“She went from this sweet, bubbly kid with a twinkle in her eye, to a child who could not track you, who was completely checked out”.
They went to doctor after doctor but no one could provide an answer. Finally, 51 doctors and 18 months later, they found out Goodreau had Lyme disease.
There is a tiny minority of primary care physicians ("Lyme-Literate Medical Doctors") who will blame any fatigue of unknown etiology on Lyme disease and/or other tick-borne diseases, despite the lack of any clinical signs like the classic red ring or commonly accepted lab results like antibody assays. They prescribe powerful antibiotics on a long term basis, despite the severe side-effects and the complete lack of evidence that such treatments are helpful.
I blame this problem on the fact that some maladies just don't have any answers yet, but people want to provide them. For some, it's chronic lyme. For others, it's biofilms (Cf. the Marshall protocol), subluxations (chiropractic), or unbalanced qi (reiki).
> despite the lack of any clinical signs like the classic red ring
Afaik proper diagnosis still poses quite a bit of challenge.
The red ring doesn't always happen, in a German trial only 23% of neuroborreliosis patients actually had the "wanderröte". [0]
Similar problems with the antibody assays: They can only detect if the pathogen had been present/not present, but not if it's an acute or a chronic infection. That's why some physicians keep on giving long-term antibiotics regimes, based on the assumption that it's a chronic infection.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and you see it in duck territory, and there have been ducks traipsing around where you found it, it's probably a duck.
Speculating on the risks of treatment is premature when the cost is a few $k a year and the alternative is shitty quality of life.
Prove that long-term antibiotic treatment is harmful, and then prove that there exists a better treatment. Daraprim may be extremely toxic, and cost $750/pill, but people still take it.
Is this because the bites are actually making people ill, or are people finally going to the doctor for their illnesses because they have insurance?
Could this also be that people who live in mosquito areas are getting older and thus more susceptible to illness? (Since young people flock to cities on the coast)
They kind of alluded to this in the article, saying that people are traveling more, and thus spreading diseases to mosquitoes, but the data shows a dramatic uptick (pun intended) from last year!
At least here in Texas, there have been outbreaks of Chagas disease (from kissing bugs) and zika that have all come from immigrants from Mexico. Not sure about lyme and west nile.
I don’t know about ticks and fleas, but can we all agree to just fucking eradicate aedes aegypti and the 30 or so species of mosquitos which bite humans? They are literally the most dangerous thing (to humans) on the planet. Responsible for spreading diseases which have killed more humans than any other cause (including all wars) throughout human history.
We can leave the remaining ~3,500 species of mosquitos—which don’t bite humans—alone.
I would instantly quit my job and join any company who's mission was to eradicate mosquitos. Shit, I'm an engineer but if they were full on engineers and short on janitors I'd do that just to be a part of a team doing that work.
We're hiring! [0] At Verily we have a project that is doing exactly that called Debug [1] where we are initially focused on Aedes aegypti. We already have started deploying our mosquitoes out in the field.
Disclaimer: I'm a Software Engineer at Verily, though my main focus is on Baseline / Clinical Studies, however I helped build the website for Debug which was fun.
What function in the general food-chain do these critters fulfill? What are the implications upstream in the chain should that, perhaps, food-base cause to the rest should they be eradicated.
They suck for humans, but what % of a critical link are they to their immediate neighbors along the chain?
You could just move somewhere mosquitoes don't thrive. Being regularly annoyed by mosquitoes is personally a distant memory, and I would not be in support of any attempt to eradicate them.
Where do you live? I've been bitten by mosquitoes in tropical, temperate, and near-polar zones, and at low, high, and mid elevation, in forests, deserts, jungles, and grasslands. And in cities, too, though maybe that's where they don't thrive, because if they do, they get "treated."
I have never been bitten by a mosquito anywhere along the coast near the ocean and certainly not in any of the dryer/desert areas. I've spent a lot of time in the Mojave and other parts of SoCal, it's far too dry. Rattlesnake bites while hiking are a far greater concern of mine than mosquito bites, there are simply _zero_ mosquitoes in my daily life, it's a complete non-issue.
The midwest is where I grew up, so I know what it means to have the outdoors made hostile by mosquitoes. It was relatively trivial to move to greener pastures, and I'm glad to have found absence of mosquitoes was one of the rewards.
