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Sickness behavior is at least one step removed from symptoms. It's diagnosing from the outside. Veterinarians like it, and coined it, because, well, horses and cows cannot speak or sign. When applied to humans, at best it is a social construct. On a darker level, the term can devalue symptoms...

Cute piece. Left me with a faint aftertaste, a sorta Sorority-like vibe. Oh wait! I forgot the air quotes: Sorority-like "vibe".

I red-flagged them at "sickness behavior". In my book it's little more than a dog whistle. Are we talking about symptoms? Then call them symptoms.

Literally, i.e., zero identifiable pathogenic antibody? Or "negative" results according to someone's metric - one that actually may demonstrate pathogenic antibodies? I think it's an indictment of current medical science that I should have to ask either question.

I think this is an important study, @Andy , @Hutan , @jpcv . This study could be a banner study for ILADS. If I'm the CDC/IDSA, this study may make me more than a little nervous. I don't know where to begin. First, the authors don't pull punches in the study itself. The name of the disease...

Ikr? Ok, I'm trying to read the entire study. First, they were mentored by Steere. Second, they test the Brazilian strain - whatever it is - against the North American G39/40 strain, using the Dearborne 2T algorythm. Not surprisingly, they had to modify that because they weren't getting good...

Why is this math so difficult? Is it a spirochete that causes disease? Is it a form of Borrelia? We don't need a mainframe computer to perform the calculations. Moreover, we've seen this silliness before in the US midwest with Masters Disease (STARI). It's like some agencies cannot get out...

Oh, FFS.

So, this is a big deal, this MTTT. Go to the CDC Lyme website and there are now TWO accepted methods to test positive for Lyme: The conventional 2-tier with an ELISA and Western Blot, and this "new" MTTT. The modified two-tiered test -MTTT - with two first tier or ELISA tests - counts just so...

Dapsone. Ick.

Looks like a Hopkins endeavor, at least some of its authors. Cool premise for early Lyme, i.e. before IgM's typically kick in with Lyme. Left me a little uncomfortable with emphasis on in-vitro and rodent references, but there's some pedigree here author-wise. 63 is a small sample but may be...

It got my attention. What for me is possibly even more disconcerting, is I suspect (but do not know) this estimate did not include seronegative Lyme patients. Add those individuals into the mix and that 200 million mark may be lowballing it.

Or different prevalences of various tick species and Bbsl strains, depending on geography.

A small correction if you don't mind: Seropositivity doesn't necessarily reflect current infection, it can at best only indicate exposure. That being said, Lyme almost invariably progresses from IgMs to IgGs, so we'd expect everyone who tested positive for past exposure to technically test...

https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/more-than-14-of-worlds-population-likely-has-had-tick-borne-lyme-disease/ If the current world population is 7.9 billion, that would suggest over a billion Lyme infections. A commonly acknowledged portion that stay ill is about 20%. If my math is in the...

Wish someone asked him about chronic Lyme. I'm getting an uneasy feeling that perhaps he holds LC with the same regard he does chronic Lyme - which is to say not very highly. Hey, but that would at least make him consistent.

CDC needs to be helping develop better diagnostics, not wasting its time playing with models. High-predictive models that say Lyme cannot be in a given county or state, or are less likely to be there, are meaningless to the individuals who contract it in those counties and states. Historically...

I'd have preferred if this attempt to study the clinical course of Lyme disease included more late stage cases. Only 15 percent of this retrospective's cohort were late stage. So 85 percent was either early or early disseminated. Early stage is different, just as it is with Syphilis - not just...

Beyond her book, she has a bunch of salient essays in good journals like the Atlantic. In what is an important consideration for me, she seems nice, too. I sent her a pedantic and likely condescending email a while back and she responded with grace.

Good luck with that. PEM doesn't necessarily adhere to schedule. It even sometimes presents chronologically different depending on whether the exertion is physical vs mental. Precision in general for pwME would be great relative to PEM, but many of us suffer variations in how long after...