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Dr. William Schaffner: Lyme disease is an interesting complex infection that has been increasingly recognized in the United States over the last several years. It’s transmitted to humans. It’s a bacterial infection transmitted to humans by the bite of the deer tick. So what happens after a deer tick bites someone?
What happens is that the deer tick after it sits on you for a period of time injects some of these bacteria into you and into your skin. And then after a period of days to about two weeks, a local skin lesion or rash, a very characteristic rash will develop. And this rash called, fancy medical term, named Erythema Migrans is the hallmark of lyme disease. What happens is it looks like a target in the center. There is a kind of pimple that’s red and then a blush and then a ring around it and so this target lesion is recognized as the initial place where the tick rests.
By the time you see the rash, the tick is long gone. Now, this rash, this initial part of the illness can be associated with fever, chills, not feeling good, and just a general sense of illness and if nothing is done, you’ll get better. And may people get completely get better at that time the body gets rid of the infection. But here’s where Lyme disease gets more complicated because it can persist in the body and get into the bloodstream and be delivered around the body and months later, sometimes even years later, it can affect three major bodily functions.
One as our patient, Chuck Head involves the central nervous system. Another involves the heart and some people get involvement of their joints. So you can see, this is a complex infection. It affects many parts of the body and you have to very astute in picking it up.
The treatment for Lyme disease is antibiotics. Different antibiotics have different stages. Some of them can work very very successfully and at each stage, this antibiotic treatment is in the vast majority of patients fortunately, very successful in shutting down the illness so that it doesn’t progress further. There are some Lyme disease patient groups that tend to lump things, tend to expand if you will, the definition of Lyme disease and I’m afraid to day there are some doctors who will exploit this and provide unnecessary prolonged and often hazardous antibiotic therapy for some patients with Lyme disease. So take care.
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