Emerging Diseases

"I am not comfortable with the CDC's position that Missouri is the hole in the donut, and that somehow Missouri is a magical, ‘Lyme-free' zone and that these observed Missouri spirochetes have nothing to do with human disease." --Dr. Ed Masters, Cape Girardeau, Missouri Read More

It was July 2003 that I set out on a journey to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, to visit Edwin J Masters, the doctor involved in hand-to-hand combat with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over the existence of Lyme disease in the Southern United States. Working with a few intrepid colleagues, Dr. Masters managed to generate powerful evidence for Southern Lyme, though his evidence was continually undermined. For two days straight I sat with Dr. Masters in his oversized basement, reviewing document after document showing how data had been massaged to undermine patients and cast doubt on their disease. Ed Masters' story sheds light not only on Lyme disease but also the dangers we all face when medicine is politicized and studies designed to undermine patient care. Read More

Doctors could never explain the strange spikes of fever to 105 degrees Fahrenheit that hit me in hallucinogenic waves for more than a week that summer, or the gullies of sleep so black that, except for the nightmares, I thought I might be dead. When the fever broke and I noticed the sweating, it seemed just a consequence of summer. It was after the sweat leveled off that the headache-without-end licked its first noxious path through my brain. I would suffer that headache --an inexplicable migraine-- for seven long years, until I was treated for Lyme disease and its malarialike cousin in the tick --babesiosis.

Human babesiosis presents just like malaria --but you can catch it in your own backyard in Lyme-endemic areas like California and the northeast.  Today thousands of cases of human babesiosis are diagnosed each year in regions known for Lyme disease. But due to ignorance on the part of primary care practitioners, it can also go unrecognized and untreated for years as was the case for me. When Lyme patients don't get well, babesia is often the cause. Pictured at left is a grassy field on Nantucket Island, where the disease in humans was first found.

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A man opened fire on a pastor near St. Louis, murdering him a a rain of gunfire. His family says the attack was provoked by psychiatric illness caused by Lyme disease. Can a tick-borne infection cause this kind of rage? Read More

Sitting next to Burgdorfer in a sun-drenched conference room at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories, I watched him remove from his ancient briefcase a handwritten chart that had withstood the test of time. Yellowed and creased, the paper listed microbes, six in all. "These," he told me, "are what I found in the Shelter Island ticks." Read More

  Will a new infectious diseases panel rubber-stamp the old guidelines for diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease, or evaluate the evidence anew? To serve society, science must lead the way. Read More

"What has happened to the medical profession I loved so much? What has happened to make physicians step out of the role of healer into the role of destroyer?" --Psychiatrist Virginia Sherr, Holland PA (pictured at left.) Read More

As psychiatrist Virginia Sherr, pictured here, recovered from her long illness, she began to view her patients through a different lens -and "listen with a third, even a fourth, ear." Says Sherr: "I began to hear them describe the same symptoms that had bothered me: pains in their back, headache, enormous fatigue, night sweats, sinus problems that wouldn't quit." For a fleeting millisecond the impossible notion that she, herself, might be infecting her patients flashed through her mind. But her training as a psychiatrist quickly kicked in, causing her to question, instead, whether she had been swept up in a case of reverse transference. In the end, Sherr realized the truth. The patients, too, had significant clinical signs and symptoms and they needed to be worked up. "I realized it had nothing to do with me." Read More

Despite her own credentials as a physician, Holland PA psychiatrist Virginia Sherr, pictured here, was considered a "whiner" by other doctors. "I tried to explain that I was in serious difficulty to one physician after the next, as I gasped for breath on exertion, had painful muscle spasms in the thighs, face, and posterior shoulders, and experienced deep, aching, burning pain." Her symptoms became so severe, in fact, that Sherr felt as if "the self I knew was dissolving."

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Adults lost homes and jobs. Children lost their childhoods when cognitive or emotional disabilities forced them to be home-schooled, sometimes for years. The impact was major, but mainstream experts continued to characterize their symptoms as "minor," "nonspecific," and "vague." Read More

For years my family suffered the indignity and pain of undiagnosed Lyme disease in the hyperinfested, uninformed hamlet of Chappaqua in Westchester County, New York. Part 3 of 3

(See part 2 of 3 here)

CHAPPAQUA, NY., 1993-2000. Read More