Not everybody has option to move, nor everybody should, just because 'there are invasive mosquitoes but we shouldn't touch them'. Plus they spread. In Europe for example I can't think of a single place that doesn't have them - have been bitten in southern Portugal and in northest part of Norway (actually there one could have easily 100 bites on one hand). Maybe Iceland, haven't been there in the summer though
How would I appreciate mosquitoes making the outdoors of the midwest hostile without reacting to mosquito bites?
I react awfully to mosquito bites, and absolutely detest them and it's a big part of what keeps me from visiting home now that I prefer to spend so much time outdoors.
The simple fact is there are pros to California's perma-drought condition.
My assumption is if you're sufficiently upset by mosquitoes to advocate their active eradication with such fervor as posts in this thread suggest, you might be willing to make some compromises if options readily exist which don't require such a ridiculous proposition as eradicating an entire species of insect from the planet because they annoy you.
Also displayed in this thread, there are people ignorant of the possibility of simply moving somewhere no mosquitoes exist - operating under the assumption that it's unavoidable. Indeed, prior to my leaving the midwest, I had no idea there were places people could enjoy nights being active outside year-round without insect bites.
Obviously everyone is going to have different priorities, for many mosquitoes are a minor inconvenience sufficiently mitigated with bug spray and candles. I assume those people wouldn't be willing to move to escape them, but I presume they also wouldn't be vehemently raging about extincting the species as a priority.
I'm here to tell you - yes, you can move to such places, and it's not even particularly difficult or costly. There's _plenty_ of incredibly affordable desert land in California, where there are effectively no mosquitoes. If moving is too inconvenient for you, buy a recreational desert property and vacation there! It's that cheap. The fall-winter climate is ideal and remains good into the spring, there's no humidity, and of course - no mosquitoes!
Or don't make any changes in your life, and fill yourself with rage about the environment you find yourself in, as if that's going to help.
Maybe your diet/genetics/clothing choices are just not as attractive to the mosquitoes in your area - I've seen huge differences in mosquito attention between individuals within a group.
It's also typical that reaction to mosquito bites decreases with age after adolescence (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2571626) so maybe you moved as your reaction to mosquito bites disappeared (and maybe you can visit home again).
I'm sure there are areas where there's enough standing freshwater around to sustain mosquito populations. If you're living in a community densely packed with continuously irrigated yards, there are probably mosquitoes - don't live in those places if no mosquitoes are a priority.
The last time I experienced mosquitoes in California was camping in a rainforest. I am not immune or unattractive to them, they are quite attracted to me.
But I'm also not putting myself in residential areas that would be desert if not for the constant irrigation. You're certainly able to find places with mosquitoes if you're looking for them - why would you do that if you're averse to them?
My point is if you're serious about eradicating mosquitoes, you should at least consider moving somewhere dry which is a far more practical and immediately viable option.
The general understanding is that these creatures, at least far as the U.S. ecosystem is concerned, is that they are an invasive species and provide very little value to the rest of the ecosystem.
The Debug FAQ [1] under "Challenges and Impact" actually has a good answer on this that I'll copy below:
> What’s the ecological impact of reducing Aedes aegypti mosquito populations?
> Globally, there are already extensive attempts underway to reduce Aedes aegypti populations in urban environments to protect human health. Aedes aegypti is an invasive species that almost exclusively feeds on humans in order to reproduce. They are native to some parts of Africa, but international trade and other human activity have allowed Aedes aegypti to spread widely. These mosquitoes invade and proliferate in new communities every year, putting more and more people at risk for mosquito-borne diseases.
> The general consensus among scientists is that the ecological impact of removing Aedes aegypti mosquitoes from urban environment would be small. They are not a significant food source for other animals and don't help pollinate crops. The main ecological impact would be to restore the ecosystem to how it was before the mosquitoes invaded.
> For these reasons, the ecological risk of this project is low, particularly when compared to the impact of existing control methods that can be broadly toxic to humans and the environment, and the Debug team is committed to working with communities and regulators to ensure the safety and acceptability of our field trials and releases.
The problem is that most cities are too noisy for them (and that agriculture uses a lot of biocides).
