees, etc. at night. But also noisy as hell, and will walk all over roads.

Wild turkeys eat a lot of ticks, so we should be encouraging them.

Northern bobwhite quail are a native (to north america) quail which eat a lock of ticks. But they're near-threatened and very few of them in the wild and they also don't go as far north as New England (we have them here in Ontario but sparsely)

robbiep 2021-08-17 10:36:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It might be downvotes because the op didn’t read the article, which isn’t about a vaccine (the article says there was one but it was discontinued) but about the Lyme equivalent of PREP

istjohn 2021-08-17 14:48:55 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The problem is that the treatments we currently have for Lyme disease only provide temporary relief for a sizeable minority of sufferers.

vimy 2021-08-17 10:37:04 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Correct. The ELISA test is as reliable as a coin toss. It was also never meant to be used for diagnosis, only for research.

vinni2 2021-08-17 11:03:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Too late for me I found a tick on my shoulder and I tested positive for the Lyme disease. It was treated with antibiotics but my understanding is it can come back.

willvarfar 2021-08-17 09:59:07 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Have my TBE jabs.

But just last week I had another course of penicillin to treat Lyme disease.

Where i live, ticks are prevalent and this year seems to be particularly bad for just Lyme disease. I know four others who also have it, which seems higher than normal.

A vaccine would be most welcome.

2021-08-17 10:00:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]

nickthemagicman 2021-08-17 10:02:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I think they HAVE lime disease.

stewx 2021-08-17 12:44:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Related: "The incredibly frustrating reason there’s no Lyme disease vaccine"

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/7/17314716/lym...

cushychicken 2021-08-17 14:19:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There was a shot to prevent Lyme disease developed in the late 90s, but antivax threw a fit about it, and it was discontinued.

https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/prev/vaccine.html

istjohn 2021-08-17 14:34:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]

As the article describes, the story is more complicated than that:

> Despite its shortcomings, Lymerix was initially popular. By July 2000, more than one million doses had been distributed. But safety concerns eventually sank the vaccine. While the FDA panel that approved Lymerix did so unanimously, several members wondered whether the vaccine might cause an autoimmune reaction leading to arthritis. A section of OspA resembles a human protein that modulates the immune response, and the concern of some on the FDA panel was that, after vaccination, the immune system would overcorrect and fight off not only the OspA protein that covered the bacteria, but also that human protein. Nothing like this occurred in Lymerix’s clinical trials.

> Shortly after Lymerix hit the market, those worries emerged nonetheless. Some recipients reported joint pain and arthritis, symptoms they blamed on the vaccine itself. The FDA found only 59 such adverse events out of 1.4 million doses administered, and did not find direct scientific evidence that the Lyme vaccine had caused them. Still, the questions over possible unintended effects were enough to dampen enthusiasm, especially after 121 Lymerix recipients filed a class-action lawsuit against the vaccine’s manufacturer. SmithKline Beecham, projecting sales of only 10,000 doses in 2002, decided to withdraw Lymerix from the market in February of that year. (The lawsuit was settled one year later, with more than $1 million paid out by the pharmaceutical company to cover the prosecuting lawyers’ fees, but no financial compensation was awarded to the plaintiffs.)

The new treatment in development avoids the problem by directly injecting antibodies instead of stimulating the immune system to create the antibodies as Lymerix did.

mimined 2021-08-17 12:33:30 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I'm a bit confused here... I thought a vaccine that protected you from Lyme disease already existed? I grew up in Latvia, and it was pretty common to get that jab. You have to get boosters every 5 years or so (which I haven't really done since I moved away) but they're supposed to protect you from the encephalitis ticks? Sorry if the terminology is wrong here.

I was surprised to know that they didn't bother with that in the UK. Then I got even more surprised when I learned that there's actually a lot of ticks in Scotland. I don't understand why this isn't spoken about more. Back at school they taught you at primary school what to do if ou het bitten, how to take it out, where to bring it for tests etc.

vient 2021-08-17 12:37:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Tick-borne encephalitis and Lyme disease are different things. You are right that there is a vaccine against the first one, while Lyme vaccine has an interesting history[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Vaccination

bkanber 2021-08-17 14:27:00 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There used to be a human vaccine for Lyme, but it was pulled from market about 20 years ago. Interestingly, this Lyme vaccine was one of the first victims of the modern anti-vax movement.

resalisbury 2021-08-17 21:36:56 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The new treatment entered Phase 1 trials in January 2020 with 60 participants and the earliest it would be in market is 2024.

