Lyme Disease: Observational Study

Lyme disease has emerged as the most common vector borne infectious disease in the United States and has presented a growing challenge to public health officials over the past three decades. The infection represents a significant disease burden to the population of the United States with nearly 30,000 new cases diagnosed per year and an estimated additional 270,000 annual incident cases that go unreported. The disease results from a bacterial infection with the spirochete bacteria B. burgdorferi. This bacterial agent is transmitted to humans from the bite of a tick and is most commonly associated Ixodes species blacklegged ticks. These ticks represent the largest genus of the family Ixodidae and mainly inhabit temperate forest or grassland

No. There is a multitude of animals that can be infected by Lyme disease including dogs, horses, cattle, etc. but only ticks can spread the infection (Burgdorfer, Barbour, Hayes, Benach, Grunwaldt, & Davis, 1982).

“Lyme disease got its name from where it was first discovered in Lyme, Connecticut in 1975” (healthychildren.org). “Since then there has been thousands of cases reported of the disease. The ticks live in low and high seasonal temperatures and high humidity” (healthychildren.org). Lyme Disease most common to occur in the Northeast, North-central states, or West Coast. On behalf of the Northeast, I can tell you that ticks are everywhere in this region. They like to live in tall grasses and woody areas. “The small insects more than often latch onto the foot or lower leg and crawl up the body, and travel up the body with a destination of the head. On their normal hosts, ticks also usually crawl up; they want to blood feed around the

According to Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt (a world renowned Lyme expert), Lyme disease is considered the plague of the century due to the large number of people with chronic Lyme disease and the associated co-infections. The number one symptom of Lyme is chronic fatigue. People can have Lyme for a very long time and not be properly diagnosed because current laboratory testing comes up short with being able to detect it. One of the main reasons for this is because chronic Lyme does not live in the blood but rather in the tissues. It is an intracellular organism meaning it lives inside the cell. Lyme has different shapes: spirochete (like a spring), cyst with a hard shell, and acellular (without an outer cell membrane). Lyme likes to set up a sanctuary in the body such as in the brain, teeth (such as under a root canal or in a cavitation), vertebrae, breast tissue, and lymph nodes. It looks for a place where it can be protected and the body is vulnerable preferably in fatty tissue or under a biofilm. While traditionally Lyme disease is considered a tick-borne disease, recent findings have discovered that it is an insect-borne disease that can get transferred

This means avoiding ticks, the organism that is most responsible for spreading this disease to humans. Long sleeved clothing, wearing hats, and tucking pants into one’s socks are all common preventative measures. Another way to prevent the spread from tick to human, is to remove the tick as soon as it is found on the skin so that there is less time to actually transmit the disease. Aenishaenslin et al. claims that Lyme disease is very often an endemic species, and only two cases must be confirmed in a county in order for it to become an endemic county. Antibiotics are most commonly used in order to treat Lyme disease. However, the vigor with which drugs are used depends greatly on the stage of the disease that the patient has progressed to. Treatment may last several weeks; if symptoms persist, or return, another round of medication will be

Lyme disease is found in places of high humidity and regions that have very low or high temperatures, where infected ticks thrive. Woody, grassy and bushy regions are areas that are commonly exposed to ticks, therefore are susceptible to Lyme disease. Ticks thrive in a warmer climate which is why Lyme disease is prevalent in places such as Australia, North America, Europe and

The CDC tracks instances of Lyme disease by utilizing strict observation criteria, not intended for determination of individual cases. The rate has been increasing after some time; this is not just a consequence of expanded acknowledgment, on the grounds that in expresses that perform dynamic reconnaissance, genuine rate and geographic reach have expanded. The reasonable reasons for this increment are extension of deer groups and the extended scope of the

There are several different types of preventative measures currently underway for combating Lyme disease. Most Lyme disease cases are reported in the midwest and northeast regions of the United States. It is crucial that residents of those regions are properly educated on the disease and what they can do specifically to lower their risk of infection. Preventive foresight for residents of regions where Lyme disease is most common include dressing appropriately to prevent tick bites while in wooded rural areas. It is recommended that each resident of the owner invests in tick repellents and acaricides. It is vital that residents of areas prone to the disease do research and receive education on the disease as well as inform the people around

