Lyme Disease
Lyme Disease the Great Pretender.
Recent press stories have highlighted complete families suffering from Lyme Disease. The disease has been known about for a long while and is caused by a bacteria passed to humans through tick bites. Walking in woods and pastures especially where sheep or deer graze is a good place to get bitten by ticks – don’t I know it. I’ve spent ages taking ticks off our dogs! However, if whole families have the disease, have they all been bitten by infected ticks? Or is there human to human transmission?
The disease is caused by a bacteria of the Borrelia type, which is a spirochaete, the well known, family-friendly bugs that cause, amongst other things Yaws and Syphilis.
Lyme disease manifests itself in extraordinary ways in the human population. Hence it is described as the Great Pretender in the film below. Symptoms may be neurological or physiological.
Dr Elizabeth Large, treating patients in the USA, describes the following symptoms in infected children: optical convergence insufficiency, fatigue, stomach aches, headaches, learning disabilities, ADD, anxiety, and exercise intolerance.
In adults, another doctor Dr Klinghardt, also in the USA, claims that he has never had a single patient who suffers from Alzheimers, Motor Neurone Disease (MND or ALS), Parkinson’s or MS who tested negative for Borrelia.
Is that scary or what? A disease that is common in the countryside in Europe and the USA, easily caught, with many or almost no symptoms, which may come on quickly or over a long time period and which look like any one or more of dozens of other conditions. On top of that a reliable, cheap, routine test for the disease does not currently exist.
On the bright side, it appears that the disease can be treated quite easily if it is caught early on. Next steps:
- Education for our GPs
- Develop a decent, cheap test for Lyme Disiease
- Further research into the disease, its life cycle and modes of transmission
Could ticks, Lyme disease and Borrelia really be the clue to finding the causes and maybe a cure for all those desperate neurological diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s?
