This article is a reprint. It was originally published August 22, 2018. It’s now well-recognized that chronic infection is an underlying factor in many if not most chronic illnesses. Diseases such as Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, cardiomyopathy, gastritis and chronic fatigue are all turning out to be expressions of chronic infections, and Lyme disease appears to be a major, yet oftentimes hidden, player.
According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics released in 2013,1,2 an estimated 300,000 new cases of Lyme disease were being diagnosed in the U.S. each year. That’s about 10 times higher than the officially reported number of cases, and is indicative of severe underreporting.
Lyme Disease Now Found in All 50 States
Lyme disease used to be confined to the area of New England. The disease is actually named after the East Coast town of Lyme, Connecticut, where the disease was first identified in 1975.3 Now, a Quest Diagnostics health trend report4 warns the tick-borne disease has spread and is being diagnosed in every state in the U.S.5,6 Last year, 10,001 cases of Lyme were diagnosed through Quest Diagnostics’ testing in Pennsylvania alone, the state with the highest prevalence.
New England states (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont) accounted for the vast majority — 60% — of the cases diagnosed through Quest, numbering 11,549 in total. Between 2016 and 2017, prevalence rose by 50% in New England and 78% in Pennsylvania. However, positive tests also rose in areas where Lyme has previously been absent, including Florida and California. Overall, over the past seven years the greatest uptick in positive tests occurred between 2016 and 2017.
According to Harvey W. Kaufman, senior medical director for Quest Diagnostics:7 “Lyme disease is a bigger risk to more people in the United States than ever before. We hypothesize that these significant rates of increase may reinforce other research suggesting changing climate conditions that allow ticks to live longer and in more regions may factor into disease risk.”
Lyme Disease 101
Lyme disease refers to illnesses transferred by insects. Although some still attribute transmission exclusively to ticks, the bacteria can also be spread by other insects, including mosquitoes, spiders, fleas and mites. Ticks are blood suckers, and prefer dark crevices such as your armpit, behind your ear or on your scalp. Once it attaches itself and starts feeding on your blood, it will at some point “spit” its bacterial load into your blood stream. If it carries an infectious organism, the infection spreads to you via this salivary emission.
The black-legged tick (Ixodes scapularis, also known as the deer tick) was linked to transmission of the disease in 1977. In 1982, Willy Burgdorfer, Ph.D., identified the bacterium responsible for the infection: Borrelia burgdorferi8 — a cousin to the spirochete bacterium that causes syphilis. Since then, five subspecies and 300 strains of B. burgdorferi have been identified, many of which have developed resistance to our various antibiotics.
B. burgdorferi is capable of taking different forms in your body (cystic, granular and cell wall deficient forms) depending on the conditions it’s trying to survive in. This clever maneuvering helps it hide and survive. Its corkscrew-shaped form also allows it to burrow into and hide in a variety of your body’s tissues, which is why it causes such wide-ranging multisystem involvement. The organisms may also live in biofilm communities — basically a colony of germs surrounded by a slimy glue-like substance that is hard to unravel. All of these different morphologies explain why treatment is so difficult, and why recurrence of symptoms occurs after standard antibiotic protocols. Ticks can also simultaneously infect you with other disease-causing organisms, such as Bartonella, Rickettsia, Ehrlichia and Babesia. Any or all of these organisms can travel with B. burgdorferi (the causative agent of Lyme) and add their own set of symptoms.
Signs and Symptoms of Lyme
Common side effects of tick bites include:
- An itchy “bull’s-eye” rash (however, while this is the only distinctive hallmark unique to Lyme, this mark is absent in nearly half of those infected, and only 15 to 50% of Lyme patients recall a tick bite)
- Pain
- Fever
- Inflammation
A 2014 paper published in the journal Frontiers in Zoology9,10 has argued that ticks should be reclassified as venomous, noting that many of its salivary proteins and their known functions are similar to those found in scorpion, spider, snake, platypus and bee venoms. An estimated 8% of tick species are in fact capable of causing paralysis with a single bite.
Symptoms of Lyme disease typically start with unrelenting fatigue, recurring fever, headaches and achy muscles or joints, which may progress to muscle spasms, loss of motor coordination and/or intermittent paralysis, meningitis or heart problems. For a printable list of symptoms, refer to the Lyme Disease Association.11 Lymedisease.org has also created a printable symptom checklist.12
The simplest presentation is the orthopedic form of Lyme disease, which is typically more superficial, affecting the larger joints. When the microbes and associated immune reactions are situated in your connective tissue, the infection presents as a “vague, dispersed pain,” which oftentimes ends up being misdiagnosed as fibromyalgia.
Lyme disease, just as syphilis was, is also known as “the great imitator,”13 as it mimics many other disorders, including multiple sclerosis, arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, ALS, ADHD and Alzheimer’s disease. Interestingly enough, despite debilitating symptoms, many Lyme patients outwardly appear quite healthy, which is why Lyme disease has also been called “the invisible illness.”
What’s Causing the Rapid Spread of Lyme Disease?
Over the years, a number of theories have been presented to explain the rapid increase of Lyme, and its geographical spread. According to the CDC, climate change may be part of the equation. The migration of hosts such as deer and rodents due to changes in land use is another. As reported by the Center for Public Integrity:14 “The link between Lyme disease and climate change isn’t as direct as with other vector-borne diseases. Unlike mosquitoes, which live for a season and fly everywhere, deer ticks have a two-year life cycle and rely on animals for transport. That makes their hosts key drivers of disease. Young ticks feed on mice, squirrels and birds, yet adults need deer … to sustain a population.
Rebecca Eisen, a federal CDC biologist who has studied climate’s influence on Lyme, notes that deer ticks dominated the East Coast until the 1800s, when forests gave way to fields. The transition nearly wiped out the tick, which thrives in the leaf litter of oaks and maples. The spread of the deer tick since federal Lyme data collection began in the 1990s can be traced in part to a decline in agriculture that has brought back forests while suburbia has sprawled to the woods’ edges, creating the perfect habitat for tick hosts.
Eisen suspects this changing land-use pattern is behind Lyme’s spread in mid-Atlantic states like Pennsylvania, where the incidence rate has more than tripled since 2010. ‘It hasn’t gotten much warmer there,’ she says. But climate is playing a role. Ben Beard, deputy director of the federal CDC’s climate and health program, says warming is the prime culprit in Lyme’s movement north. The CDC’s research suggests the deer tick, sensitive to temperature and humidity, is moving farther into arctic latitudes as warm months grow hotter and longer. Rising temperatures affect tick activity, pushing the Lyme season beyond its summer onset.”
Declining Fox Population May Be a Driving Force
Other research pins the spread of Lyme to rodents, more so than deer. The main predators of mice and rats are fox, birds of prey such as hawks, falcons and owls, and snakes and cats. Agricultural and urban sprawl is killing off habitats for all kinds of animals, including these natural predators. The red fox, for example, feeds on rodents, but urban and agricultural sprawl, and the competition with coyotes for habitat has caused the fox population to diminish.
Hunting cannot be blamed for killing of the fox population today. Fox were overhunted in the early 1900s, but today fox hunting and trapping has either been restricted or banned for decades. Instead, the vanishing fox population appears to be primarily caused by an increase in coyotes.15 The coyote population is thriving in almost every state…