31 ms·

A shot to prevent Lyme disease could be on its way

595 points by Kaibeezy 5y ago

hannob 5y ago
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.
- erichocean 5y ago
  That's…not how the FDA, or science, or medicine works. Antivaxers have no power whatsoever.
  - hannob 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      I'm not antivax but if the company is sure its vaccine is safe, why should they fear lawsuits ?
      - johnny53169 5y ago
        They can be sure the vaccine is safe without being sure they would win in court.
        inter_netuser 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        > 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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        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.
      - nickthemagicman 5y ago
        Because the American Legal system is very imperfect.
      - mschuster91 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        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 https://youtu.be/s_jaU5V9FUg [2] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13971482/mcdonalds-coffee-lawsuit-stella-liebeck https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13971482/...
        torgoguys 5y ago
        >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.
        nate_meurer 5y ago
        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 https://www.ncausa.org/About-Coffee/How-to-Brew-Coffee
      - _greim_ 5y ago
        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.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        > Class action against any medical product? BAD until proven otherwise. You are arguing with strawman, noone said this.
      - hannob 5y ago
        I haven't said anything like that at all.
    - tamrix 5y ago
      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.
      - markus92 5y ago
        Tell that to the antivaxers that attack vaccination sites and spread the propaganda.
        imwillofficial 5y ago
        You say the word “propaganda” pretty loosely. I bet you also said “3 weeks to flatten the curve!”
        eganist 5y ago
        > 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-surge-vaccines/2021/08/14/bdd88d04-fabd-11eb-911c-524bc8b68f17_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/iceland-covid-su...
        inter_netuser 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        Stop with all your facts and numbers, people have a religion to follow.
  - pulse7 5y ago
    Spreading false information on Facebook and capturing many followers is called "power of influence"...
  - computer23 5y ago
    The Lyme vaccine is still FDA approved. The company selling the vaccine took it off the market for business reasons.
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  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/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/
  - acdha 5y ago
    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.
- istjohn 5y ago
  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_ 5y ago
    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.
jacobr 5y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick-borne_encephalitis
- foepys 5y ago
  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.
willvarfar 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
  - nickthemagicman 5y ago
    I think they HAVE lime disease.
inter_netuser 5y ago
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 5y ago
  They administered over 1 million doses in about a year. 10,000 doses was the sales projection after a misinformation campaign.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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 5y ago
  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.
skocznymroczny 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
  - robbiep 5y ago
    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
  - bregma 5y ago
    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.
  - 5y ago
spicybright 5y ago
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.
- gkilmain 5y ago
  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.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
a-saleh 5y ago
Yep, last summer I knew more people in my friend group that had lyme disease than people with covid.
est31 5y ago
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.nature.com/articles/s41541-020-0183-8 https://www.bc.cas.cz/en/news/news-detail/5483-a-new-lyme-vaccine-is-100-effective-in-tests/ https://www.bc.cas.cz/en/news/news-detail/5483-a-new-lyme-va...
vinnymac 5y ago
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.
vinni2 5y ago
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.
yodsanklai 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_Lyme_disease 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 5y ago
  Take a look: https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/628045/fneur-12-628045-HTML/image_m/fneur-12-628045-g007.jpg 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.2021.628045/full 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 5y ago
    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/2018/05/01/debunking-myths-surrounding-lyme-disease/532264002/ 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.
zz865 5y ago
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.
- jankotek 5y ago
  Better to eradicate ticks.
  - somehnacct3757 5y ago
    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.
    - jf22 5y ago
      I'm sure deer populations have been higher in the past and the forests survived.
      - zz865 5y ago
        There used to be Wolves and Mountain lions to keep the deer under control.
      - echelon 5y ago
        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.
mind-blight 5y ago
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 5y ago
  I’m sorry for your loss. I hope these trials go further to help more people in need.
contravariant 5y ago
> 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.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  transfusion blood gets gamma irradiated. maybe that? also there was some research on UV-C irradiated blood.
- akyu 5y ago
  >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".
- rogers18445 5y ago
  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.
Whitespace 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    For folks in NYC, ‘upstate’ is used loosely to mean ‘a place in NY state you access via queens or the bronx’.
  - Whitespace 5y ago
    Ahh you're correct, I'm 90 miles from Lyme, not 20.
- vimy 5y ago
  The tests look for antibodies which only are measurable after weeks so a test immediately after a tick bite is useless.
  - tcoff91 5y ago
    If you collect the tick itself, is there a way to check the tick instead of checking the person that's bit?
    - vimy 5y ago
      Yeah, you can send it to a lab. This should be the default move after every tick bite.
giantg2 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Please link.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    I saw it on Netflix, but here is a similar article. https://elemental.medium.com/the-mouse-cure-48f81e7a3fec https://elemental.medium.com/the-mouse-cure-48f81e7a3fec
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
jemurray 5y ago
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.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  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.
  - chubot 5y ago
    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!
  - Dumblydorr 5y ago
    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.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      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.
dmos62 5y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick-borne_encephalitis
- arpa 5y ago
  there have been vaccines against that for a long time.
- nanis 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    And a booster lasts around 5 years I believe? So not as bothersome as a flu shot even.
- Anthony-G 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
xyzzy21 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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).
nikkinana 5y ago
There's also a treatment that's extremely effective.
mrfusion 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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-a-safe-way-to-keep-ticks-out-of-your-yard/ https://www.consumerreports.org/pest-control/bait-boxes-are-...
    - kortex 5y ago
      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.
      - mrfusion 5y ago
        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?
mimined 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Vaccination
- bkanber 5y ago
  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.
stewx 5y ago
Related: "The incredibly frustrating reason there’s no Lyme disease vaccine" https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/7/17314716/lyme-disease-vaccine-history-effectiveness https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/7/17314716/lym...
darkerside 5y ago
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 5y ago
Are tick repellents any good? Any recommendations?
- wepple 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Note that permethrin is very toxic to cats. You may want to be careful if you have them around.
    - d4rkp4ttern 5y ago
      Thank you both for the tips.
Grazester 5y ago
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/ https://time.com/6073576/lyme-disease-vaccine/
- Inhibit 5y ago
  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.
- bkanber 5y ago
  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.
- istjohn 5y ago
  I think you're shortselling the critics. See the quote from the article in my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28210290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28210290
kortex 5y ago
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 5y ago
  “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.
brightball 5y ago
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.
cushychicken 5y ago
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 https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/prev/vaccine.html
- istjohn 5y ago
  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.
abruzzi 5y ago
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 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 5y ago
  Well spotted. It's a reporting artifact: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpyQMEthstNKhKNJQ/massachusetts-lyme-reporting https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpyQMEthstNKhKNJQ/massachuse...
  - abruzzi 5y ago
    thanks for that link. Thats what I expected.
davnn 5y ago
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 https://help-pen.com
quotz 5y ago
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.
wildmanx 5y ago
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.
- hitpointdrew 5y ago
  >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 5y ago
    > 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.
alfon 5y ago
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?
resalisbury 5y ago
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."
d4rkp4ttern 5y ago
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 ;)

