Lyme disease really is in South

Opinion

August 25, 2012

Lyme disease really is in South

By Robert Hitt Neil, Syndicated columnist The Picayune Item Picayune Item Sat Aug 25, 2012, 07:21 PM CDT

PICAYUNE — Forewarning: your old Uncle Bob mought get het up in this’un.

A choir member brought me a magazine to Wednesday night practice, saying he had picked it up in the local doctor’s office that morning, and it might interest me. Sho’nuff, it did.

Note: I am purposely writing more ungrammatically in this, so that those who don’t agree can say with all sincerity: “What a dummy this guy is!”

This was a medical journal magazine, dating back to springtime, and included an article by two real sho’nuff doctors on Lyme Disease.

Let me pause to set up my own credentials on that subject: I had Lyme Disease, undiagnosed, for about 11 years. I’m all broke up anyway, so the symptoms that settled within me were arthritis, to the point that I was taking two to three dozen painkillers (over-the-counter) a day during the winter, when it was worse. Then I got a call from a national magazine to do an article on Lyme, for a bunch of money. Within three days of doing the research, I suddenly realized, “Hey! I’ve got all these symptoms!” Took me six weeks to find a doctor who would recognize, diagnose, and treat Lyme (this was 1989 by now), but I began antibiotic treatment in June, for essentially a year. I was cured, although most Lyme victims are not, sad to say. The spirochete bacteria will always be in my blood, and when my system gets down, I just go back on antibiotic for a month.

During that period, I was doing a lot of high-priced speaking, some talks on Lyme Disease included, and the president of an insect repellant company heard me at a show in Nashville, then the next week got bit by a tick and had the tell-tale “bull’s-eye rash.” He called me the next week to say that his company was going to hire me to write a book on Lyme Disease, and we worked out the details and I went to work. I got about a third through with it, when circumstances beyond our control took that opportunity from me. But I still had the research, and this was back 20 years ago, remember?

Even at that time, there was medical evidence that Lyme had been detected in every state but Alaska and maybe Hawaii. The article B.R. gave me said it wasn’t a problem except in New England and the upper Midwest.

There was medical evidence that the spirochete bacteria had been found in almost every bloodsucking insect, including a Lyme epidemic in Philadelphia that was spread by fleas, and stopped when the city poisoned all the rats! This article blamed ticks as the mainmost vector, which they are, because a tick can carry the infected blood in its system for three weeks, whereas a Lyme-carrying mosquito has to bite me, then almost immediately go bite you, to spread it.

An animal is seven times more likely to have Lyme than a human, and it can be spread by body fluids — blood, salvia, etc — to humans or other animals. I ain’t a cat person, but I thought it was fitting that one can’t identify Lyme in cats readily because, the mainmost symptom in cats is — lethargy! I have once or twice seen a non-lethargic cat, but he had just been turpentined by a couple of bad boys.

My research for the Lyme book also turned up an interesting theory on how Lyme began and was spread, which involves Medical researchers experimenting on mutating spirochete bacteria for what we used to call “Germ Warfare” back during the so-called Cold War. Their New England laboratory was wrecked by a hurricane which blew the bacteria straight across Long Island Sound into — where else? — Old Lyme, Connecticut, where it was initially misdiagnosed as an epidemic of juvenile arthritis in the mid-seventies, a few years later.

Lyme Disease has spread very well since then, and IT IS a real problem in the South, as well as most other parts of the country. Shame on the folks who keep denying that it cripples and kills folks outside of New England! No, Ma’am, I ain’t a doctor; but I’m the most educated-on-Lyme-Disease victim that you know!

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