You have to scroll through 20+ paragraphs before you get to the lede...

"Enter Mark Klempner. A physician and infectious-disease scientist at the University of Massachusetts, he’s embarked on an experiment that could upend the field of Lyme treatment. Klempner is the lead creator of a first-of-its-kind antibody shot for preventing Lyme infection."

And the most relevant update comes after around 50 paragraphs in the 3rd from last.

"In February, Klempner's phase-one trial kicked off with 60 participants. The goal of the trial is to determine the right dosage so that a person is protected for six to eight months. Lyme PREP will have to be administered annually, but it's a small price to pay in the minds of infectious- disease experts. If my forehead looks flat, it's because I have been banging my head on the wall for 35 years," says Telford. “We need as many tools as possible to prevent Lyme disease."

In just a few years, Lyme PREP could be available for commercial use. Klempner is eyeballing 2024, and maybe even sooner, depending on how the drug performs in clinical trials."

est31 2021-08-17 10:35:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]

In addition to the Pfizer/Valneva vaccine mentioned in the article, there is also one from Sanofi in development: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41541-020-0183-8

https://www.bc.cas.cz/en/news/news-detail/5483-a-new-lyme-va...

Grazester 2021-08-17 13:19:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Wasn't there already a shot being made a long time ago but was shut down due to a whole lot of hot air from critics and anti-vaxxers?

https://time.com/6073576/lyme-disease-vaccine/

istjohn 2021-08-17 14:44:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I think you're shortselling the critics. See the quote from the article in my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28210290

bkanber 2021-08-17 14:28:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yes. In my eyes, the original Lyme vaccine was the first casualty of the modern anti-vax movement.

They claimed that the vaccine gave them Lyme when really the vaccine gave them an immune response for a few days... as vaccines should. Through a huge amount of media attention they scared away the pharma company, they stopped marketing, sales tanked, the vax was pulled. No medical issues with the vaccine were ever discovered.

Inhibit 2021-08-17 14:11:41 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The article covers that but very pointedly doesn't bring up the angle. Just a note that suddenly there were dramatically lower projected sales the next year.

If you read closely they attribute this to medical objections without mentioning the reason you're stating. Your statement better aligns with my memory of the period.

d4rkp4ttern 2021-08-18 12:11:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Another “tick noob” question. When going hiking in woods I avoid trails where I may “brush” against bushes or twigs or branches etc. In other words prefer wide trails. Would that be an effective way to avoid ticks? Or is there a chance ticks “fly” in the air or are passively transported in the air via wind etc? (I did say I’m a tick noob ;)

abruzzi 2021-08-17 14:24:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]

This is fascuinating. Fortunately I live in a state with very low numbers, both absolute and per-100k, but I was curious about how infections had spread across the country, so I found this data at the CDC:

https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/stats/tables.html

The really strange thing is Massachusetts. In 2010 they had 36.3 confirmed cases per 100k residents--one of the higher rates in the country at that time, but in 2019 they had .1 confirmed cases per 100k, while neighboring states remained high. I have to assume this isn't real or is some kind of artifact (not confirming, just treating?), but I wonder if anyone has any insight into this?

justinpombrio 2021-08-17 14:28:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Well spotted. It's a reporting artifact: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpyQMEthstNKhKNJQ/massachuse...

abruzzi 2021-08-17 14:38:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]

thanks for that link. Thats what I expected.

brightball 2021-08-17 13:40:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I used to work with a man who's wife suffers from Lyme disease. It's awful to the point of being essentially life destroying. She's in terrible pain every day unless she is using strong pain killers, which make her live in a cloud essentially instead.

mrfusion 2021-08-17 12:20:19 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I’ve found the biggest places to watch out for ticks are where not many people go. Little travelled trails. The heavily trafficked areas seem to have way less ticks.

My working theory is the deer to human ratio of an area determines how many deer ticks.

kortex 2021-08-17 13:33:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]

My partner got a bullseye-inducing tick byte in our front yard in suburban upstate NY. Hardly little-traveled.

