Sorry for the late notice on this. Just found it. To register: https://lnkd.in/e6Zb-R3
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For more: https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2016/02/13/lyme-disease-treatment/
https://www.tribtoday.com/life/lifecovers/2019/05/new-york-doctor-warns-of-tick-borne-diseases/
Neurologist Dr. Elena Frid of New York, left, and Lyme patient Megan Tilton of Cherry Valley in Ashtabula Township discuss the prevalence of Lyme disease in Ohio. (Tribune Chronicle / R. Michael Semple)
NILES — The ticks are coming — they’re already here — and residents and doctors alike must do a better job with care and treatment.
That was the warning and advice from Dr. Elena Frid, a neurologist and clinical neurophysiologist from New York, who stayed at the Residence Inn by Marriott earlier this month before speaking at the Northeast Ohio Lyme Disease Symposium in Andover.
“Lyme is easy to catch, difficult to diagnose and difficult to treat,” said Frid, who specializes in infections-induced autoimmune disorders. “An average patient with Lyme disease sees 10 doctors over a course of two years before receiving a diagnosis.”
The infection caused by bacteria transmitted by bites from infected deer ticks can cause chronic pain and neurological disorders. It is the fastest-growing vector-borne illness in the United States and across the world, Frid said.
Megan Tilton, 22, of Cherry Valley sat in a wheelchair beside Frid in the Residence Inn lobby.
“The ticks this year are bountiful,” Tilton said. “Literally anybody who goes outside is at risk. They’re in your backyard.
“People really need to understand how serious this is. People get a tick bite, shake it off and think that’s it. If someone had told us 10 years ago, if the doctor had tested for it, I wouldn’t have this chronic illness,” she said. “In most cases, if you treat it right away, you usually get better.”
Tilton was bitten by a tick in 2005 when she was 9 but not diagnosed with Lyme disease until 2012. In the meantime, she suffered headaches, joint pain, fevers and heart dysrhythmia, among other problems. Eventually, her legs quit working. But tests kept turning up negative and some doctors suggested she was making it all up for attention.
Now a senior at Malone University, Tilton is studying clinical laboratory sciences so that she can go into research of tick-borne diseases. She wants to help make sure what happened to her doesn’t happen to anyone else.
“I’ve gotten a lot better,” Tilton said. “I’m back in school. I’m driving. I’m starting to walk again — not very well, but I am.”
After the diagnosis, Tilton’s mother, Connie Moschell, a labor and delivery nurse at St. Joseph Warren Hospital, helped found the NE Ohio Lyme Foundation, a nonprofit organization that raises money for awareness and puts on the annual symposium.
“Our mission is to get money and get local doctors to go through training,” Moschell said. “If you tried to use that money to help patients, you’d run out real quick.”
Frid said, “If you teach one doctor, you treat the whole community. Then patients are not as disabled or impaired because the disease is caught earlier.
“One of the things when I speak is that really to raise money to have local physicians be educated on Lyme disease by attending international conferences to learn more they can serve the community,” she said. “This disease is very underrepresented in its funding. Because of that, our testing for it is poor.”
Research is limited for lack of government funding, she said. Doctors find themselves using information from the 1970s when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified Lyme disease.
“Many physicians are seeing a difference between what they see in textbooks and what they see in the office,” Frid said.
When first discovered, Lyme had been centered mostly southern and eastern coastal states. Then it started moving north and west. Lyme disease has become more and more prevalent in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the two states that border eastern Ohio, and more cases continue to migrate into Ohio, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In 2017, the last year for which statistics are available, Pennsylvania reported 77.2 incidences of Lyme disease per 100,000 population, up from its three-year average of 66.7 incidences, and West Virginia reported 27.7 cases per 100,000 population, up from the three-year average of 19 incidences. Ohio in 2017 reported 2 cases per 100,000 population, up from its 1.3 three-year average.
Randee Shoenberger, epidemiologist for the Trumbull County Combined Health District, said six probable or confirmed Lyme cases were recorded in both 2017 and 2018 in Trumbull County. The true numbers are uncertain for a number of factors, she said.
Because Lyme often isn’t diagnosed right away and bites often go unnoticed, it’s frequently uncertain where the patient was when bitten by a tick. The health department investigates cases in hopes of pinpointing where it happened.
Also, doctors may give medications to treat the symptoms, which clear up, and the case is never reported to the health department. Other times, victims of tick bites don’t seek treatment.
It just becomes hard to know for sure.
“We’re predicting that it could be a lot. You never know,” Shoenberger said.
The CDC’s database records 31 confirmed cases of Lyme disease in Trumbull County over the 17 years from 2000 to 2016. The greatest number was six in 2004. The least was zero in 2012 and 2016. East Stroudsburg, Pa.-based laboratory TickCheck, which tests for Lyme and tick-borne diseases, estimates that the actual numbers are 10 times greater than cases confirmed by the CDC.
