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Health See other Health Articles Title: Lyme disease 10x as common as reported - CDC The CDC has said Lyme disease is much more common than most doctors had previously believed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spoke out on Sunday night in Boston, Massachusetts at the 2013 International Conference on Lyme Borreliosis and Other Tick-borne Diseases. The CDC gets 30,000 reports of Lyme disease cases each year. However, their experts told the conference that they believe the real number of Americans diagnosed with Lyme disease each year is around 300,000. That’s a stunning tenfold under-reporting of the crippling disease. In a statement provided to media after the presentation, the CDC said that they made the estimate based on three different ongoing studies. And they’re not using a small sample size. One of the ongoing projects involves analyzing the medical claims of 22 million people for six years. The CDC added that their findings uphold 1990s-era studies that said Lyme disease was under-reported by as much as 12-fold. Ninety-six percent of the Lyme cases come from 13 states in the northeast and the upper midwest. The CDC suggested that people fight infection by using repellent and checking for ticks every day. Lyme disease is caused by a bacterium called Borrelia burgdorferi that’s transmitted to humans when they’re bitten by infected ticks. Unfortunately, the ticks are tiny — sometimes reportedly the size of the period at the end of a sentence — and can go overlooked. And that’s a real public health problem. Lyme disease was first identified in the Lyme and Old Lyme area of Connecticut in 1975. But the disease has since exploded, especially in the rural areas of the northeast. If caught early, Lyme can be successfully treated with antibiotics. However, it’s hard to diagnose with vague symptoms like fatigue and pain that can be mistaken for clinical depression. Victims who aren’t treated in time can develop serious and even disabling symptoms of the joints, heart, and nervous system. The new statistics highlight the urgency the CDC feels about Lyme disease. [Lyme disease tick photo by daksel via Shutterstock] Poster Comment: Informative discussion of Lyme on C2C Tuesday; possible connection to MS. Worth a listen from archive. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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