Lyme Disease - may spoil your summer fun
Doctors warn that Lyme disease is rising once again in the U.S, especially in Pennsylvania. This may be caused by the fact that people are spending more time outdoors in the warm summer weather. If this is true, this may spoil your summer fun.
What is Lyme disease? How dangerous is it to you?
Lyme disease is a bacterial illness spread by ticks when they bite the skin. Lyme disease affects different areas of the body in varying degrees as it progresses. The site where the tick bites your body is where the bacteria enter through your skin. Initially, the disease affects your skin, and causes an expanding reddish rash often associated with “flu-like” symptoms.
source: http://kidshealth.org/parent/infections/bacterial_viral/lyme.html
The bacteria (known as pathogenic spirochetes) take weeks to months after the initial redness of the skin to spread throughout your body. Subsequently, disease and abnormalities can develop in your joints, heart, and nervous system.
How is the bacterium transported around your body?
After bitten by a tick, the pathogenic spirochete gets into the blood and travels through your body, gets out of the blood system and then gets into the heart, neurological tissue in the brain and in the joints.
Early symptoms of Lyme disease are:
** A circular rash near the area of the tick bite.
** Fatigue, chills and fever.
** Headache as wella s muscle and joint pain.
** Swollen lymph nodes.
Lyme disease bacteria are completely irrational and very destructive to the healing process. This bacteria can survive even if you freeze them, heat them, attack them with antibiotics, or put them into distilled water. When the bacteria encounter adverse conditions, they simply take on a dormant form and wait for the conditions to improve.
How can you treat Lyme disease?
Most Lyme disease is curable with antibiotics. The type of antibiotic depends on the stage of the disease (early or late) and what areas of the body are affected.
A patient at the early stages of the disease can usually take antibiotics orally to clear the bacteria. Therefore, if you find a typical skin rash (described above) developing in an area of a tick bite, you should seek medical attention as soon as possible. Generally, antibiotic treatment resolves the rash within one or two weeks.
However, Lyme disease is harder to treat as it advances through the body. Later illness such as nervous-system disease might require intravenous drugs.
If left untreated, Lyme disease can lead to nervous system disorders, various neurological symptoms, arthritis or arthritis-like symptoms and extreme fatigue.
Prevention is better than cure - how do you protect yourself?
To protect yourself from tick attacks in the following ways:
(a) wear long-sleeved shirts and pants
(b) tuck your pants into socks or boots
(c) apply a bug spray containing DEER on your clothings
(d) inspect your clothes and skin for ticks after being outside.
Ticks are common around stone walls, shrubs and the edges of lawns and forests. Ticks don’t fly or jump. They attach to people. You can use tweezers to remove a tick and then drop it into alcohol to kill it.
There is concern that people who have symptoms of Lyme disease are not always taken seriously by doctors as many doctors don’t know enough about the disease. The disease is under-publicized and not enough people know about it. There is a need for better testing methods, more awareness of the disease, and a better warning system for the public.
Each year about 23,000 new cases of Lyme Disease are diagnosed in the United States, about 100 new cases are diagnosed in Canada. The United States for Disease Control has a detailed map on its website on where infected ticks can be found in the U.S., but no such map is available in Canada. The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) has reported that, in the next year or so, maps like that will be available for general viewing by the public and for physicians to know where the ticks are established.
