12 ms·
There are actually clinical trials underway for a new Lyme vaccine: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/260471.php http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles
by newbie12 13y ago
There are actually clinical trials underway for a new Lyme vaccine: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/260471.php http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/260471.php
The core problem with the original vaccine is that 80% effectiveness is terrible-- that's not sufficient, you still need to take all normal precautions. The second problem is that many people at high risk for Lyme may already have it, or have other tick-borne diseases that are difficult to diagnose and can be chronic-- that probably explains the "side effects" problem.
Lyme is at the center of a number of nasty bacteria and parasites that you can get from a deer tick. The most effective thing we can do is reduce deer populations.
- randomchars 13y agoDeer ticks are not the only kind of ticks.
- newbie12 13y agoThey are the ticks that carry Lyme.
- randomchars 13y agoNot the only ones. There are no deer ticks in Europe, yet we still have Lyme disease.
- _delirium 13y agoDue to Europe's lower concentration of wild animals and higher concentration of farm animals, the role of deer for the north-American deer tick seems to be played primarily by sheep and cattle for the European Ixodes ricinus. I suppose one way of fighting it analogously might be to reduce populations of sheep and cattle, but that seems likely to run into opposition.
- Ergomane 13y agoWhile it is called the 'sheep tick' around here, Ixodes ricinus has a number of hosts, including mice, deer and birds (eg black birds, robins) that contribute to the spread and maintenance of the species in forests and woodlands. Roe deer often carry all tick stages (larvae, nymphs and adults).
- Tichy 13y agoInteresting that it's yet another way that our meat eating habit bites us back.
- pc86 13y agoOh come on.
- Tichy 13y agoWhat? Lot's of diseases are a result of animal farming - see "Guns, Germs and Steel" for an account of how the germs we bred in Europe helped deplete the New World of people who weren't exposed to animal farming yet. And modern factory farming will add it's share (antibiotics resistances and so on).
- TheCraiggers 13y agoNevermind all the ways our "water drinking habit" bites us back. We are omnivores. We need vegetables AND meat to be healthy. I think what you meant to say is it's another way our overpopulation is biting us back. If we didn't have so many people we could still have normal herd sizes. (Granted, it's likely the prevalence of said food that led to overpopulation... oh nevermind.)
- _delirium 13y agoAnimal consumption has scaled considerably faster than population, so I don't think it's solely that. The traditional Mediterranean diet, for example, uses much less meat than is now commonly consumed in the Mediterranean countries. My guess is some mixture of affluence (can afford to import meat from faraway factory farms), the factory-ization itself (meat is a cheap-ish commodity), and decline in cooking skills and time available to use them (most good vegetable-heavy dishes take more time and skill to cook than a hamburger does).
- teahat 13y agoRound the corner from my house in Richmond Park (London), there is a large population of deer who carry the bacterium that causes Lyme disease (and apparently several other exciting ailments) and is spread by ticks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond_Park http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond_Park.
- bhickey 13y agoBlack legged ticks are the principle vector for lyme on the west coast. I learned first hand that you can find them on Mt. Tam.
- Alex3917 13y ago> The most effective thing we can do is reduce deer populations. The disease comes from mice, not deer. Deer do help spread the ticks around, but reducing the deer population wouldn't significantly help with lyme disease prevalence. I'm actually currently on roughly day 14 of doxycycline for possibly having it or some other tick infection. I got bit on the shoulder by a nymph, found at somewhere between 18 - 24 hours later still unengorged. I then got the 200mg prophylaxis later that day, meaning that my odds of getting anything should have been less than 1%. I never developed a lyme rash, only a local rash, but my shoulder and arm started hurting within a couple days. I tried to convince myself it was just from using my laptop even though I've never had any RSI problems, or else just from being tense from worrying about it, but it was still sore on and off for the next 20 days. Finally woke up and my whole arm was burning, so I drove down to the pharmacy and had the scrip filled within the hour. It's frustrating though because there's really no way to know if you have it in the first place, and also no way to know if you're actually cured once you finish the treatment. The symptoms did go away pretty much as soon as I started taking the meds, but who knows what that really means.
- refurb 13y agoWasn't there a study in CT where they massively reduced the prevalence of Lyme disease by culling the deer population?
- johnthedebs 13y agoWhile mice spread the bacteria to a new generation of ticks, reducing deer populations apparently does have a dramatic effect on their ability to spread the disease. I'm on a mobile device, so the best I can do right now is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Management_of_host_animals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Management_of_host...
- Alex3917 13y agoAhh interesting, I did see a bunch of sites/studies suggesting otherwise, but looking at them again they seem somewhat dubious. My bad.
- 13y ago
- danielharan 13y agoHow about giving the deer the vaccine?
- learc83 13y agoFor one, it requires multiple booster shots.
- jk215 13y agotalk about an interesting start-up model...
- 300bps 13y agoStudies have done something similar: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/opinion/ticks-to-the-slaughter.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/opinion/ticks-to-the-slaug... Summary: Researchers from Cornell University installed and monitored dozens of “four-poster” feeding stations, which lure deer to a bin baited with corn and rigged with rollers soaked with a tick-killing pesticide, permethrin. When a deer rubs against the rollers, ticks die by the thousands. One station can treat all the deer in about 100 acres.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoI would donate to something like this.
- joemaller1 13y agoChickens love to eat ticks.
- ddlatham 13y agoOr fence lizards! http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/02/15/ticks-lizard-lyme-disease/ http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/02/15/ticks-lizard-lyme-...
- tyree732 13y agoAccording to wikipedia, 7.9 people per 100,000, so ~21k people, get Lyme Disease every year. Imagine if suddenly ~16k fewer people got the disease, do you think those people would find the vaccine terrible?
- cantankerous 13y agoI think is point is, from an individual's perspective, you'd still have to play it safe in the woods. People wouldn't be so inclined to get the vaccine if it didn't allow them to ignore the tick illnesses when they're out in nature. The vaccine wouldn't be so effective in that sense.
- tsuraan 13y agoIf there were a 100% effective vaccine against lyme's, I'd still check myself for ticks at the end of the day, and remove (and incinerate) any that I found. Ticks are nasty, whether or not they can give you diseases.
- FaceKicker 13y agoWhat's wrong with 80% effectiveness? I didn't know anything about the effectiveness of vaccines, but 80% effective struck me as being 'pretty good'. I looked up the effectiveness of flu vaccines for comparison, and found a source [1] that said it varies in effectiveness from 70 to 90%, so just about the same. I've never felt compelled to be more careless after taking a vaccine (I'm not even sure what I'd do differently if I did); I just get vaccines to minimize the expected number of times I get a disease in my lifetime. [1] http://www.webmd.com/vaccines/how-effective-is-flu-vaccine http://www.webmd.com/vaccines/how-effective-is-flu-vaccine