The absolute quantity of deer is more important than the deer/human ratio. Lawns make it super easy for deer to migrate, human presence suppresses wolves and other predators, and mice love our trash, houses, bird feeders, and pet food.

mrfusion 2021-08-17 13:40:14 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I’d wonder though if deer use your front yard more than you? Especially in the pre dawn hours.

Even if you garden you’re probably only out there a couple times a week?

But you could be right that quantity of deer is more important.

BTW have you considered guniea fowl? Or at least something like this might help. https://www.consumerreports.org/pest-control/bait-boxes-are-...

kortex 2021-08-17 13:49:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I am pretty they do, while I haven't seen them in my yard, they love my neighbor's ~1acre lawn abutting woods across the street. I see them hanging out there all hours of the day.

I actually just learned about guinea fowl elsewhere in this thread! Definitely will be looking into it.

I also started doing the permethrin soaked cotton balls in tubes. Mice collect the cotton for their nest and it kills ticks. Also our dog gets tick-killing meds and takes out a non-trivial amount just by collecting and killing them.

bstpierre 2021-08-17 20:38:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Based on our experience, with anywhere from 2 to about 15 in a flock, guineas aren't super effective at reducing ticks. They're also very noisy, leave big turds all over the place, and at least in our rural New England area, serve to attract predators.

Our spring "dog tick season" has become intense the last couple of years. At the height of the season this spring the daily tick count from grooming the dog was anywhere from 10 (a light day) to a high of 27 ticks acquired after an hour-long hike. When it's this bad, I can pick up four just walking across the front lawn. During that season they're mostly not deer ticks, so fortunately they're bigger and much easier to find, and at least according to most literature I've seen, dog ticks do not transmit Lyme.

mrfusion 2021-08-17 14:10:59 +0000 UTC [ - ]

They could probably crawl over from your neighbors yard. Not sure how far they travel. Or hitch a ride on mice?

Wow if tick killing meds exist for dogs maybe we could get deer on those. Problem solved?

at_a_remove 2021-08-17 15:35:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I know when I bring my deer into the vet for their annual checkup, they'll probably offer the shot pretty soon.

mrfusion 2021-08-17 16:18:11 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You could mix it into food or salt licks or even hire people to hit them with medicine darts.

I thought I’ve heard of that for deer birth control before?

at_a_remove 2021-08-17 17:16:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Edible vaccines are not easy. There's a reason you are still getting injections.

Shooting them with darts, well, those would be a hell of a lot more expensive than bullets. It seems ... fraught with a lot of potential for unexpected effects.

patall 2021-08-17 15:53:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

My grandma just got Lyme with pretty high certainty in her own garden. In suburbia in a million people city. With a deer:people ratio of about 0.00.

From my understanding, ticks can be in any type of grass. If you somehow touch grass of any type, be it walking, sitting or hand-mowing, there is a chance of picking one up. Sure, there are few ticks in very populated areas, but I would rather guess that more people equates to more likelyness that someone else already picked up the ticks in that area. And obviously: there is less grass were many people go.

mrfusion 2021-08-17 16:17:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Interesting. Maybe my formula only works for rural and suburbs. Maybe get enough people and they become the vector for the ticks.

davnn 2021-08-17 14:35:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Ticks are incredibly common where I live (Austria) and so is hiking. In our local "shark tank" show someone pitched a freezing/electroporation tool (modified lighter) to remove ticks; I guess [1] is the final product, which sounds pretty interesting IMHO.

[1] https://help-pen.com

quotz 2021-08-17 15:06:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Took around 5 unlatched ones off me this summer, about 5 more latched and unlatched from my dog and a few off my gf. We live close to a national park. Apparently the dog lyme vaccine is the same as the one that was approved for humans in the 90s. I wanted to buy it and shot myself with it. Theres some folks who say its fine.

alfon 2021-08-17 16:59:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Any reason why this injection of OspA Monoclonal Antibodies wouldn't help in late disseminated Lyme disease?.

My understanding is that very tough cases of neurological Lyme disease often benefit greatly from IVIG. Wouldn't this be a more targeted version of IVIG?

darkerside 2021-08-17 12:52:00 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I'd rather see treatment than a vaccine. I do believe most cases of Lyme are trivial, but some can linger and cause horrible issues. Disulfiram sounds very promising.

d4rkp4ttern 2021-08-17 13:05:42 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Are tick repellents any good? Any recommendations?

wepple 2021-08-17 13:18:09 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Permethrin on your clothes (not on your skin), and deet.

