Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What is Lyme disease and how is it transmitted?
But everywhere else where it can spread into the interior of the United States and up into Canada, it's starting to. Yeah, and there's also a history continuing to this day even where Lyme disease can be overlooked, misdiagnosed, not taken as seriously by your doctor as it should be, including what we'll get to later on, something called post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome.
And it's all very frustrating if you have been an individual that has had Lyme disease before. There's a big community out there of people that are like, why won't anyone listen to us? Why won't our doctors take us seriously? And what do we have to do here? Like, do we have to start dropping dead?
Yeah, there's a tremendous amount of frustration in that community because there's a sentiment among the medical establishment that, you know, hey, man.
Just take some antibiotics. You'll be fine. Exactly.
It's easy to cure Lyme disease. Here's some antibiotics. You still have persistent symptoms. Those are probably in your head. We're not going to say they're in your head, but they're in your head. And the people who are experiencing these symptoms are like, no, my life has been derailed by these symptoms, and you guys aren't doing anything about it. It's frustrating.
I know there's a lot of people out there that are pretty stoked right now to be hearing this. Yeah. You know? Yeah, for sure. We're advocating for you guys. Sure. I'm not patting myself on the back, although I am literally patting myself. I feel like I see you, Chuck. That elbow is sticking out pretty far. So Lyme disease is a disease.
It's an infection caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi. Wow. Borgdorferi. Bergdorferi. We're going to get you an apron and call you the word butcher. Bergdorferi. Mork, mork, mork. And we'll get to why it's called that in a bit. Okay. But if you haven't caught on by now, it is transmitted through tick bites. Right.
So a tick, and in particular a nymph stage of a tick, which is a young adult or juvenile tick, will transmit this bacteria, the Borrelia burgdorferi, into a human. And the reason we usually get it from nymphs, Chuck, is because an adult tick doesn't find humans particularly appetizing. But a nymph tick will because they're stupid. They don't know anything yet.
So as they're feeding on us after somewhere maybe around 24 to 36 hours of feeding ā this infected tick that has this bacteria in it, the bacteria will make its way from the midgut to the tick's saliva, and the tick transmits it into the human bloodstream, where it just absolutely wreaks havoc on the human body. Yeah, and you said something really key there.
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Chapter 3: How has Lyme disease spread in the United States?
Polly Murray ended up writing a book. She made it sort of her life's work. In 1996, a book called The Widening Circle. And because of... sort of the persistent sexism in science, they were largely discounted, even though they had a list of 37 individuals. They researched on their own, contacted scientists. We just really need to shout them out.
Pauli Murray died just about a month ago at the age of 85. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Yeah, she was a persistent cuss, as they call them up in the Yankee States. That's right. So, on the one hand, yes, from everything I've read and all the impressions I have, they were very much dismissed, and it was very much sexist. And also, I think, because they weren't doctors.
But on the other hand, the doctors who were being presented with these cases were like, I have no idea what this is. So let's just pretend it's not real. But luckily, those two women in the groups that they established, they went on and they contacted Yale Medical School. They contacted the state and they really kind of put this on the map.
They said there is a mysterious epidemic that's going on where you have a lot of kids who suddenly have juvenile arthritis out of nowhere. What are you guys going to do about it? And because of their agitation, this mystery made its way to the desk, or I guess the microscope, of a guy named Willie Bergdorfer.
And he was, at the time, the world's foremost authority on what's called Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, which is another tick-borne bacterial infection. I remember that when I was a kid. That was a big news item. It was. A scary one. He was working. out in Colorado, and Colorado was ground zero for Rocky Mountain spotted fever for a while, which is, yeah, you do not want to have that.
It's a really bad bacterial infection. But by this time, they had done, thanks to the legwork done by the moms and the patient advocate groups in Lyme, Connecticut, it had been pretty well established that the common thread between all these people, besides where they lived, and by the way, it was Chuck, Lyme, Old Lyme, and East Haddam. Sorry, East Haddam.
Aside from the fact that they all lived in the same region, was that all of them, or almost all of them, were called being bitten by a tick. And a lot of them had a mysterious rash right before the symptoms presented. So it came to this guy, Willie Bergdorfer's microscope, because they had said, there's something in the ticks here that is creating this disease that we haven't encountered before.
That's right. And he had already discovered this bacterium called, how do you pronounce that? Spirochete? Spirochete. Spirochete. But a spirochete is a type of bacteria. Spirochete. That's what I know. Give me the apron. There you go. All right. Spirochete. You just made me think of the older brother Chet in Weird Science. Now go make yourself one, buttwad.
Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What challenges do patients face in getting diagnosed with Lyme disease?
Right. The problem is it takes days, if not maybe a week or two, before your body mounts an effective immune response against this infection. So if you find a tick and they give you a test, say, within the first couple days, it's going to come back negative. Even though you very much have a Bergdorferi infection, it's going to come back negative because the antibodies haven't been created yet.
