Ticks!!!

[khoomeizhi]

Last year was brutal for ticks.there would be 20 climbing your pants after walking the 50 yards to the barn. Much better this year,only 1 or 2 at a time. Just check after being out - no problems, no bites.

To be fair, I could have mowed a lot more last year.

[mskrieger]

I find that the deer tick nymphs are so small they're almost impossible to distinguish from a freckle or bit of dust until they begin to feed and swell a little.

[prairiegardens]

Well was just listening to a doctor who deals with the various issues that ticks instigate and he had the uncomfortable news that it's not just ticks that spread these diseases. He said they get people from all over the world in his clinic, and some people who show up with what he referred to as a wastebasket of symptoms called Lyme disease have never been bitten by a tick. He seemed to be saying with the right diagnosis (for many doctors hard to get since overt symptoms can vary so widely and because these viruses have a multitude of defence strategies) people can certainly regain perfect health, but antibiotics are often not useful because of the ability of the virus to hide itself so it isn't recognized so all they do, often, is knock your own immune system off kilter. It was an interesting talk, part of a free summit thing or I'd link to it, its over now.

As far as getting them off, I've had so many in the last couple of years my instinctive reaction isn't as frantic as was once the case. A leech is a different story, they'll reduce me to a shrieking panic instantly, one of the very few things that will. .

[mskrieger]

The general medical consensus is that Lyme disease is caused by a spirochete bacteria (i.e. it's shaped like a spiral), not a virus. Syphilis is another spirochete, and untreated syphilis damages people neurologically in ways similar to untreated Lyme disease. Both syphilis and Lyme get very hard to treat once they are in the neurological system (although many infectious disease specialists these days deny that...I don't know why, but it has something to do with the movement not to over-utilize antibiotics.) I'm assuming the doc you heard was on target, prairiegardens, and you just mistyped 'virus' instead of 'bacteria'. But if that doctor was really claiming Lyme disease was caused by a virus, I'd take everything he said with a tablespoon of salt.

[prairiegardens]

I was half asleep, my bad, he was clearly and exhaustively talking about bacteria. I should know better by now than to post anything while still waking up.

[templeton]

Luckily we dont have Lyme disease here, but our ticks are venomous and can confer a life-threatening allergy to red meat in some victims. Luckily not where i live
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[prairiegardens]

Aug 1, 2017 16:15:42 GMT -5 mskrieger said:

The general medical consensus is that Lyme disease is caused by a spirochete bacteria (i.e. it's shaped like a spiral), not a virus. Syphilis is another spirochete, and untreated syphilis damages people neurologically in ways similar to untreated Lyme disease. Both syphilis and Lyme get very hard to treat once they are in the neurological system (although many infectious disease specialists these days deny that...I don't know why, but it has something to do with the movement not to over-utilize antibiotics.) I'm assuming the doc you heard was on target, prairiegardens , and you just mistyped 'virus' instead of 'bacteria'. But if that doctor was really claiming Lyme disease was caused by a virus, I'd take everything he said with a tablespoon of salt.

If I remember accurately what he said there are several issues with using antibiotics. Apparently the borrellia (spelling?) bacteria can take a sort of cyst form so they appear dormant and aren't recognized as a problem, they have at least 23 bits of other genetic material in them  - he gave the scientific term for that but it's slipped my mind - instead of the 2 or so that most bacteria hostile to us have-  I'm assuming that means we don't have antibiotics that can handle that range,(at least without being hugely toxic to the patient)  and they can produce a biofilm that antibacterial agents can't penetrate. Any odd phrases are mine btw, I don't have the medical jargon so paraphrasing.

They also excrete toxins which can kill some of the cells we use to defend against them. He said that's sometimes a problem because doctors look for these cells' activity to decide if a person has Lyme and their body may not have them because they've been destroyed by the bacteria. He uses biofilm markers among other things to test for Lyme. It was a very interesting talk.

[mskrieger]

That does sound interesting! I am always glad to hear of medical professionals thinking out of the box when it comes to hard to treat infections like Lyme. I work at a state medical school, and there is enormous pressure to conform to a certain, narrow dogma that says we have conquered bacteria, bodies are mechanical and more complex/expensive technology is always good. With Lyme disease, this dogma is obviously wrong and yet our doctors ignore it.

[prairiegardens]

Seems a tad peculiar to claim we have conquered bacteria when researchers now seem to agree we are physically actually more bacteria than we are specifically unique human cells.

otoh it would seem that the technology used to interpret the biofilm is very advanced indeed and makes diagnosis much more accurate, something that pretty much everyone seems to agree is otherwise very subject to error.