8 ms·
Ancient History of Lyme Disease Revealed with Bacterial Genomes (2017)
- amriksohata 7y agoAnyone else highly suspicious about the release timing of this report in 2017? At the time when Lyme cases were picking up?
- mc32 7y agoWhy? It would reason that they’d study this at a time when things were on an uptick. Im glad people are looking into these things. Looks like a combination of suburbanization and uncontained deer pop growth has contributed to the spread of the disease.
- b_tterc_p 7y agoThere’s a conspiracy theory that the us military is purposefully or accidentally responsible for Lyme as a bio weapon. Fun fact, things like bubonic plague were used during WWII. Japan had a plan scheduled to go off a few months after they surrendered (and thus canceled) to use such things on one of the US west coast cities, can’t recall which.
- boudin 7y agoThere's an actual investigation about that. https://edition-m.cnn.com/2019/07/17/politics/lyme-disease-amendment-investigation/index.html https://edition-m.cnn.com/2019/07/17/politics/lyme-disease-a...
- ivanhoe 7y agoYup, operation Cherry Blossoms at Night. Japan planned an air-raid attack on San Diego at night to spread plague infected fleas. They never did that in the end because the war ended, but they killed some estimated 200K people in China while "testing & improving" those weapons - horror movie stuff... and AFAIK Japan never officially apologized for that (nor US apologized for giving immunity to Shirō Ishii, the mastermind behind Unit 731 war crimes, and his medical team) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cherry_Blossoms_at_Night https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cherry_Blossoms_at_N... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirō_Ishii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirō_Ishii
- msbarnett 7y ago> and AFAIK Japan never officially apologized for that It would actually appear to be covered by a number of apologies they’ve issued over the years, first and most notably the formal apology for all actions in China which was accepted by the PRC as part of the Japan–China Joint Communiqué that formally reestablished diplomatic relations in 1972.
- wallace_f 7y agoIDK why corporate media loves to hate Japan. The two big criticisms are whales and war crimes apologies, yet other countries kill more whales (not just per capita but in absolute numbers) and it's not like America has ever apoligized for the Native American genocide(1), or even interning Japanese. 1-https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-madley-california-genocide-20160522-snap-story.html https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-madley-californi...
- mc32 7y agoReagan apologized and also compensated descendants of Roosevelt’s internment policy[1]. I think people keep chiding Japan because they are reluctant to address the so called “comfort women”. Obama signed an apology to First Nations Americans. [1]https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/09/210138278/japanese-internment-redress https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/09/210138278...
- wallace_f 7y agoI stand corrected on internment camps, I didn't know they were compensated. From the above source I linked: >Neither the U.S. government nor the state of California has acknowledged that the California Indian catastrophe fits the two-part legal definition of genocide set forth by the United Nations Genocide Convention in 1948 Finally, I don't see why Japan is singled out. The rape of Berlin could have been worse. Millions of Cambodian Viets were pick axed to death in the Killing Fields. Norway kills far more whales, especially on per capita basis. We still throw people in prison for smoking plants and are quiet about our police state. The Japanese were utterly bombed like almost no other time and place in humanity, and the only leadership from that era which survived did so by the US. And I don't see any people broadcasting their views about social justice for women going to Southeast Asia where Western money pours in to sexually exploit women. I think we live in an era with its own virtue politics, not an era of actual virtue.
- cgh 7y agoFor a horrifying fictional take on this, watch Men Behind the Sun. Be warned.
- perl4ever 7y ago"...when things were on an uptick"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- domnomnom 7y agoNo but I think phylogenetics is pretty bs. I don’t think you can use mutation rate/differences to infer timescales.
- vibrio 7y agoScience doesn't care what you think.
- billiam 7y agoBased on what evidence? Or just your "feeling?"
- domnomnom 7y agoI think you’re confused on how evidence and burden of proof works. These studies use genetic differences as a proxy for differences in periods of time. If there was a context that caused a high rate of genetic change, it would appear to be an organism with a lineage that spanned across a large time period.
- tim333 7y agoShame the vaccine they made for it got largely stopped by antivaxers https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/20/lyme-disease-is-solution-on-way https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/20/lyme-disease...
- radicaldreamer 7y agoThey still produce it for dogs...
- pmjordan 7y agoThis may or may not be obvious, but the Lyme vaccine for dogs is not the same as the discontinued one for humans. So it's (unfortunately) not a simple case of rebranding/repackaging the vaccine they're already producing for human use.
- sansnomme 7y agoJust how many antivaxers are there on HN? My comment from a few days ago was also severely downvoted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20487229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20487229
- toss1 7y agoI have no ide3a, there should be few, as it takes a special kind of intellectual failure to subscribe & promote such packs of falsehoods about both science and history, much based on a fraudulent study that caused the author to be stripped of his degree & Med license. [1][2] Perhaps more importantly, it needs to be understood that anti-vaxxers are A) freeloading on the herd immunity created and maintained by the smarter people, and B) are directly endangering the set of people who cannot get vaccinated for medical reasons -- they are literally a death threat to many. Much of this is also people falling for weaponized Russian dezinformatsiya, a very cheap way to both sow discontent, conflict, and illness in their adversaries [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield [2] https://www.webmd.com/children/vaccines/news/20190304/largest-study-ever-finds-no-link-between-measles-vaccine-autism https://www.webmd.com/children/vaccines/news/20190304/larges... [3] https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/09/in-the-united-states-russian-trolls-are-peddling-measles-disinformation-on-twitter/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/09/in-the-united-states-ru... There are plenty of further resources on all of these topics; this is merely a start
- lkrubner 7y agoSlightly off-topic, but for anyone interested, I did write up my own battle with Lyme, which went on for many, many years, till I found a simple solution: "How I recovered from Lyme Disease: I fasted for two weeks, no food, just water" http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/how-i-recovered-from-lyme-disease http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/how-i-recovered-from-...
- simonebrunozzi 7y agoWow, it's incredible to read that you've been sick for TWENTY years before finally getting cured by fasting for two weeks. > I went 2 weeks without food. Just water with a little bit of salt. No food. I took antibiotics the first week but not the second. I felt very sick. The fast ended. I had a vegetarian meal. I fell asleep. I woke up the next day and had a large vegetarian meal. That night I felt funny. The feeling was similar to that moment, if you have a flu, when the fever breaks. With a flu, you get sicker and sicker till a moment the fever breaks and then you know that your immune system has kicked in. That was exactly the feeling that I had then. After 20 years, my immune system had finally kicked in. On a related note, you might want to take a look at fast-mimicking diets (FMD), and one of his more credible proponents, Dr. Valter Longo. I've met him personally, and read some of the papers and material that he has published. It strongly relates with the last part of your article, in which you are trying to guess why fasting cured you. Happy to hear it ended well for you. I can't imagine how life has been for those twenty years, on and off antibiotics, never able to understand what the real problem was.
- cm2012 7y agoIn a related note - my wife had chronic vomiting for 5 years. Almost every meal would make her throw up. We went to general doctors and two gastroenterologists, who gave antacids that made the vomiting worse if anything. One day I found an amateur website that said the issue was more likely not enough acid, gave ways to test it, and recommended drinking a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar. My wife's vomiting stopped immediately after one dose. She recurred once or twice in the last 4 years but another dose of AC vinegar fixed it each time. Literally miraculous.
- sschueller 7y agoThe house just voted to investigate if the US weaponized lyme disease. [1] [2] [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/17/politics/lyme-disease-amendment-investigation/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/17/politics/lyme-disease-ame... [2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/weaponized-ticks/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/weaponized-ticks/