Fruit of the Contemplative Life
Fruit of the contemplative life: => Health, healing and fitness => : Jhanananda October 16, 2016, 01:41:06 PM
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Last night and this morning I was reading through an interesting article Long-Forgotten Research Unearths New Mystery about Lyme Disease (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/long-forgotten-research-unearths-new-mystery-about-lyme-disease/?WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20161014), in Scientific American, which covers Lyme Disease and another not so well understood disease that seems to strike patients with Lyme Disease, which goes by the names: Swiss Agent Disease; or Rickettsia helvetica.
While the evidence is hardly conclusive, patients and doctors might be mistaking under-the-radar Swiss Agent infections for Lyme, the infectious disease specialists said. Or the bacteria could be co-infecting some Lyme patients, exacerbating symptoms and complicating their treatment—and even stoking a bitter debate about whether Lyme often becomes a persistent and serious illness...
How might the Swiss Agent add fuel to this conflict? Steere, a Massachusetts General Hospital researcher and among the world’s leading Lyme experts, said some patients who believe they have Lyme, but who test negative for the infection, might be suffering from an illness caused by one of several other microbes. Rickettsia helvetica could be among them, he said...
Ticks often carry more than one pathogen, so patients can also have co-infections along with Lyme, which frequently begin with similar symptoms, such as fever, neck stiffness, and headaches.
“You can’t tell them apart clinically” in the first several weeks, Steere said. Co-infections can cause “more severe early disease … a phenomenon of the summer, when the tick bites.” Longer term, the confusion would not last because of Lyme’s distinct symptoms, even if the infection were untreated, he added.
Other experts noted that Lyme and Rickettsia helvetica have co-infected patients in Europe. Antibiotics normally cure Rickettsia helvetica infections, but diagnosis can prove difficult because the microbe does not cause a rash. If untreated or inadequately treated, the two infections share overlapping, serious, and sometimes persistent symptoms, according to clinical researchers. These include debilitating fatigue, severe headaches, muscle weakness, meningitis, facial paralysis, and sarcoidosis—a chronic inflammatory disease that can cause lung and skin problems. Numerous studies have linked Rickettsia helvetica to such ailments, although it is not regarded as a major public health peril in Europe.
He had found “that many patients suffered not only of arthritis, but also of disorders affecting the skin, muscular, cardiac, and nervous systems,” Burgdorfer told his official biographer from the National Institutes of Health in 2001.