Last May, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal launched an anti-trust investigation into the potential conflicts of panel members who led the writing of the Infectious Disease Society of America’s (IDSA) 2006 guidelines for treating Lyme disease. “Medical guidelines have profoundly powerful consequences for countless lives, driving doctors’ treatment decisions and insurance company coverage determinations,” Mr. Blumenthal said in a statement released the day of the hearing. “Such significant clinical standards deserve the most intensive scrutiny from all perspectives — physicians, scientists and patients — before they are published.”

Shelter Island has among the highest Lyme disease incidence rates in New York State.

Mr. Blumenthal’s findings of actual conflicts of interest led to a public hearing in Washington D.C. last Thursday during which a new panel heard testimony on why the guidelines should or should not be changed. Most at issue was whether, or how, chronic Lyme disease could be defined. If it cannot be defined, definitive guidelines cannot be written on how to treat it.

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The Brewster Lyme Disease Support Group, along with Denise Zevitas of the Brewster Ladies’ Library reference department, has been monitoring confirmed areas of Lyme disease in Brewster for more than a year.

In July 2008 the VNA took over the task of counting confirmed Lyme disease cases on Cape Cod. The town of Brewster in 2007 had a confirmed count of 77. The health officer in Brewster, Nancy Ellis Ice, signed off on this number.

The state lab in Boston has reduced this number to 23. In so doing, the credibility of Cape Cod Healthcare and the VNA is on the line. Brewster worked hard to get an accurate count of confirmed Lyme disease cases. So did its physicians. The VNA has cast this aside. How 77 cases becomes 23 is alarming.

The Lyme Disease Support Group in Brewster is challenging this development. We have alerted state Rep. Cleon Turner and U.S. Rep. William Delahunt. We ask the VNA to verify its assertion along with the state lab in Boston.

This defies credibility. Let’s get an honest count. This disease is taking a terrible toll.

Source: Cape Cod Times

Two tick-borne diseases are emerging in Minnesota, prompting state health officials to urge caution when vacationing in the state’s outdoors.

Health officials said dog ticks and deer ticks — both in ample supply in Minnesota — are carriers of Rocky Mountain spotted fever and Powassan disease, respectively, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported Thursday.

A Minnesota child died earlier in July from Rocky Mountain spotted fever although health officials didn’t provide details about the death.

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Is the tick problem getting worse, or does it just seem that way at this time every year?

Fighting back involves a lot of individual strategies: tucking pant legs in socks, using bug spray (while hating it), obsessively doing full-body checks at the end of a summer day and building deer fences. Yet the public as a whole has been ineffective in dealing with the plague of black-legged (deer) ticks, which spread Lyme disease, a problem linked to, among other things, the overpopulation of deer, which the ticks feed on. What is important to know about ticks and their environment, and what steps might be taken to control them? Here is what the experts say:

• Thomas Mather, professor of public health entomology
• Felicia Keesing biology professor
• Richard S. Ostfeld, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
• William L. Krinsky, entomologist
• Daniel E. Sonenshine, Old Dominion University

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In 2002, Danna Pristach took her 12-year-old son to the doctor after a tick bit him while he was playing flashlight tag in the neighborhood. He tested positive for Lyme disease and was given a two-week course of antibiotics, and the family assumed that would be the end of it.

Now 19, Peter Pristach spends most of his days sitting in an oversized beanbag chair in the family’s Centreville living room. He has had to delay finishing high school at a point when most of his former classmates from Westfield High School are getting ready to begin college.

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There’s been a notable increase in the number of Mainers being infected with Lyme disease. According to the Maine Centers for Disease Control, there were more than 900 confirmed and probable cases of the tick-borne illness in humans last year – that’s an increase of 72 percent.

And that comes on the back of a 57% increase in 2007. The disease is most common in southern and coastal Maine, but it is gradually moving up the state. Lyme disease is caused by a bacteria that is transmitted to humans through the bite of an infected deer tick, also known as black-legged tick. The disease often causes symptoms such as joint pain and fatigue.

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Dan Wolfe said his health problems began after he went mushroom hunting around the Coralville Lake Reservoir and Lake Macbride State Park in late April.

One morning in the middle of May, he said he woke up with a rash on his stomach. The rash developed into a series of problems that included vision issues, headaches and the left side of his face becoming partially paralyzed. Four doctor visits and several hospital stays and trips to the emergency room later, he learned he had contracted Lyme disease.

“I’m going to be all right, but it was a scary two weeks,” said Wolfe, 24, a recent University of Iowa graduate in operations management. “I couldn’t move part of my face.”

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One strain of Borrelia burgdorferi appears to be more frequent in patients with antibiotic-refractory Lyme arthritis, researchers say.

“Our results add to the emerging literature concerning the differential pathogenicity of strains of B. burgdorferi,” the researchers said.

The tick-borne spirochete causes Lyme disease, which often begins with erythema migrans, an expanding skin lesion. The spirochetes frequently disseminate within a week to the nervous system, heart, and joints, often promoting arthritis.

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BILLINGS — Doctors have reported 15 cases of Lyme disease in Montana this year — a sharp spike from prior years. But health officials say most appear to be recently diagnosed older illnesses and that all likely originated outside the state.

The disease is passed to humans by ticks and can cause headaches, fever, fatigue and a distinctive, bulls-eye shaped rash. The overwhelming majority of cases occur on the East Coast and in the Great Lakes states.

The 15 cases of Lyme reported so far this year to the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services compares with four cases each in 2007 and 2008. Only one case this year was reported as a recent infection; the others were thought to be infections from two to 20 years old that had previously escaped detection.

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Lyme disease in the U.S. is caused by the tick-borne bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi and usually begins with a skin lesion, after which the bacteria spread throughout the body to the nervous system, heart or joints. About 60 percent of untreated individuals develop arthritis, which affects the knees in particular.

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