Word: lyme
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...suburbs and rural areas, summer is Lyme-disease season, prompting the flurry of instructions now issuing forth from doctors' offices on how to avoid the illness. It's wise to pay attention: the symptoms can range from joint pain and lethargy in mild cases to debilitating arthritis and even heart damage. But thwarting Lyme disease is not so easy, as anyone knows who has ever searched for the poppy seed-size tick that carries it, or for its unmistakable rash -- which sometimes never appears at all. Tests sometimes don't reveal an infection, and symptoms may not show...
...based diagnostic tests are also under development for Lyme disease, tuberculosis and viral meningitis. Present tests for tuberculosis, which involve culturing and growing the bacteria, take up to a month to confirm a diagnosis. PCR can do the job in a few hours. Current tests are unable to distinguish viral meningitis quickly from the far more dangerous bacterial form of the disease, which is most common in infancy. As a result, all babies found to have meningitis are treated as if they had the more lethal form. With a PCR diagnosis, those with viral meningitis could be spared unnecessary hospitalization...
Antibiotic treatment usually works fairly well in the early stages, but the suffering of a few patients with advanced Lyme disease does not respond to conventional cures. So a dangerous and unconventional therapy has come into use. Dr. Henry Heimlich of Cincinnati, known for developing the Heimlich maneuver to relieve choking, observed that Lyme disease resembles syphilis in that it is caused by a corkscrew-shaped spirochete. He knew of an outdated treatment for the late stages of syphilis in which patients were deliberately infected with malaria and then cured of it. It was believed once that malarial fevers cooked...
...Nancy Modiano, a 30-year-old Hamilton, N.J., resident, agrees with Heimlich. She thinks she contracted Lyme disease as a teenager. By last year she was helpless, subject to vomiting and seizures, her joints so swollen that she couldn't operate her wheelchair. She flew to Mexico City last November and was injected with malaria. For 35 days her fever would spike to 108 degrees, then drop to 95 degrees. Yet two weeks after the induced malaria was cured, she was learning to walk again. Though she still has some Lyme symptoms, her recovery continues. She sums up the experience...
...HEALTH Lyme disease: those ticks are taking the fun out of summer...