But you’ll still get them if you’re outside, and should do daily tick checks anyway.

Workaccount2 2021-08-17 15:37:43 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Note that permethrin is very toxic to cats. You may want to be careful if you have them around.

d4rkp4ttern 2021-08-18 12:08:29 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Thank you both for the tips.

nikkinana 2021-08-17 12:18:56 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There's also a treatment that's extremely effective.

hannob 2021-08-17 09:40:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The article touches this briefly: I think it's horrible that the antivax movement successfully managed to push a working lyme vaccine off the market, based on concerns that turned out to be false.

Every time you get a tick you should remember that you could be safe from lyme, but the antivax movement took that away from us.

istjohn 2021-08-17 15:06:42 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You're oversimplifying the issue which is described in some detail in the article. Yes, the antivax movement is killing thousands of people with their opposition to COVID vaccines, but that doesn't mean every vaccine ever studied was good, or that the FDA is infallible.

I'm not saying it was good that Lymerix was pulled from the market. I think it's unclear. I just think we shouldn't let (justified) passion on one controversy cloud our understanding of another controversy.

_greim_ 2021-08-17 15:53:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yeah, one of the terrible things about the anti-vax movement is that it makes it hard to distinguish signal from noise when looking at objections or criticisms of any vaccine.

erichocean 2021-08-17 09:41:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

That's…not how the FDA, or science, or medicine works. Antivaxers have no power whatsoever.

pulse7 2021-08-17 09:46:41 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Spreading false information on Facebook and capturing many followers is called "power of influence"...

hannob 2021-08-17 09:45:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

From what I understand the vaccine wasn't taken off the market by the FDA or science. It was taken off the market by the company producing it, due to pressure from lawsuits and bullshit concerns about risks.

wiz21c 2021-08-17 09:57:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I'm not antivax but if the company is sure its vaccine is safe, why should they fear lawsuits ?

johnny53169 2021-08-17 10:00:30 +0000 UTC [ - ]

They can be sure the vaccine is safe without being sure they would win in court.

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 11:11:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]

so they would lose a legal challenge to the product's safety....but it's safe? How does that follow?

Liability is just a cost of doing business.

You ever had D&O insurance? Right now in blockchain businesses some get quoted 10+% for coverage, i.e. 100k+ for 1 mil in coverage. Many simply forego the insurance because it's too expensive, and assume the risk.

The product in question had too little upside to offset the liability, that's all.

torgoguys 2021-08-17 11:43:34 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> so they would lose a legal challenge to the product's safety....but it's safe? How does that follow?

You convince a jury that it is unsafe. Happens all the time. There are many reasons this is easier than it should be.

> The product in question had too little upside to offset the liability, that's all.

The vaccine had a ton of upside...for those receiving it. Like most vaccines, it's not a hugely profitable endeavor for the company producing it, so it wasn't worth all of the baloney being thrown around in court.

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 11:46:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]

How much would you pay out of pocket to get the vaccine?

People do group buys for all sorts of nutraceticals, small molecules, and even some biologics.

torgoguys 2021-08-17 12:33:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]

For me, at least $100, probably quite a bit more if I thought about it. However, I don't know that you could legally manufacture and sell/group buy such things. Nutraceuticals gets exceptions under the current, disastrous law but this wouldn't qualify.

inter_netuser 2021-08-18 19:51:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]

If enough people pool in, you could underwrite your own clinical trial.

Why not? People have pooled-in to try drugs that are in development and not generally available yet. I can recall numerous instances: pitolisant, rintalimod, hyper immune IG, etc

Some went well, some were disasters, it’s the same as any other clinical trial.

_greim_ 2021-08-17 15:59:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]

If they completed the trials then they'd have some protection against major lawsuits. But no amount of legal protection would prevent low sales due to widespread public mistrust. Especially at a time when Lyme wasn't as rampant and terror-inducing as it is now.

nickthemagicman 2021-08-17 10:04:22 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Because the American Legal system is very imperfect.

mschuster91 2021-08-17 10:13:25 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Because in the US legal system that uses laypeople as judges ("juries"), lawsuits tend to be won by those who put on the best play for the juries, not by those who have the better arguments on their side like in Continental Europe. And to make matters worse, sometimes juries go for obscenely excessive damages against companies to "make a point" - just look at the McDonald's coffee case.

spicymaki 2021-08-17 10:32:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The McDonald’s coffee lawsuit was not frivolous[1][2]. The company served coffee at extremely dangerous temperatures. The claimant had severe third degree burns and only wanted McDonald’s to pay for her medical expenses. McDonald’s had a least 700 complaints about the problem before the lawsuit and did nothing until after the lawsuit. Please stop repeating corporate propaganda.

