Lyme Disease patients have faced an ongoing battle over the past four decades, as the disease struggles to be legitimized in the eyes of the mainstream medical community. Fortunately, the tide seems to be turning, and in 2018, Lyme is more visible than ever before. It’s no longer thought of as solely a North-eastern American disease but is now accepted to be a worldwide problem, with reported cases on every continent and every state in the U.S. Although there are still grey areas surrounding the acceptance of the chronic form of Lyme disease in some medical circles, when it comes to facing the problem of Lyme head-on, the future looks optimistic. With this increased visibility, patients and medical professionals are starting to ask the hard questions about the contraction and transmission of the disease. One of the recurring issues is whether Lyme can be carried over from mother to child in the womb. Most people associate Lyme disease with ticks, and rightly so. Deer ticks are the sole carriers of the disease in North America, while sheep ticks perform the same function in Europe. So most people correctly assume you can be infected from a tick bite; what they severely underestimate is the number of ticks that are out there. It’s surprisingly easy to get bitten by an offending tick, and even easier to not notice the bite. With an estimated one in three ticks carrying the offending Lyme strain of bacteria, Borrelia burgdorferi, Lyme disease is an extremely threatening problem, and one that is only increasing as global warming continues to affect the earth. Lyme disease cannot be transmitted from person to person; you can’t contract Lyme from touching, being close to, or breathing the same air as an infected person. That is not how the offending bacteria work. Unlike other viruses, they can’t migrate to another person through the air, water, or food. Although it might seem like Lyme is contagious because of the initial flu-like symptoms it presents, there have been no reported cases of Lyme disease being contracted from contact or close proximity to a patient. Cases of Lyme in the same family can almost always be chalked up to shared environmental factors. But when it comes to the case of an unborn child in the womb, the situation becomes a little more complicated. This is a controversial area, as many public health authorities in the U.S. claim that there is no risk of the bacteria being transmitted from mother to fetus. However, many Lyme experts have seen repeated evidence that gestational transmission is occurring in a worrying number of cases. Some doctors estimate the risk of a mother already diagnosed with Lyme Disease transmitting the infection at 20%. However, if a pregnant woman contracts Lyme disease while carrying, that number shoots up to a minimum of 60%, as the disease is in its bacteria-dominated acute stage. This is just another instance of Lyme experts disagreeing with the pronouncements of other health officials. The history of the disease is littered with these cases, and even now, forty-odd years after Lyme was first discovered, the two camps still don’t see eye-to-eye on many issues. However, scientists and experts have long suspected that the Lyme-causing Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria can be transmitted in the womb, as it shares the characteristics of many other ‘spirochetes’ (a family of bacteria to which Borrelia belongs), which are confirmed to be womb-transferrable.