Between 2000 and 2016, 44 confirmed cases were reported in Mahoning County, 28 in Portage, 14 in Ashtabula and 11 in Geauga, according to the CDC.
Symptoms of Lyme disease include headaches, fever, fatigue and joint aches, and to a lesser degree, a minor rash, Frid said.
“Just because there’s no bull’s-eye rash (from a tick bite) doesn’t mean you don’t have Lyme. Fifty percent of patients don’t realize they have a bite, so often it’s missed.”
In most cases, symptoms tend to resolve on their own. But if the immune system is not strong enough to fight it off, then it can progress to chronic fatigue, neuropathy, chronic pain, even muscular dystrophy-like symptoms.
“We know the test is inaccurate,” she said. “(Asking questions about doctor comfort levels) will help them ID a specialist who is seeing and testing Lyme patients.”
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**Comment**
Asking a doctor if they are comfortable treating Lyme and how many patients they treat might be a way to sift out those who aren’t going to treat this properly, but a much better way is to contact your local Lyme support groups. They have in hand a doctor list that contains doctors that are specially trained by ILADS (International Lyme & Associated Diseases Society).
What isn’t admitted is that the “wait and see” approach has been killing patients. By the time they “wait and see” if patients develop symptoms, the bacteria has moved past the blood/brain barrier and has burrowed deep within the body, making it much harder and longer to treat.
Einstein stated, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
Well, docs have been telling patients to “wait and see,” and the results of that experiment have been horrific. Time for a new approach.
Each and every tick bite should be taken as seriously as a heart attack. Do not mess around with this. In my opinion, each tick bite should be treated prophylactically. A $30 bottle of antibiotics beats $50-200K out of pocket every time in my book, not to mention the avoided pain and suffering.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2019/p0513-rocky-mountain-spotted-fever-training.html
For Immediate Release, Monday, May 13, 2019
Contact: Media Relations
(404) 639-3286
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has created a first-of-its-kind education module to help clinicians recognize and diagnose Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF), a sometimes serious and fatal disease spread by the bite of an infected tick.
“Rocky Mountain spotted fever can be deadly if not treated early – yet cases often go unrecognized because the signs and symptoms are similar to those of many other diseases,” said CDC Director Robert R. Redfield, M.D. “With tickborne diseases on the rise in the U.S., this training will better equip healthcare providers to identify, diagnose, and treat this potentially fatal disease.”
The module includes scenarios based on real cases to help healthcare providers recognize the early signs of RMSF and differentiate it from similar diseases. Continuing education credit is available for physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, veterinarians, nurses, epidemiologists, public health professionals, educators, and health communicators.
In 2017, a record number of cases of tickborne spotted fever rickettsiosisexternal icon, including RMSF, were reported to the CDC. While the number of spotted fever cases in 2017 is striking (6,248 cases, up from 4,269 the previous year), fewer than 1% of those cases had sufficient laboratory evidence to be confirmed, pointing to the need to better train health care providers on the best methods to diagnose tickborne diseases.
RMSF is treatable with doxycycline, the antibiotic of choice in people of all ages. Disability and death from RMSF can be prevented when doxycycline is prescribed within the first five days of illness, meaning that early recognition and treatment can save lives. RMSF begins with non-specific symptoms such as fever and headache, and sometimes rash, but when left untreated, the disease can lead to devastating consequences. Severely ill patients may require amputation of fingers, toes, or limbs due to poor blood flow; heart and lung specialty care; and management in intensive care units. Roughly 1 in 5 untreated cases are fatal. Half of those deaths occur within the first 8 days of illness.
For more information about Rocky Mountain spotted fever and other rickettsial diseases:
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U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICESexternal icon
CDC works 24/7 protecting America’s health, safety and security. Whether disease start at home or abroad, are curable or preventable, chronic or acute, or from human activity or deliberate attack, CDC responds to America’s most pressing health threats. CDC is headquartered in Atlanta and has experts located throughout the United States and the world.
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For More: https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/07/10/first-rmsf-death-in-wisconsin/
https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/09/14/rocky-mountain-spotted-fever-rmsf/
https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/08/16/new-tick-causes-epidemic-of-rmsf/ Excerpt:
It’s usually spread by the American dog tick and the closely related Rocky Mountain wood tick. But in recent years the bacterial infection has also been spread by the brown dog tick — a completely different species.
The researchers were investigating an epidemic of the infection that broke out in the border town of Mexicali starting in 2008. It’s already sickened at least 4,000 people, according to Mexican government estimates. Several hundred have died, and at least four people have died in the U.S. after crossing the border, according to this report and others.
