Lyme Disease History

Lyme Disease History
Lyme disease is a tick-borne condition - meaning it is passed on to humans by ticks (Ixodes tick), which is identifiable by its characteristic black legs. This disease affects thousands of people each year and will mostly advance in three stages where the resulting symptoms will cause severe brain damage. Fortunately, Lyme disease can be prevented, and is treatable, and it has shown overly high degrees of success with the treatments available.

Fascinatingly, Lyme disease only became known in 1975 when mothers of a cluster of kids living in an area close to each other in the state of Connecticut, in Lyme, raised awareness to researchers that all the children had apparently been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. In other words, it was the curiosity that there were unusual grouping of 'rheumatoid-like' illnesses that made researchers identify the bacterial cause of the kid's condition, which was thereafter known as the Lyme disease in the year 1982.

The disease is named after the coastal town of Connecticut, 'Lyme' where it was first detected during the 70s. Even though the disease was officially named after the 70's outbreak, it can be traced back to 1883 where the first instance of it was recorded in Germany. In the year 1909, a Swedish doctor was able to successfully connect the characteristic Lyme disease rash to that of the deer tick bite.

Several milestones of the disease have been achieved since then, where in the year 1983, physicians started using antibiotics to treat individuals who exhibited Lyme disease symptoms, and it is during this time that the 3 stages of the Lyme disease were officially and clearly documented. Just recently, in 1999, the US Foods and Drugs Administration (FDA) officially approved LYMErix, a vaccination which was used to treat the disease at that time. However, after 3 years in the market, the vaccination was withdrawn from the market after people started filing lawsuits against the manufacturers, citing that they developed Lyme disease and arthritis from using the vaccination.

The prevalence rate of Lyme disease in a given area is depended on the number of ticks that are present in that locale and how often they are infected with the causative bacteria. Ever since the 70s outbreak in Connecticut, other places where Lyme disease has been reported include Europe, China, Australia, Japan, parts of the Former Soviet Union as well as all the 50 states of the US.