To put some things in context also, there are 34 millions of new citizens in USA since 2004. We can expected some increase in people bitten just by this. The population had increased therefore the cases also did (but does not explain all the increase)
Some bats are good to hunt mosquitos, some birds are good also, but there are other options. One of them is well known, easy to manage, hard (can starve for weeks), totally silent, harmless and can adapt easily to a human environment: spiders. Would be much much easier to promote than bats.
The other big group is inexplicably neglected, their real role and statistics as mosquito predators are poorly studied, and most people is not even aware of their existence even if they are 100% designed to overpower mosquitoes in its own game. They can fight them in the open air where spiders can't. I'm talking of flies. Some flies are big mosquito killers.
But I bet that most experts on Asilidae struggle each month to find enough funds for keeping their research alive.
Bats are rabies vectors, so you'd have to look at the cost/benefit analysis on an uptick in rabies vs. a downtick in mosquito-borne diseases. I'm sure this has been done but I don't have a citation handy.
Maybe, but from a balcony of a condo I used to have in downtown Austin I could look down at the world’s largest urban bat colony sleeping under the Congress St bridge over our downtown lake[1]. The over a million bats would fly out in an amazing cloud each evening and fly down the lake in mass searching for insects to eat. It was an impressive sight, especially when they chose to fly toward my building splitting around it in flight a few floors below my view.
I used to use the running trail around our downtown lake frequently and I could hear the bats making sounds above me as I ran under the bridge. Occasionally, I would wonder about those stories of spelunkers getting rabies from just breathing the virus from a large subterranean colony, but thousands of people use Austin’s most popular running trail with apparently no ill effects from the close proximity to so many bats.
Yes, I've stood under the Congress Avenue bridge at dusk too (while wearing a hat for guano protection). It's an amazing sight. And it's true that not very many bats have rabies, but a few do. The risk is small but not zero.
My understanding is that mosquitoes (in general, not limited to the human-biting species) aren't a critical link in any ecosystem. They are pollinators, but all mosquito-pollinated species are also pollinated by other insects; they are prey for insectivores, but aren't the primary food source for anything.
There still could be knock-on effects from removing them, but restricting it to the human-biting species might mitigate that.
I've only done a bit of research, but my understand was that while bats eat a lot of mosquitoes, they're so tiny that even a bat doesn't get much out of each one. The stomach contents of a tropical bat are less than 25% mosquitoes by mass after a night of feeding, IIRC.
I admit I don't know if that's true of all species or in all locations.
Yes! Though I don't see any positions open on our website which is interesting. Send me an email (see my profile for my contact info) and I'll be in touch!
> They are literally the most dangerous thing (to humans) on the planet.
Automobiles, sugary foods, an opiods would like a word.
But yes, in terms of threats from other animals, they're at the top of the list.
edit: Holy heck with the instant downvotes. Look: I'm not trying to downplay the threat of malaria and other mosquito-borne illnesses. Malaria is the #9 cause of death in developing nations today and totally worth the efforts to fight it. But it's also true that, if you get in a car or live around cars, they are more likely to kill you than a mosquito. Heart disease (which I'm representing here with the phrase "sugary foods" obviously) kills more people everywhere on earth than malaria, including developing nations.
So depending on how we define "the most dangerous thing", it's not entirely crazy to say that the mosquito isn't it.
Well, it's not clear that that's true in the first place[0].
But even if it is, it's certainly not the case today.
It's not in the top-10 causes of death at the moment. If we limit the scope to developing nations only, it's #9, which is huge, but still killing less than half the number that heart disease does.
Furthermore, most mosquitoes don't carry malaria, but all sugary foods are capable of causing heart disease if consumed in excess.
So it's not unfair to say that sugary foods are more dangerous to humans than mosquitoes.
It’s hard to believe, but just malaria—which is transmitted exclusively by mosquitoes—is responsible for on the order of half of all human deaths throughout history.
And second, if we're talking about present day, malaria is way behind heart disease (largely caused by sugary foods). And in developed nations, its way behind automobiles. And in the USA, it's way behind opioids. So my comment wasn't totally off.
> Edit: I hate Amp but don't know, at a glance, how to get the full URL.
What is the difference between the two for you? I'm on a desktop, and both the AMP and the non-AMP version look literally identical - somewhat mobile-optimized, but not particularly.