595 points by Kaibeezy 5y ago

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.

erichocean 5y ago
That's…not how the FDA, or science, or medicine works. Antivaxers have no power whatsoever.
- hannob 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    I'm not antivax but if the company is sure its vaccine is safe, why should they fear lawsuits ?
    - johnny53169 5y ago
      They can be sure the vaccine is safe without being sure they would win in court.
      - inter_netuser 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        > 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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        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.
    - nickthemagicman 5y ago
      Because the American Legal system is very imperfect.
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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 https://youtu.be/s_jaU5V9FUg [2] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13971482/mcdonalds-coffee-lawsuit-stella-liebeck https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13971482/...
        torgoguys 5y ago
        >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.
        nate_meurer 5y ago
        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 https://www.ncausa.org/About-Coffee/How-to-Brew-Coffee
    - _greim_ 5y ago
      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.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        > Class action against any medical product? BAD until proven otherwise. You are arguing with strawman, noone said this.
    - hannob 5y ago
      I haven't said anything like that at all.
  - tamrix 5y ago
    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.
    - markus92 5y ago
      Tell that to the antivaxers that attack vaccination sites and spread the propaganda.
      - imwillofficial 5y ago
        You say the word “propaganda” pretty loosely. I bet you also said “3 weeks to flatten the curve!”
        eganist 5y ago
        > 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-surge-vaccines/2021/08/14/bdd88d04-fabd-11eb-911c-524bc8b68f17_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/iceland-covid-su...
        inter_netuser 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        Stop with all your facts and numbers, people have a religion to follow.
- pulse7 5y ago
  Spreading false information on Facebook and capturing many followers is called "power of influence"...
- computer23 5y ago
  The Lyme vaccine is still FDA approved. The company selling the vaccine took it off the market for business reasons.
nickthemagicman 5y ago
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/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/
- acdha 5y ago
  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.
istjohn 5y ago
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_ 5y ago
  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.

jacobr 5y ago

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

foepys 5y ago
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.

willvarfar 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  I think they HAVE lime disease.

inter_netuser 5y ago

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 5y ago
They administered over 1 million doses in about a year. 10,000 doses was the sales projection after a misinformation campaign.
mschuster91 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
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.