[1] https://youtu.be/s_jaU5V9FUg

[2] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13971482/...

nate_meurer 2021-08-17 18:24:09 +0000 UTC [ - ]

No, what happened to Stella Liebeck was terrible, and it's right that she had the public's sympathy, however her coffee was not excessively hot by modern standards.

Stella's coffee was served within the temperature range that was, and still is, recommended by professional coffee associations like SCAA and NCA [1]. The NCA recommends that coffee be held and served at around 180-185 deg F (~80-85 deg C), which is likely near the temperature at which Stella was burned. This is a perfectly reasonable service temperature, widely used by coffee shops, restaurants, and home brewing machines to this day.

Stella Liebeck took her cup of coffee and squeezed it between her legs in order to fiddle with the lid. The result was tragic, but completely expected. If I spill a fresh cup of Starbucks coffee on my crotch today, I fully expect to sustain third-degree burns. So I take a little extra care with it until it has cooled to drinking temperature, which happens pretty quickly.

Tea is generally even hotter. Any good tea shop will serve a pot of freshly boiled water, at least twenty degrees hotter than hot coffee. Spilling that on yourself is guaranteed to melt your skin. Great care is warranted.

Again, what happened to Stella was terrible. She didn't deserve it, and she didn't deserve the hate she got afterward. But she did something really stupid. I sympathize, because I do stupid stuff all the time, and I have the scars to remind me.

We're surrounded by extremely dangerous things that require great care to use properly. It's useful for coffee to be held and served hot, just as it's useful for knives to be sharp and cars to be able to reach highway speeds. There will inevitably be accidents, but making the world completely safe for people who use these things carelessly would mean depriving everyone of their proper use.

1 - https://www.ncausa.org/About-Coffee/How-to-Brew-Coffee

torgoguys 2021-08-17 11:50:56 +0000 UTC [ - ]

>The company served coffee at extremely dangerous temperatures.

Yes, it was frivolous to many peoples eyes, including mine. McDonald's still serves their coffee at the same temperatures today. They just changed the cups and added warnings at least according to the Wikipedia article on the case.

bkallus 2021-08-17 10:33:10 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The McDonald's coffee case is often cited this way, but I think a spilled a coffee that causes third-degree burns and necessitates skin grafts is probably too hot.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restau...

torgoguys 2021-08-17 11:52:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The article you linked to notes they still serve the coffee at the same temperturea today, just changing the cups and adding warnings. Probably not too hot or they would have changed it after the lawsuit.

bkallus 2021-08-17 18:02:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]

This is a good point (and so are the other responses here)

bluGill 2021-08-17 12:46:59 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Coffee drinkers like their coffee hot. They tell me the taste is much better when it is brewed hot. I know I was working at McDonalds at the time of the suit, and a few weeks later we adjusted our temperatures to the minimum of the acceptable range from the max, and immediately got complaints. (the complaints didn't start until after the adjustment)

nicoburns 2021-08-17 12:53:43 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Would you not expect to get coffee made with boiling water? This is what you would get if you made it at home. It can't havr been much hotter than that or it would have evaporated.

tamrix 2021-08-17 10:00:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Antivax are people who don't want to take the vaccine. They're not against other people taking vaccines or the development of vaccines. You're likely misinformed.

hannob 2021-08-17 10:53:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]

So you're saying the people who were shouting at people standing in line to get a vaccine against covid (which happened plenty of times in Germany and I'm sure in other places, too) are not antivaxxers?

fckthisguy 2021-08-17 10:28:25 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Antivax isn't a single organized group, so being antivax can manifest in many ways. I know antivaxers who harass people who got vaccinated for Covid and protest.

markus92 2021-08-17 10:05:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Tell that to the antivaxers that attack vaccination sites and spread the propaganda.

imwillofficial 2021-08-17 10:29:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You say the word “propaganda” pretty loosely.