Every creature in an ecosystem serves some niche and is part of a very complex balance, and willful eradication of an entire species is extremely irresponsible in that no one can know every consequence.
On the other hand, letting them live is disastrous too. Malaria has killed half of all people who have ever lived. Also, we unintentionally destroy a lot of species every year, often with little direct consequence to humans, so destruction of another one isn't necessarily ecologically disastrous. Of course, it could still be a bad idea, and we shouldn't do it without sufficient research, but the option to do shouldn't be dismissed outright.
The issue with most current mosquito control (https://www.wired.com/2016/06/zika-mosquitos/) and actually most insect control in general is that, historically and even heavily today, they generally involved chemicals (pesticides). Pesticides in general are not insect specific, and can have some rather serious effects on the environment, other animals, and even maybe humans. They also only tend to be effective against mosquitoes for, say, a couple decades or so before mosquitoes develop resistance, and a new one has to be deployed.
I definitely would personally welcome research on efforts to more specifically target the mosquito and the mosquito alone. Chemical based insect control isn't going to go away in the absence of alternatives, meaning that, should an alternative, mosquito specific approach be developed, it probably will have much less "knock on effects" to the ecosystem compared to what we are already doing.
Aedes aegypti are an invasive species to the U.S. [0] so there's little evidence that they would greatly negatively affect the ecosystem if they were to suddenly be eradicated.
That response has always struck me as FUD. You could say the same thing about the actual diseases humanity is trying to, and has successfully gotten rid of. What if the response to people trying to eradicate smallpox was that we should keep it around because we don’t know what the consequence of getting rid of it is? Well, we would still have smallpox around... Should we keep polio around too? Not snarky—is like to understand. Sometimes a known good is better than an unknown bad.
OTOH we're eradicating dozens of species every day without thinking too much about it. Maybe we should eradicate a couple that are actually harmful to us.
The world needs some sort of self-defense mechanism from the biggest parasite of the planet -- human. With significantly diminished mortality due to intra-species conflict, the various epidemics seem to be the only viable way.
The amount of people contracting diseases from bites can increase, but it doesn't actually mean you're more likely to contract diseases from bites.
For instance here in Australia there has been a rise of shark attacks recently. The reason isn't necessarily because sharks were attacking more people or acting more aggressively, it was because more people were in the water.
It's interesting how statistics can point you in the wrong direction.
Although interesting, that analogy doesn't hold for the ticks discussed - the range, habitat and viable seasons for Lyme disease carrying ticks has extended greatly due to climate change across the globe and infection rates have been mostly increasing every year for the past two decades.
Suppressing the booming deer population and getting higher populations of foxes and other predators of mice would definitely with the lyme disease problem.
- All clothes that you wear into the woods should be treated with permethrin. (Don't apply DEET, because mixing permethrin with DEET is neurotoxic.)
- Pants should always be tucked into socks.
- Wear light-colored clothing so that ticks are easier to see before they get onto your skin.
- Wear something like boxer briefs where there is tight elastic on both the wasteband and thighs.
- If you get a tick in a certain park, never go back to that park. The distribution of ticks is highly uneven, so this is surprisingly effective.
- Always check yourself in the mirror as soon as you get home, and then immediately take a shower and make sure you check every square inch of your body.
- Any clothes you wore into the woods should either go into the laundry, or else be stored in a sealed container so that any ticks on your clothing can't start running around your bedroom.
Tickborne illnesses are extremely serious, difficult or impossible to diagnose, and often deadly. But if you always follow these basic steps then you can eliminate the vast majority of the risk.
Scientists used to believe that it took 24 hours after getting bitten to transmit tickborne illnesses, but this is no longer the case. When in doubt just do the 21 days of doxycycline, although obviously this isn't something you ever want to have to do. (Some tickborne illnesses aren't treatable with doxycycline, but this is a good starting point absent other specific symptoms.)
Don't stop hiking, just don't go more often than you're willing to take adequate precautions. That's probably roughly the point of diminishing returns anyway in terms of utility.
If I can't go anywhere where I've seen a tick basically everywhere around the Bay area is no longer available for hiking. Not really sure that's a reasonable precaution.
Also little gaiters I find are better than tucking in your pants.
