I’d Like to Buy the World a Brand New Disease to Fear

Remember that New Yorker story from earlier in the summer about how basically everyone has lyme disease in 2013 but nobody knows how to treat it or, really, anything about it? Outside also covered this in detail not too long ago. Both were a joy to read, if you’re an indulgent hypochondriac with any real self respect. (Oh, also: are you a hypochondriac? Email me for a project.) Biologists agree on the origins and the cause of the disease, Michael Specter wrote, but not much else:

…nearly everything else about Lyme disease — the symptoms, the diagnosis, the prevalence, the behavior of the borrelia spirochete after it infects the body, and the correct approach to treatment — is contested bitterly and publicly. Even the definition of Lyme disease, and the terminology used to describe it, has fuelled years of acrimonious debate. The conventional medical assessment is straightforward: in most cases, the tick bite causes a skin rash, called erythema migrans, which is easily identified by its bull’s-eye. If left untreated, the bacteria can spread to muscles, joints, the heart, and even the brain. Public-health officials say that a few weeks of antibiotic treatment will almost always wipe out the infection, and that relapses are rare. In this view, put forth in guidelines issued by the Infectious Diseases Society of America, Lyme is normally easy to treat and easy to cure.

For many people, though, the clinical situation is far more complicated. Some who have been infected with borrelia don’t notice the rash. Others — up to a quarter of those with Lyme, including Kaleigh Ahern — never even get one. Most troubling, some patients who are treated continue to suffer from a variety of symptoms long after their therapy has ended. Nobody really knows why they fail to get better. Infectious-disease experts refer to the phenomenon, which can affect up to twenty per cent of patients, as Post-Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome.

Great news. The CDC would now like to cosign this story:

Lyme diseaseis about 10 times more common than previously reported, health officials said Monday.

As many as 300,000 Americans are actually diagnosed with Lyme disease each year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced. Usually, only 20,000 to 30,000 illnesses are reported each year. For many years, CDC officials have known that many doctors don’t report every case and that the true count was probably much higher.

The new figure is the CDC’s most comprehensive attempt at a better estimate.

Do you have lyme disease? No, you’re fine, I bet. Do I have lyme disease? Probably, who knows. This reminds me of the time I found out, during the peak of the New York bedbug crisis of late 2010 and also courtesy the CDC, that most humans don’t even have a physical reaction to the monsters’ bites. That sort of realization — we all have it and there’s nothing we can do about it, ha ha — is at once both very calming and very terrifying. Shower up.