I bet you also said “3 weeks to flatten the curve!”

bluGill 2021-08-17 12:49:51 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> I bet you also said “3 weeks to flatten the curve!”

No, if you check my comment history you will see that I said something along the lines of don't flatten the curve, kill it with longer, harsher lockdowns. Just search for my top downvoted posts. I still maintain that stance, two months of harsh worldwide lockdowns would have killed the spread completely and we would have been completely opened by the middle of last summer. Australia almost managed it alone, and a bit more of the world joining them could have.

imwillofficial 2021-08-17 17:28:39 +0000 UTC [ - ]

China did exactly this. It worked decently for them.

bluGill 2021-08-17 19:40:03 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The more of the world that does it, the better it works for everyone.

imwillofficial 2021-08-18 00:44:58 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The data is not clear on this. Places that did no lockdown like Sweden have been pretty well off, other places that did heavy lock downs like NYC have not fared as well.

bluGill 2021-08-18 12:49:43 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Sweeden has much worse results than that peers. NYC didn't do lockdowns well - the state sending infected people to nursing homes is the opposite of lockdowns.

eganist 2021-08-17 10:50:38 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> I bet you also said “3 weeks to flatten the curve!”

The vaccines were working perfectly in that regard until we hit a wall of people unwilling to take them, which brought us in the US to where we are today when antivax lag hampered us from outrunning the delta variant.

Iceland[1], with >70% vaccination rates, is seeing much different outcomes even in spite of record infections.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/iceland-covid-su...

imwillofficial 2021-08-17 17:27:37 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> The vaccines were working perfectly in that regard until we hit a wall of people unwilling to take them,

This is misinformation. Israel has the highest vaccination rate in the world. 50% of their new cases are “breakthrough cases”

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 11:38:11 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Iceland is reintroducing restrictions, possibly for years. Gibraltar at 99% vaccination rate is having an outbreak.

If 99% vaccination rate will not achieve herd immunity, what will?

imwillofficial 2021-08-17 17:28:05 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Stop with all your facts and numbers, people have a religion to follow.

jeromegv 2021-08-17 10:53:07 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Lots of antivax activists have been attacking vaccination sites all over North America and Europe

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 09:58:37 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You don't think vendors that sell products that can leave you maimed for the rest of your life, damage or eliminate entirely your earning potential, destroy your marital relations, and destroy future of your children should not be liable for injuries caused by their product?

Really? You are against holding people liable for faulty products?

GuB-42 2021-08-17 10:22:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There wouldn't be a single car being sold if it was the case.

The vaccine was approved by the FDA, they did their part making sure it was safe. 100% certainty is impossible, and people should not be held liable to that.

Here, they pulled off their product off not because it was shown to be unsafe but because it was unprofitable. Due to the controversy, it was a tough sell, and lawsuits are costly no matter if you are right or wrong.

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 10:43:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

This one is a real weird forum.

Class action against car manufacturer, Toyota, because of 200-400 injuries from airbags? GOOD

Class action against any medical product? BAD until proven otherwise.

It’s like tainted blood transfusions, vioxx, fen-phen, thalidomide just never happened.

I’m guessing the demographics is on the younger and still thinks they are made from steel.

matkoniecz 2021-08-17 11:44:09 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> Class action against any medical product? BAD until proven otherwise.

You are arguing with strawman, noone said this.

hannob 2021-08-17 10:54:46 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I haven't said anything like that at all.

computer23 2021-08-17 17:25:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The Lyme vaccine is still FDA approved. The company selling the vaccine took it off the market for business reasons.

nickthemagicman 2021-08-17 10:01:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It was a large law firm looking to make a buck who blew it out of proportion ...not anivaxxers.

Here's another good article from a more legitimate source.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/

acdha 2021-08-17 12:19:34 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It’s not OR but AND: as described in that article, the law firms didn’t come up with the lawsuit out of the blue but saw the hundreds of people who set up “victims” groups alleging all sorts of injuries caused by the vaccine.

It seems noteworthy that this was relatively early in the Internet reshaping society: these groups had websites but not massive companies like Facebook promoting them. This ability for people to self-organize and diagnose at a large scale is still having interesting ripple effects, both helping people with unusual conditions which are commonly misdiagnosed and helping build lawsuits or political movements from people who really aren’t interested in accepting the science.

xyzzy21 2021-08-17 12:02:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Honestly, I live in the the WORST NY county for Lyme but it really isn't that big a deal. The country across in Vermont is Vermont's top Lyme county. And I live in the woods.

