babesiosis ?? worse than lymes?

[greywolf99]

just saw on abc world news about this disease caused by deer ticks -
one more thing for hikers to worry about

[Snowleopard]

Babesiosis is definitely nasty. I had a physical yesterday and talked with my doctor about Lyme (he practiced medicine in Lyme, CT, for some time). He emphasized doing a thorough tick check at the end of the day. If you catch the tick quickly and remove it properly it won't transmit Lyme disease. I'm guessing the same would be true for babesiosis. Also, permethrin on clothes and DEET on exposed skin is useful.

http://www.cdc.gov/parasites/babesiosis/ (http://www.cdc.gov/parasites/babesiosis/)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babesiosis
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babesiosis)

[Bronk]

Don't forget Ehrlichia and Bartonella...80% of people who get Lyme are also infected with Babesia, Ehrlichia or Bartonella, and sometimes all three. And the symptoms for all of these are very similar.

[Buffalo Skipper]

Don't forget Ehrlichia and Bartonella...80% of people who get Lyme are also infected with Babesia, Ehrlichia or Bartonella, and sometimes all three. And the symptoms for all of these are very similar.

But is the treatment for all these the same or different?

[Snowleopard]

But is the treatment for all these the same or different? Lyme and babesiosis get different treatments. Babesiosis is more like malaria than Lyme. The other tick borne diseases, I don't know the treatment, but they're all nasty diseases.

I don't know how common babesiosis is on the AT. It is more common on Long Island, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, but I seem to remember reading somebody getting in the New England mountains.

[Farr Away]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/health/21ticks.html

Seems to be spreading, albeit slowly.

[pdcollins6092]

Here is a link that a friend sent me about babesiosis.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/ways-prevent-tick-bourne-diseases-tick-season-begins/story?id=13897068

[Snowleopard]

Farr Away, thanks for that link. That's bad news about babesiosis spreading:

A potentially devastating infection [babesiosis] caused by tick bites has gained a foothold in the Lower Hudson Valley and in coastal areas of the Northeast

[Pedaling Fool]

Maybe there will become a point of symbiogenesis with these organisms http://discovermagazine.com/2011/apr/16-interview-lynn-margulis-not-controversial-right/?searchterm=Lynn

Excerpt:

Don’t spirochetes cause syphilis?

Yes, and Lyme disease. There are many kinds of spirochetes, and if I’m right, some of them are ancestors to the cilia in our cells. Spirochete bacteria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirochaete) are already optimized for sensitivity to motion, light, and chemicals. All eukaryotic cells have an internal transport system. If I’m right, the whole system—called the cytoskeletal system—came from the incorporation of ancestral spirochetes. Mitosis, or cell division, is a kind of internal motility system that came from these free-living, symbiotic, swimming bacteria. Here [she shows a video] we compare isolated swimming sperm tails to free-swimming spirochetes. Is that clear enough?


Are you saying that the only harmful bacteria are the ones that share an evolutionary history with us?

Right. Dangerous spirochetes, like the Treponema of syphilis or the Borrelia of Lyme disease, have long-standing symbiotic relationships with us. Probably they had relationships with the prehuman apes from which humans evolved. Treponema has lost four-fifths of its genes, because you’re doing four-fifths of the work for it. And yet people don’t want to understand that chronic spirochete infection is an example of symbiosis.

You have upset many medical researchers with the suggestion that corkscrew-shaped spirochetes turn into dormant “round bodies.” What’s that debate all about? 

Spirochetes turn into round bodies in any unfavorable condition where they survive but cannot grow. The round body is a dormant stage that has all the genes and can start growing again, like a fungal spore. Lyme disease spirochetes become round bodies if you suspend them in distilled water. Then they come out and start to grow as soon as you put them in the proper food medium with serum in it. The common myth is that penicillin kills spirochetes and therefore syphilis is not a problem. But syphilis is a major problem because the spirochetes stay hidden as round bodies and become part of the person’s very chemistry, which they commandeer to reproduce themselves. Indeed, the set of symptoms, or syndrome, presented by syphilitics overlaps completely with another syndrome: AIDS.

