Word: lyme
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...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...
Twenty years after the first cases of Lyme disease were reported in and around Old Lyme, Conn., the epidemic of tick-borne infections seems to be taking a detour into the twilight zone. Doctors know how to diagnose it--most of the time. They can even cure it--most of the time. Pharmaceutical companies are working on two promising vaccines that could be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration later this year. Biologists have even come up with some ingenious methods for controlling the tick population that carries Lyme. But no one is satisfied, not the victims...
...battle lines are deeply drawn. Taking a page from AIDS activists, several advocacy and educational groups are insisting that, among other things, they be consulted in the design of scientific studies of Lyme. Their input has not been entirely welcomed by the scientific community. One outspoken program officer at the National Institutes of Health was so vociferous in his criticism of the Lyme groups that he was barred from having anything more to do with the disease. His cause was taken up three weeks ago in an op-ed piece in the New York Times that criticized the lay groups...
...facts are clear. Lyme disease is caused by one of a group of corkscrew-shaped bacteria called spirochetes. It is spread when infected deer ticks, or other members of the genus Ixodes, bite their potential hosts, which include field mice, wood rats and suburbanites. Lyme has become endemic in the Northeastern U.S. It has also been found in Canada, Europe and Australia. The initial infection is usually accompanied by an expanding red rash, which generally, but not always, resembles a bull's-eye. Caught early enough, the Lyme infection can be completely cleared by taking oral 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...