One Response to “Experts: Long Island’s Eastern End Tick Population Moving Disease Threats West”
- Liz Schmitz on July 27th, 2013 10:44 amThank you for your article, however, there is a significant error. The bacteria that causes Lyme disease, Borrelia burgdorferi, have indeed been documented in lone star ticks by many researchers in published studies for years and lone star tick bites are associated with human Lyme disease cases. Dr. Ed Masters and the CDC itself documented cases of humans bitten by lone star ticks who tested positive for Lyme disease (published in studies and Read Chapter 29 in Pam Weintraub’s book, Cure Unknown).A recent study, Lyme Borreliosis in Human Patients in Florida and Georgia, USA, showed that lone star ticks and the symptomatic patients who removed them both tested positive for exactly the same species of bacteria known to cause disease in the northeastern USA - Borrelia burgdorferi sensu stricto. In the same study, the research team documented two species of Lyme bacteria never before reported in humans. Current tests are not designed to detect these.A 1908 report noted that lone star ticks, Amblyomma americanun, were documented in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Michigan as well as in various states throughout the southern USA. (Banks, N. 1908. A revision of the Ixodidea, or ticks, of the United States. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Entomology Technical Series 15. 61 p.)The very first cases of lone star tick vectored Lyme disease were actually documented in New Jersey in 1984, where in one county, 96% of the ticks collected back then were lone stars. Fewer than 2% collected were black-legged ticks. A 2001 study reported that on Gibson Island, Maryland, 95% of ticks collected there were the aggressive lone star species yet many residents claimed they developed Lyme disease. Their claims should not have been so readily dismissed.Lone star ticks have likely been a second vector of thousands of cases of Lyme disease in the northeastern USA for decades, as well as a vector of thousands of Lyme disease cases across the South (where the disease isn’t reported at all due to the assumption that it’s “not Lyme disease” transmitted by these ticks). Reporting methods are very different making it look as if there is no Lyme in the South. Patients living in the Northeast with rashes alone, no positive test needed, may be reported as a Lyme disease case. In the South, rashes alone are not reportable rendering national statistics incomparable. The South would also have thousands of Lyme disease cases if these were reported by the CDC instead of dismissed.Liz Schmitz, President, Georgia Lyme Disease Association- Posted by: Liz Schmitz