Interesting. In Fairfield County and Westchester, there are lots of parks where I've spent dozens of hours in the woods without ever seeing a tick, and others where I've seen several the first time I've gone. And I'm usually mushroom hunting, so off trail and rubbing against lots of bushes.
Not to belittle your advice, which is probably very good advice. But it's kinda weird when going outside requires a response protocol like an ABC attack just happened.
Tho you have a point, ticks get in the unlikeliest places: One time I had a tick on the inside of my wrist, right under the watch I was wearing. Which wasn't a good place for the tick, it was crushed dead between the wrist/my watch and simply fell off after I took off the watch.
Two precautions I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of are regularly hosing my outdoor boots down with repellant (most ticks are coming up from the ground and for short walks your boots are your only ground contact) and leaf-blowing trails (ticks prefer leaves).
So in a thread about Lyme disease where people are talking about their company's efforts to eradicate ticks, its not the place to ask a question about ticks?
Whatever.
So, in a thread about Redshift on AWS, with Jeff here talking about the service, I should probably go hire a DBA rather than ask a simple question like "how often should one perform a vacuum?
This is not the place to ask about redshift, you should probably go hire an AWS solutions architect.
I'm not a doctor, but I've gone to the doctor's office with deer tick bites. According to the doctors I've asked, if you catch the tick within 24 hours of being bitten, your chances of infection are virtually nil. But I tend to go to the doctor's anyway, because Lyme is no joke.
If you go, they'll tell you to monitor the site for the characteristic rash, and be alarmed if you have any flu-like symptoms in the next couple of weeks.
Not sure if this advice varies between different countries - but here you get several ticks per season if you are out in nature. If you find the tick soon enough it's normally low risk. If you see anything unusual around the bit (blushing, especially the ring kind, fever, pain etc) you go see a doctor. Otherwise you don't.
Where I live the worry is TBE and Lyme, and people tend to take vaccination shots against TBE. Lyme is terrible but normally only causes chronic problems if undiscovered/untreated. My 6yo has had dozens of ticks, (a handful every season) and had antibiotics for the first time after a bite already when he was 3. We check him after he has been out, and every now and then we find 1 or 2.
Keep track of the bite site. If it in any way looks different from normal, except for a single red mark as a consequence of the bite, go to the doctor. If you get swollen and red around the bite site, especially in a "ring", insist on antibiotics to treat it.
Lyme is one thing everyone needs to be worried or cautious about. I dont know why but the media is trying to keep it under wraps. Its a hidden pandemic waiting to happen.
This whole site screams "obnoxious quack." I'm surprised I don't see an eBook pitch. I don't know who this doctor is or why he's somehow more credible than the CDC.
That’s a pretty weak argument and it’s on a site devoted to getting you to sign up with a “Lyme Literate MD”, which by strange coincidence includes the guy writing the page.
I’m more convinced that there’s a conflict of interest there than anything else.
AFAICT, the CDC position is the usual conservative scientific process: “chronic Lyme” isn’t a recognized diagnosis, the proposed treatments aren’t clinically proven, and there are significant risks: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6623a3.htm
Growing up in the western half of the US, I virtually never heard about Lyme growing up. (To be clear, I don't think it's a conspiracy, it's just not nearly as common in the west) Then some of my family moved east and it seemed like everyone there has dealt with Lyme.
Alpha-gal allergy, or mammalian meat allergy, needs more attention.
“Bites from certain ticks, such as the lone star tick in the US, [...] have been implicated in the development of this delayed allergic response which is triggered by the consumption of mammalian meat products.”
I'm spinning up a lab in Santa Cruz to research the local tick population. We could use extra skilled hands to help obtain the distribution of pathogens, and in developing treatment protocols. Plus, who doesn't enjoy a good tick hunt?
Get at me if you're 'bout it: eng at clayrichardson.me
Here in Maine, we now have a big problem with ticks with lyme disease, whereas when I was little I lived in the woods and was never once bitten by a tick. But now they're everywhere. The winters are becoming milder, the deer population is growing, and the ticks are surviving the cold better, and it all combines to create a situation where the tick population is growing fast.
In the Canadian prairies we already had an insanely short window between endless winter season and infinite mosquito season and now tick invasion season has ably filled that gap. Argh.
