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