Facts About Lyme Disease
Tuesday, August 28th, 2007Lyme disease is nothing to be taken lightly.
I woke up this morning and the news just happened to feature a woman who had just gone through a yearlong ordeal because of Lyme disease from a tick she found on herself. Her testimony was an eye opener. Did you know 20,000 people a year get Lyme disease but then only 30% get diagnosed correctly for the disease. So who knows how many people a year get it.
This particular woman went to bed fine and woke up paralyzed from her waist down and neck up. No one diagnosed her correctly for a year. Think about that. If you are the head of the household and wake up one morning paralyzed and then can’t get diagnosed correctly for almost a year after constant visits to the doctor and hospital, pills, treatments, etc. It would just about break a person. There is even more bad news. 60% of the blood tests for Lyme disease are inaccurate also. There really is no way of diagnosing the disease.
The woman remembered pulling a tick off of herself a year prior to any symptoms showing up. A person can harbor the disease for years before any symptoms show up. Once a tick of this sort gets engorged with blood they are easy to spot. It needs to be removed within 24 hours. Once removed, there will be a bulls-eye looking mark. It is important to seek medical treatment immediately because the disease is caused by bacteria. Antibiotics work more easily if they are administered right away, otherwise the bacteria will cause an infection throughout the body. The woman who was on the news was lucky. After a year, a doctor diagnosed her correctly. She had to get high doses of antibiotics into her heart for two weeks.
This is just an example of why no one should feel global warming won’t affect them. Besides the weather itself getting worse with more tornadoes, and straight-line winds, bugs that carry disease might really be worse. There are many, many hunters in Michigan that could be affected easily if the tick populations continue to grow. Deet is the spray of choice to keep ticks off. But Deet is dangerous to children. Keeping covered up from head to toe is the next best thing. What affects everyone in the summertime here is mosquitoes. That’s a bad scenario if global warming keeps warming our winters to the point nothing totally freezes anymore. There will nothing to kill off pests like mosquitoes, which really carry some miserable and deadly diseases.