Wait—you are suggesting that AIDS is really syphilis?

There is a vast body of literature on syphilis spanning from the 1500s until after World War II, when the disease was supposedly cured by penicillin. Yet the same symptoms now describe AIDS perfectly. It’s in our paper “Resurgence of the Great Imitator (http://www.springerlink.com/content/924g933230828284/).” Our claim is that there’s no evidence that HIV is an infectious virus, or even an entity at all. There’s no scientific paper that proves the HIV virus causes AIDS. Kary Mullis (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1993/mullis-autobio.html) [winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for DNA sequencing, and well known for his unconventional scientific views] said in an interview that he went looking for a reference substantiating that HIV causes AIDS and discovered, “There is no such document.”

[Snowleopard]

John Gault wrote: "Maybe there will become a point of symbiogenesis with these organisms" So, if we wait a billion years, we may reach a symbiosis with spirochete that causes Lyme. I wonder what the nature of the symbiosis might be?

30 years ago, the evidence that HIV causes AIDs could be questioned, but the evidence is now overwhelming. I'd say this calls into question the judgement of the quoted author.

http://www.aidstruth.org/NIAIDEvidenceThatHIVCausesAIDS (http://www.aidstruth.org/NIAIDEvidenceThatHIVCausesAIDS)

[Pedaling Fool]

...I'd say this calls into question the judgement of the quoted author.

http://www.aidstruth.org/NIAIDEvidenceThatHIVCausesAIDS (http://www.aidstruth.org/NIAIDEvidenceThatHIVCausesAIDS)
The author is a little freaky and out in the weeds of the mainstream, but I like them types http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis

She's also into the Gaia hypothesis: "She is also a proponent and co-developer of the modern version of Gaia hypothesis (http://www.whiteblaze.net/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis), based on an idea developed by the English atmospheric scientist James Lovelock (http://www.whiteblaze.net/wiki/James_Lovelock)."

So, I'm sure she's also a global warming nut, but I'd still love to talk to her about how she views evolution.

[DaveSail]

Here is a link to the Chester County , PA Lyme Club . ( Highest occurance in the country here . ) Has a lot of other links :http://www.lymepa.org/ David

[DaveSail]

Click on " Reference " or "General " or " Patient " David

[Snowleopard]

The author is a little freaky and out in the weeds of the mainstream, but I like them types http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis

I think I met Lynn Margulis in the late 1960's. She's done interesting work. I used to know some of the people mentioned in that discovery article. I think it's now an accepted theory that the cell nucleus and mitochondria are the sort of bacterial symbiosis that she talks about. That's why I mentioned a billion years, though perhaps the timescale for symbiosis with the Lyme spirochete might be 10s of millions of years.

I should have actually read that discover magazine article and its references, rather than just your quote. In Discover, she seems to be overstating the conclusions of her paper "Resurgence of "the great imitator". AIDS may well sometimes be misdiagnosed for syphilis, but they are distinct diseases. She implies that syphilis is now an obscure disease, but that's just not true. Until the 1990s it was far better known to doctors than AIDS.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/924g933230828284/fulltext.pdf

[Snowleopard]

Davesail, that's also a nice reference for tick borne illness. I like this pdf for an excellent overview of Lyme, etc.:
http://www.lymepa.org/Basics2007v1.2landscape.pdf

[CSeupel]

I am writing a piece about Babesiosis for my journalism class at Columbia U.,maybe an article later. If you've ever had or have Babesiosis, would you talk to me about what it is like? Thanks!

[tiptoe]

I just came down with ehrlichiosis (for the second time in my life). Cause: embedded infected tick. Symptoms: chills and screaming (103 degree) fever. Meds: doxycycline. It wasn't the hiking that did me in, though, it was gardening and yardwork. Best prevention is to do a tick check daily if you're an outdoor type, and who on Whiteblaze isn't?