Via Jordan’s study, deer cull areas that lack hard and soft mast producing species, can be attributed to over browsing of deer. However the oak trees that dominate our forests are known to produce highly variable acorn crops from year to year. Moreover this variation in acorn crops is highly correlated with the density of mice in the forest, by evidence of exponential growth in mice numbers, due to the previous year’s increase of acorn availability. This introduces our first observational lag and is at the heart of preventing us from viewing changes of deer per year on Lyme disease incidence in a one-year vacuum. The second observational lag occurs during the life cycle of the ticks. After the adult ticks finishing feasting on the deer, they drop off and “hibernate” for the winter. That following spring the female ticks lay eggs, known as questing larvae. These larvae feed on mice and other rodents and also hibernate for a year. Now carrying Lyme disease microbes and maturing to their nymph stage, they are ready to transmit the disease to deer and us. Here a two-year lag of time of development from egg to disease carrying nymph is generally glossed

In 1975, residents living in the small town of Lyme, Connecticut started to experience many troubling symptoms such as muscle aches, joint pains, and fatigue. The prevalence of the symptoms among both children and adults baffled doctors, and they struggled to diagnose their patients. By 1977, the first 51 cases of “Lyme arthritis” were described, and the Ixodes scapularis tick, commonly known as the blacklegged or deer tick, was linked to the transmission of the disease (Pino). The causative factor was discovered in 1981 by Willy Burgdorfer when he isolated a spirochete, or spiral-shaped bacteria, that triggered the Lyme symptoms while he was studying another

People living in the Northeast area with high incidence need to have an adequate level of susceptibility. Recognizing risky environments need to be followed by various type of precautions. Lyme disease is a zoonotic disease that can cause a range of symptoms including rash, joint pain, neurological and cardiac manifestation. Knowing the complications and the severity of Lyme disease, people would then be more proactive in implementing preventive measurements. The CDC recommends clothing attire be long pants and socks, light colored clothes when outdoors. The simplest method to prevent Lyme disease is to avoid having contact with ticks when traveling to Ixodes tick infested areas. That can be accomplished by avoiding predisposed areas during

Adult ticks of Amblyomma and Hyalomma are exophilic, i.e. they hunt for a nearby host by running across the ground (Walker et al., 2003). Argasids and many Ixodes species are endophilic, i.e. they spent their life time in a host’s nest from where they attach to available host. A few species of ticks have adapted to human dwellings, e.g. Rhipicephalus sanguineus. These feed

The most common animal with an exoskeleton to carry diseases that affect both animals and human in all of Europe are ticks. It is because of this that concerns on rather or not they can possess more than one pathogen at a time has become prominent. Scientists also question rather or not the anthropoids’’ symbolists, a major part of a tick’s biology, could affect these pathogens. Sara Moutailler, Claire Valiente Moro, Patrick Gasqui, and nine other writers for the Public Library of Science set out to answer the many questions surrounding this subject. In their article they conduct an experiment in the French Ardennes in order to examine pathogens and symbolists in ticks and possibly find a solution to any problems surround the tick-carried diseases (Moutailler).

Spatial distribution of the ixodes ricinus tick was studied over three different habitats; woodland, woodland edge and grassland of Dolebury Warren Hill Fort. This species of tick carry the bacteria responsible for Lyme disease and therefore transmit this disease to numerous vertebrate hosts which they choose to feed on. Ticks were sampled using a blanket drag method for 10 metres over three different habitats and the results were collected and recorded in a table, then used for statistical analysis to aid the understanding of the distribution of the I.ricinus tick species. All life stages of ticks were counted, including larvae, nymphs and adult ticks. As many of ticks as possible were collected using tweezers and then placed into collecting

Introduction: This article tested the Dilution Effect model, which predicts that high species diversity in the community of tick host reduces vector infection prevalence by diluting the effects of the most competent disease reservoir, the white footed mouse. This study suggests that the preservation of vertebrate biodiversity and community composition can reduce the incidence of Lyme disease. The Dilution Effect hypothesis is decreasing infection prevalence in the tick population with increasing host diversity. The nymphal stage in the tick life stage is most likely to infect humans. The nymphal infection prevalence (NPI) was used as a measure of the disease risk to humans and to investigate the change as the diversity of the host community