The other part of the problem is even if you take a blood test that tests directly for the Bergdorferi bacterium, it moves out of the bloodstream really easily and within several days. So there's a very brief window of time where you can directly test for the Bergdorferi bacteria and find it in a simple blood test.
Yeah, you can also get false positives, and they're advocating now for two-tiered testing for confirmation of the diagnosis. So if you get that first positive test, sometimes now you'll get a different test, a Western blot test. Right. That's going to really get more specific to that antibody, not just the general antibodies. Right. So part of the other problem isā
The reason a lot of patient activists and patient advocate groups say, no, doctors, you're wrong, like this is not good enough, is that there's a sneaking suspicion among people who have what's called chronic Lyme or post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome.
is that the round of antibiotics, the two to four week round of antibiotics that seemingly cured the Lyme disease symptoms that you had, actually failed to fully knock out the bacteria that created this infection, that created this Lyme disease in the first place, that it just burrowed further into your body.
And because the medical establishment said, we got it, it's fine, these antibiotics cured it, and didn't go deeper, that bacterial infection is allowed to fester and then present in worse ways later. Yeah, and it's a really big deal because, you know, what will happen is they'll say, you're cured. We gave these antibiotics. They worked.
But weeks and months and even years later when people have persistent fatigue and muscle aches and headaches and, you know, like your knee joints hurt, they said like a brain fog can happen. And these are all things that are ā
I don't want to say generic, but if you walk into your doctor and say, I feel like I'm fuzzy and have a brain fog and I get headaches and I'm tired, it's sort of a wide, it's hard to pinpoint what's going on. Sure. And they think you're cured of the Lyme disease. So that's where some of the more dismissive, at least from the Lyme disease community, they're saying, like, I have this chronic issue.
And they're saying, but no, there's no such thing as a chronic issue. Right. Well, they're also saying like, look, we gave you a test for Lyme disease and you came back negative. We know you had it before. We tested you. We came back positive. We treated with antibiotics. Now we've tested you again and it's coming back negative. You don't have Lyme disease anymore.
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Chapter 5: What are the symptoms of Lyme disease?
Yeah. about six years before this cluster of juvenile arthritis cases popped up in Old Lyme, Lyme, and East Haddam. Well, it's a very bad idea if that's what went on because you have to depend on a lot of things, which is, A, these ticks definitely finding their way toā the enemy, B, they attach to the enemy successfully and transmit the disease, and then what does it transmit?
A very slow-acting disease that will give people headaches and fatigue over the course of a long time. Right, that also produces a one-of-a-kind telltale rash that tells you, supposedly in plenty of time, that you have this disease that needs to be treated with a simple course of oral antibiotics. Yeah, and it has to be probably in the country. They don't thrive well in the city. Right.
So it doesn't make a good biological weapon. No. And then, again, people who subscribe to this conspiracy theory say, well, they can't all be winners, but maybe it was just something they were experimenting with and it wasn't very good. Trust me. I mean, we've done enough research on stuff our American government used to do and continue to do that it's not the most outlandish thing in the world.
No, it's not, and that's also why Chris Smith, the representative from New Jersey, shouldn't just be dismissed out of hand because it's entirely plausible. Yeah, it's not just a complete wacko idea. The other reason Chris Smith shouldn't just be dismissed out of hand is because he is a true Lyme warrior.
He introduced other legislation called the TIC Act, and of course he had to make TIC an acronym. An acronym, not an anachronism. What's it stand for? Ticks, colon, identify, control, and knockout act. He was really grasping like a tick on a blade of grass with that one. But the point is... But knockout's not one word unless you use it as knockout.
That's what he's saying, I guess, because it's one word. So it's really the Tickos Act. But it would create an additional $180 million in federal funding for Lyme disease research, which is sorely needed right now. That's awesome. I didn't know he was such an advocate. That's good. He really is. He hates Lyme disease like... Like, a lot.
I was about to say something, but... I wish I could take a pill that would bulk up my analogy region in my brain. Oh, your analogies are great. What were you going to say? I want to know. We can beep it out if we need to. I was going to get political. I was going to say he hates tics like he hates... Okay. Can we leave that and bleep it? I don't know. We'll find out. All right.
So the whole idea that it's a bioweapon, almost certainly not the case, right? But it makes for good press. I mean, like if you look up like Lyme disease and bioweapon, there is a lot of recent articles written on it just because a member of Congress introduced this legislation. Yeah.
What a lot of people are saying is, look, it makes sense, like this conspiracy theory, that people would go to that. But at the same time, there's another really great explanation for it, and it's climate change. That this whole thing came about in the 70s because we're starting to see what was called the first epidemic from climate change.
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