I see climate change being blamed for this increase in insect bites, but can this be right? Perhaps it’s a factor; however, as I understand it the USA has warmed by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 100 years[1]. There is roughly a 50 degree difference between the northern states (excluding Alaska and Hawaii) and the southern states based on a quick peek at iso therm maps for the USA.[2]
It lookes like that would increase the ticks habitats very little over a whole century. Now take a look at the dramatic changes in just few years presented in the article.
Deer ticks are adapted to northern climates and the biggest source of Lyme disease. You have to look at the impact of climate on their northern range (Which historically has been near water bodies that moderate winter temperatures). North south comparisons don't much factor into it.
I remember having concerns over finding a tick on myself in the early 90's. The doctor assuaged me at the time among other things with the fact that only a couple of states in the Northeast had to be extremely vigilant about ticks and we were in the South. Now the range for concern is much of the entire range of deer in the United States and researchers are finding it in urban areas in Western Europe.
A small average change is small but it's something. There was some separate issue about saiga antelope undergoing catastrophic die off a few years ago. The best theory now is a temperature change enabling bacterial infection by bacteria that were always present but not killing the antelope. The average temperature would not change that much as per your data but the extremes are going to swing more with climate change.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42720955
The ticks carrying the Lyme disease bacteria were trapped in the Northeast (for the USA). Climate change changed the feeding behavior of the prey of juvenile nymph ticks, the main vector for increasing the habitat is mice not deer. The adults feed on deer but most infections in people that we know about come from nymphs ( probably because they are so tiny).
"But our rapidly changing climate also seems to be making it easier for Lyme to spread, by shifting when blacklegged ticks typically feed."
This means it's simply a matter of waiting for the temperature to rise just a bit more for the Lyme disease to be a problem in the USA everywhere there are deer.
There is the difficulty with temperature theory helping the spread the same way in Europe which the article covers, but Lyme disease in Europe is a slightly different bacteria as well.
I think lately we are looking for a reason to blame climate change for a lot of things because it is top of mind and we fear it so much. However, a historically cold climate disease like Lyme disease moving south is not explained by warming temperatures. I suspect several reasons.
First, an increase in the natural vectors for parasites. We have eliminated wolves and reduced other predators, and since we don't hunt small mammals for food anymore there could be an explosion in their population. Even deer, which we continue to hunt, have seen rapid population growth over the last century[1]. Looking at the population minimum from the deer population chart, I suspect that other potential disease vector hosts might have gone through a similar minimum followed by a rebound, and parasites are recovering with them.
Second, an increased awareness of these diseases is probably a big factor. I've known many people who have contracted Lyme disease. It used to be a big fight to get a doctor to take the possibility seriously, even in Connecticut where I used to live (the epicenter of Lyme disease)! As of even 5 years ago friends and family of mine could not get a prescription for the required antibiotic until they had a positive test result, which is finicky and allows the disease to progress over the weeks of delay. And Lyme is an incredibly debilitating disease. Diseases like Zika that have much more subtle symptoms (except in babies) could easily go unnoticed.
Finally, keep in mind that malaria, dengue fever, and yellow fever used to be common in the United States. This is a natural range for these kind of mosquito borne diseases. We used to take mosquito population control much more seriously, perhaps we have become too apathetic about it. How many people do you know that are part of the local mosquito control association? Do you make sure there is no standing water on your property? Do we spray for mosquitos any more?
Anyone have experience with mosquito yard treatments? I'm in the southeast and have a good-sized garden, so I don't want to treat with anything which would harm pollinators. I've used the Terminix AllClear Bait and Kill spray the past couple years, and there's several studies which support the efficacy of its patented ATSB ingredient. The problem is it's only available to consumers in the small spray cans, which run $15 for a 2-pack. The concentrate is only available to Terminix exterminators and municipalities. There are other natural methods, but they mainly rely on deterrence rather than elimination.
Website and donate link: http://livlymefoundation.org/
“She went from this sweet, bubbly kid with a twinkle in her eye, to a child who could not track you, who was completely checked out”.
They went to doctor after doctor but no one could provide an answer. Finally, 51 doctors and 18 months later, they found out Goodreau had Lyme disease.
https://www.thedenverchannel.com/lifestyle/health/denver-gir...
reply