Word: lyme
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...LYME LIGHT...
While the Internet may be the biggest force behind science's democratization, it's not the only one. Local health groups have long used little more than flyers and phone banks to document emerging illnesses like Lyme disease or recruit volunteers to test new AIDS medications. Archaeologists increasingly rely on the help of lay people who pay for the privilege of accompanying the scientists on digs. And even in summer, the National Audubon Society is looking forward to its Christmas bird count, a winter tradition in which thousands of volunteers survey the ornithological fauna near their homes in order...
...debate gets downright vicious when the subject turns to "chronic Lyme disease," a catch-all term that means different things to different people. Some patient advocates and their medical allies believe the Lyme spirochete tends to persist in the body even after standard antibiotic treatment. This camp generally favors intravenous antibiotic therapy to treat chronic Lyme. On the other hand, some academic researchers and their allies argue that people with chronic Lyme fall into one of two categories: they either have hypersensitive immune systems that have overreacted to an earlier, no longer viable, Lyme infection--in which case antibiotics...
...heart. Clearly, intravenous antibiotics should not be withheld from people who truly need them. Who truly needs them is, of course, what's in dispute. The NIH is funding a $4.5 million study in an effort to sort out both the best definitions and the best treatments for chronic Lyme disease...
Meanwhile, a group of biologists in central Texas may have come up with at least a partial solution to the Lyme problem. "We call it the four-poster," says John George, a tick specialist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Kerrville. It's a bin full of corn surrounded by specially angled rollers. As deer push in to eat the corn, the rollers coat the animal's head and neck with a pesticide that targets mites and ticks. Pilot studies on 50-acre plots have produced a 95% drop in the local tick population. "What's neat about this...