Opinion: A Health Epidemic That’s Going Largely Unnoticed
By Linda on Jun 12, 2010 in Infections | comments(2)
Excerpt:
Special to AOL News
(May 28) — We’re in the midst of a terrifying epidemic, although you wouldn’t know it to talk to most doctors and health specialists.The disease is growing at a rate faster than AIDS. From 2006 to 2008 alone, the number of cases jumped a whopping 77 percent. In 2008 alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention listed 28,921 “confirmed” and 6,277 “probable” cases of the disease, but there could be as many as 420,000 because of underreporting.
Prominent victims include Parker Posey, Richard Gere, President George W. Bush, Alice Walker and Christie Brinkley.
If any other disease had stricken so many people, the medical community would be scurrying for knowledge, scrambling for cures or rushing to warn patients (think swine flu).
But that’s not the case with Lyme disease — a disease carried by ticks.
Instead, ill-informed doctors are often flummoxed when patients complain of fatigue, headaches, fever or chills, muscle or joint pain, mental confusion, swollen lymph nodes and neurological symptoms. It’s an appalling display of indifference.
As Lyme Disease Awareness Month comes to a close and Memorial Day travelers flock to grassy, tick-infested holiday spots across America, vacationers and physicians alike need to be on the alert for freckle-sized menaces that are responsible for the fastest-growing, most misdiagnosed infectious disease in the country. The CDC has a map that shows where the ticks are most prevalent.
For my part, I was lucky because my smart nutritionist friend, JJ Virgin, immediately grew suspicious when, almost overnight, I became an exhausted, headache-ridden, nightmare-plagued, memory-challenged zombie suffering from vertigo, sleeping problems, swollen glands, achy eyes, sensitivity to light and noise, fever, chills and a sore neck.