Basically it's easily treated once you are fairly sure you have it with VERY MILD antibiotics that aren't super at risk for resistance. Getting Lyme is a pretty normal and common thing. Akin to catching a cold - it's simply inevitable but you will be treatable.

You also need to check for ticks and putting on DEET is always an option. Thinking about what you wear is also SOP but no big deal (per spicybright's comment).

But honestly WE don't worry about it that much despite being completely endemic.

acdha 2021-08-17 12:26:54 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I believe you intended this to be reassuring but consider how it reads to the many people who’ve had significant, long-term effects from the disease. Maybe tone it down a bit on the “no big deal” front and focus on the key part: “if promptly diagnosed” with the advice about prevention and detection that implies.

nicoburns 2021-08-17 13:17:10 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I think it's just a difference in perspective from someone living where it's endemic and pretty much impossible to outright prevent. You get used to it. You hear similar perspectives on malaria from people living in countriew where that is rife. And indeed on other dangers. For example, australians don't tend to see poisonous snakes or spiders as a big deal.

acdha 2021-08-17 15:44:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Oh, definitely — my point was simply that it's good to think about how that would sound to someone who _isn't_ used to that risk. Saying “no big deal” runs the risk of sounding like ”I don't know what I'm talking about” or even “I'm downplaying this for some reason”. I don't think the person I replied to was in either category but I do think with medical concerns it's important to acknowledge that someone's concerns are reasonable before introducing some things which might make the risk more palatable (e.g. doctors now are far more likely to quickly recognize it and treat it aggressively since there's been a lot of awareness that this is becoming endemic in many areas where it didn't used to be common).

istjohn 2021-08-17 15:09:46 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There are people in this thread who have had people close to them die from Lyme disease complications, and the article describes the experience of an avid runner who has been sidelined by the disease.

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 10:00:22 +0000 UTC [ - ]

This one is a real weird forum. Class action against car manufacturer, Toyota, because of 200-400 injuries from airbags? GOOD!

Class action against any medical product? VERY BAD!

It’s like tainted blood transfusions, glyphosate, vioxx, fen-phen, thalidomide just never happened.

I’m guessing the demographics is on the younger and still thinks they are made from steel.

CorrectHorseBat 2021-08-17 10:07:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

They administered over 1 million doses in about a year. 10,000 doses was the sales projection after a misinformation campaign.

mschuster91 2021-08-17 10:08:50 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There were 1.4M doses administered:

> The FDA found only 59 such adverse events out of 1.4 million doses administered, and did not find direct scientific evidence that the Lyme vaccine had caused them. Still, the questions over possible unintended effects were enough to dampen enthusiasm, especially after 121 Lymerix recipients filed a class-action lawsuit against the vaccine’s manufacturer.

Reminds me of the entire clusterfuck around the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, with the difference that politicians this time at least pushed for getting vaccinated simply to stop the pandemic.

rvz 2021-08-17 11:25:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> Reminds me of the entire clusterfuck around the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, with the difference that politicians this time at least pushed for getting vaccinated simply to stop the pandemic.

The media in the UK (Especially the BBC) tried to gaslight the British public with the AZ vaccine and using the 'tHErE iS moStLy nO eVIdEncE' trick repeatedly whilst the reports and concerns of blood clots forming in young people kept increasing.

It was enough from them to not recommend the AstraZeneca vaccine to them and instead give them Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

resoluteteeth 2021-08-17 11:36:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Imagine if it was impossible for anyone to buy a car ever because when cars first went on the market 59 out of 1.4 million people who bought them got joint pain that may not have even been connected with the cars.

drstewart 2021-08-17 15:13:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Let's see how self-driving regulation go first before you say that.

inter_netuser 2021-08-17 11:40:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]

so the product was so unprofitable it couldn't cover liability insurance with only 59 claims out of 1 millionn units sold?

seems it was just not viable commercially.

resoluteteeth 2021-08-17 11:48:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]

If we've created a system where vaccines aren't commercially viable, that seems like a problem in itself.

matkoniecz 2021-08-17 11:44:31 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You are arguing with strawman, noone said this.