Lyme Disease Facts, Part 2
The white-footed mouse: Where many ticks first pick up Lyme disease I’ve been researching Lyme disease, and it’s like drinking from a firehose that has advanced degrees in infectious diseases, immunology, neuropathy, and pharmacology. In the meantime, some interesting factoids with which you can annoy and educate your friends: • Some researchers have likened the current state of knowledge about Lyme to what we knew about AIDS in the 1980s. So we know a bit about it. There’s more that we know we don’t know. And there’s almost certainly a lot that we don’t know we don’t know. (Google “Rumsfeld, Donald, types of unknowns” if you find this distinction confusing.) • It’s “Lyme” disease, not “Lyme’s.” Lyme is a small town in Connecticut. In 1975, a woman there alerted researchers at Yale to a bunch of kids who were thought to have pediatric arthritis. In 1977, those researchers changed the name to “Lyme arthritis.” In 1979, it was changed to “Lyme disease.” • The cause of the disease wasn’t identified until 1982, when Dr. Willy Burgdorfer somehow figured out it was transmitted by ticks of the Ixodes genus (which includes deer ticks) that were themselves infected by the disease. Ticks aren’t born with Lyme disease. They get it from infected rodents, particularly the white-footed mouse.