If interested: https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/02/19/calling-all-doctors-please-become-educated-regarding-tick-borne-illness-heres-how/
https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/06/06/lyme-education-for-healthcare-professionals/
Galaxy Diagnostics, the One Health Commission, Louisiana One Health in Action (LOHA), and the One Health Student Club at Tulane partnered to present an educational “Barbecue and Bartonella” event for medical students, veterinarians, public health faculty, and other interested parties on March 28th 2019 at the Tulane School of Public Health. Approximately 70 attendees gathered to raise awareness of bartonellosis and discuss the impact of a one health approach to medicine.
The event included an excerpt from our medical education webinar, Understanding Bartonella. Also LOHA founder, Amy LeBoeuf, shared her son’s medical journey. In her presentation, Amy discussed the severity of his symptoms, the complexity of his treatment, and the overwhelming amount of testing that he has faced over the years.
Like many patients facing chronic illnesses, he saw more than 30 doctors in 19 different specialties. A variety of autoimmune diseases were considered, including lupus, fibromyalgia, and complex regional pain syndrome, before an accurate diagnosis was made.
“It is imperative that we develop a different approach in the medical community,” says Amy LeBoeuf, founder of Louisiana One Health in Action, “because not everyone that becomes ill has the same host response to these pathogens, which make it easy to mistake for other diagnoses.”
LOHA is a community of advocates dedicated to spreading the one health initiative at a community level and providing opportunities for awareness and education. Along with this event, they also organized a “Beating Bartonella” color run that Galaxy Diagnostics co-sponsored in October. If you would like to learn more about the organization and their events, please visit their page here.
About Galaxy Diagnostics, Inc.
As a social venture and a One Health company, Galaxy Diagnostics is passionate about protecting the animal-human bond through the surveillance, prevention and clinical management of flea- and tick-borne diseases shared by people and animals. Not only do we offer the best possible molecular and serology test options available, but we work with researchers and clinicians to generate new knowledge about emerging infectious diseases such as bartonellosis, Lyme borreliosis and other vector-borne diseases. Based on our scientific expertise, we are able to provide counsel to clinicians and researchers dedicated to achieving the most accurate diagnosis possible for their patients. Our mission is reflected in our corporate values, clinical service offerings, and everyday interaction with patients, clinicians and researchers.
**Comment*
Any forward progress regarding Bartonella is pretty much due to the efforts of one man – Dr. Breitschwerdt (veterinarian). Like other researchers truly undertaking research that helps Lyme/MSIDS patients, he’s heavily vested.
His own father died due to chronic Bartonellosis: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3044516/#!po=1.02041
The love he had for his dad is palpable – even in a scientific article. Excerpt:
Potentially, his illness illustrates a complex interaction between intravascular Bartonella infection and complex disease expression, provides documentation for an as yet uncharacterized zoonotic rodent Bartonella sp., and offers disconcerting evidence supporting antimicrobial drug ineffectiveness and clinical evidence supporting the concept that persistent infection with >1 Bartonella spp. may lead to immunosuppression and opportunistic infections with organisms such as herpes zoster and C. albicans. As in his life, Dad would want this story to benefit others after his death. We hope that it does.
Breitschwerdt has seen all sorts of animals and mites, TICKS, fleas and even spiders test positive for Bartonella.
“Animals are the primary reservoir for the Bartonella species,” he said. https://www.northcarolinahealthnews.org/2013/12/05/bartonella-is-everywhere-so-why-dont-we-know-more-about-it/
More on Bartonella: https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2016/01/03/bartonella-treatment/
https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2016/11/29/bartonella-seizures/
https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2019/04/08/case-series-bartonella-ocular-manifestations/
https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2016/08/09/a-bartonella-story/
https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2019/03/02/skin-inflammation-nodules-letting-the-cat-out-of-the-bag/ Read comment after article.
https://mailchi.mp/treatlyme/antigerm-action-plans-lyme-disease (Go to Link to get FREE pdf book)
Subscribe to the Treat Lyme newsletter and receive a FREE pdf download book: Antigerm Action Plans for Lyme Disease and Ten Daily Email Health Tips. Plus get updates, special offers and more.
I have decided to offer Treat Lyme newsletter subscribers a free downloadable version of my book: Antigerm Action Plans for Lyme Disease: How to Use Herbal & Prescription Germ Killers for Bacteria, Parasites, Viruses & Yeast.
In the Appendices you will find two bonus sections you can use to improve your Lyme disease treatment. These include:
If you have any questions, participate in my weekly free Lyme Q&A Webinar called Conversations with Marty Ross MD.
To learn more: https://www.treatlyme.net
Marty Ross, MD, is the creative force behind Treat Lyme, Marty Ross MD Supplements, and this book. He believes strongly that given the right information, people with Lyme and tick-borne illnesses can recover. He offers these resources so that all who have Lyme disease may recover with or without a physician.
Dr. Ross is a graduate of Indiana University School of Medicine. He completed his family medicine residency at the Georgetown University/Providence Hospital program where he served as chief resident.
Dr. Ross is a member of The International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society and The Institute for Functional Medicine.
