Treatment And Antibiotics For Lyme's Disease

Caught early, the disease can be cured with antibiotics, although specialists still debate which drugs work best and whether doctors should prescribe them if they suspect Lyme infection but aren't sure. If the tell-tale rash doesn't appear, diagnosis can be tricky in the first weeks, because it takes time for the body to produce antibodies that can be reliably detected by blood tests.

Detecting and treating the infection early is important, because even though the early flu-like illness usually subsides without drugs, Lyme disease can cause a wide array of serious long-term health problems if it isn't treated. It can progress in weeks or months to disabling arthritis or arthritis-like pain that migrates from joint to joint. It can cause fatigue, numbness, tingling and other nervous system problems and even potentially life-threatening heart disturbances.

Virtually every aspect of Lyme disease has become the subject of research; it's a complex and interesting problem environmentally as well as medically.

The Ixodes dammini ticks, (named by colleagues of Dr. Gustave J. Dammin, a Harvard pathologist) live most notably mice and deer, but also on other mammals and birds.

Researchers suspect that Lyme's emergence in recent years has been caused in part by growing deer herds and in part by people building homes and vacationing in wooded areas. They're not sure what other factors play roles. Nor are they sure how the disease is related to a similar, tick-borne illness that has long been in Europe.

There is a tick-control product called "Damminix" that several communities are trying.

"Damminix" consists of pesticide-treated cotton balls in cardboard tubes that are placed on the ground at 10-yard intervals. White-footed mice, many of which carry Lyme bacteria, carry the cotton back to their nests, in the process killing the immature ticks.

Health officials in Ipswich and Nantucket are enthusiastic about Damminix, but other health officials and some Lyme experts say questions about its cost, effectiveness, legal liability issues and potential environmental impact aren't resolved.

Last year, 15 acres at Castle Hill, the mansion at Crane Beach in Ipswich, were treated with Damminix tubes. They will be used there again this year.

On the medical side, research focuses not only on how to treat and identify Lyme disease, but on how the spirochete remains in the body only to cause disease years later.

The ultimate goal is to find a connection between the arthritis caused by Lyme disease and other forms of arthritis, some of which he suspects also may have infectious origins.

The question is this: Given that Lyme's symptoms can be so wide-ranging and even sometimes so vague, how can physicians determine whose illness is due to past Lyme infection? And how should these patients be cared for?

Syphilis also caused by a spirochete has been known as the Great Mimic, and this is as well. We're still learning, trying to learn, how to recognize it later in the disease. It's not just an academic question, because this is a disease that is treatable by antibiotic therapy.

Lyme Disease