It’s quite long, but really worth reading, it really shows just how difficult the disease is to identify and to treat, and might be of help to anyone who is, or thinks they might have the disease.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/life-with-lyme/594736/

The BBC also have an article up suggesting that older, white women are most at risk from Lyme Disease – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-49344772

There was a good Science Vs podcast about Lyme disease last year, it’s worth checking out if you’ve an interest in the subject.

Lyme Disease, a potentially shocking twist

Where is Rayban with his insistance that Lyme is a short term not serious disease?

To be fair to rayban, “it’s complicated” and I like to think he’s suggesting that it may not be a long term infection but possibly inflammatory response

I think there’s a bit of science in support of that (CBA looking now). There’s also the difficulty Drs face that there are no quick and dependable tests to show active infection, even before we get to low-level persistence & sessile cells.
(doxycycline in particular is an antibiotic with identifiable anti-inflammatory properties and so you might even stretch to a rationale for it working in the absence of active Lyme infection. The “plaquenil” mentioned in that article is hydroxychloroquine – used to be quite widely used vs rheumatiod arthritis etc because it also modulates chronic immune response)

Look at this recent list from the EMA:

arthralgia, pain in extremities, gait disturbance, neuropathies associated with paraesthesia, depression, fatigue, memory impairment, sleep disorders, and impaired hearing, vision, taste and smell

That’s not Lyme, it’s long-term adverse effects of quinolone antibiotics – been on the market & widely used for, what, 30 years or so and it took that long for an association to be endorsed by EMA (US was a bit earlier)

Those are vague & really common symptoms in isolation or small combinations, experienced often without identifiable causes and that’s why it takes ages to identify common links between people experiencing them. I wonder if anyone’s looked into the drug histories of the chronic Lyme sufferers to see how many had quinolones (ever, not just “for” their Lyme)?

He was insisting that there were NO long term effects. Unfortunately for him NICE changed its guideleines to agree there was although still talking about immune system damage rather than infection – for which there is good evidence. NICE will allways be conservative and behind the cutting edge – it has to be because of the way its set up and I have no issue with that

One of the effects is death if untreated isn’t it? Sounds pretty long term.

Though very rare, but heart inflammation conditions are a more severe complication from Lyme disease and in extreme cases could be fatal.

Fair enough – I don’t typically read the full “debates” that start up on here 😉

I’m mostly in the “probably is a persistent organism” camp but still think that the apparent success of some treatment is not necessarily due to antibacterial effect

It’d be good if the people demonstrating viable organisms could do serial quantitative testing to see if flares coincide with activity – even in small numbers

I do wonder/worry about the gut flora of some of these people receiving multiple prolonged courses – be great if somebody studied that too (nice longitudinal study of flora on 1st diagnosis of lyme – before any abx – then on emergence of chronic Lyme before starting further abx and then further along the line). May turn out that microbiome is what influences “over” response anyway.

Intereseting article on the bbc news https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-50206382