skocznymroczny 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.
- robbiep 5y ago
  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
- bregma 5y ago
  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.
- 5y ago

spicybright 5y ago

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.

gkilmain 5y ago
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.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago

a-saleh 5y ago

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

est31 5y ago

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.nature.com/articles/s41541-020-0183-8 https://www.bc.cas.cz/en/news/news-detail/5483-a-new-lyme-vaccine-is-100-effective-in-tests/ https://www.bc.cas.cz/en/news/news-detail/5483-a-new-lyme-va...

vinnymac 5y ago

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.

vinni2 5y ago

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.

yodsanklai 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_Lyme_disease 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 5y ago
Take a look: https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/628045/fneur-12-628045-HTML/image_m/fneur-12-628045-g007.jpg 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.2021.628045/full 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 5y ago
  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/2018/05/01/debunking-myths-surrounding-lyme-disease/532264002/ 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.

zz865 5y ago

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.

jankotek 5y ago
Better to eradicate ticks.
- somehnacct3757 5y ago
  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.
  - jf22 5y ago
    I'm sure deer populations have been higher in the past and the forests survived.
    - zz865 5y ago
      There used to be Wolves and Mountain lions to keep the deer under control.
    - echelon 5y ago
      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.

mind-blight 5y ago

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 5y ago
I’m sorry for your loss. I hope these trials go further to help more people in need.

contravariant 5y ago

> 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.

inter_netuser 5y ago
transfusion blood gets gamma irradiated. maybe that? also there was some research on UV-C irradiated blood.
akyu 5y ago
>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".
rogers18445 5y ago
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.

Whitespace 5y ago

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 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  For folks in NYC, ‘upstate’ is used loosely to mean ‘a place in NY state you access via queens or the bronx’.
- Whitespace 5y ago
  Ahh you're correct, I'm 90 miles from Lyme, not 20.
vimy 5y ago
The tests look for antibodies which only are measurable after weeks so a test immediately after a tick bite is useless.
- tcoff91 5y ago
  If you collect the tick itself, is there a way to check the tick instead of checking the person that's bit?
  - vimy 5y ago
    Yeah, you can send it to a lab. This should be the default move after every tick bite.

giantg2 5y ago

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 5y ago
Please link.
- giantg2 5y ago
  I saw it on Netflix, but here is a similar article. https://elemental.medium.com/the-mouse-cure-48f81e7a3fec https://elemental.medium.com/the-mouse-cure-48f81e7a3fec
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

jemurray 5y ago

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.

inter_netuser 5y ago
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.
- chubot 5y ago
  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!
- Dumblydorr 5y ago
  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.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    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.

dmos62 5y ago

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

arpa 5y ago
there have been vaccines against that for a long time.
nanis 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  And a booster lasts around 5 years I believe? So not as bothersome as a flu shot even.
Anthony-G 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.

xyzzy21 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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).

nikkinana 5y ago

There's also a treatment that's extremely effective.

mrfusion 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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-a-safe-way-to-keep-ticks-out-of-your-yard/ https://www.consumerreports.org/pest-control/bait-boxes-are-...
  - kortex 5y ago
    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.
    - mrfusion 5y ago
      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?

mimined 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Vaccination
bkanber 5y ago
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.

stewx 5y ago

Related: "The incredibly frustrating reason there’s no Lyme disease vaccine" https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/7/17314716/lyme-disease-vaccine-history-effectiveness https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/7/17314716/lym...

darkerside 5y ago

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 5y ago

Are tick repellents any good? Any recommendations?

wepple 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Note that permethrin is very toxic to cats. You may want to be careful if you have them around.
  - d4rkp4ttern 5y ago
    Thank you both for the tips.

Grazester 5y ago

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/ https://time.com/6073576/lyme-disease-vaccine/

Inhibit 5y ago
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.
bkanber 5y ago
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.
istjohn 5y ago
I think you're shortselling the critics. See the quote from the article in my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28210290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28210290

kortex 5y ago

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 5y ago
“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.

brightball 5y ago

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.

cushychicken 5y ago

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 https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/prev/vaccine.html

istjohn 5y ago
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.

abruzzi 5y ago

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 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 5y ago
Well spotted. It's a reporting artifact: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpyQMEthstNKhKNJQ/massachusetts-lyme-reporting https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpyQMEthstNKhKNJQ/massachuse...
- abruzzi 5y ago
  thanks for that link. Thats what I expected.

davnn 5y ago

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 https://help-pen.com

quotz 5y ago

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.

wildmanx 5y ago

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.

hitpointdrew 5y ago
>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 5y ago
  > 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.

alfon 5y ago

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?

resalisbury 5y ago

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."

d4rkp4ttern 5y ago

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 ;)