Lyme is a terrible disease. If not diagnosed early on, it will burrow into neural tissue and becomes very difficult to kill. Symptoms include chronic arthritis, cognitive disorders, chronic pain, dizziness, etc. It's not a disease you want to get.

I strongly believe it was a terrible mistake to remove the vaccine from the market for human use. It seems that it was taken off the market from fear of lawsuits and not because it was proven harmful.

20 years ago, few physicians knew anything about Lyme disease. Even today, physicians don't necessarily recognize Lyme symptoms, but they really ought to; 300,000 people are known to have the disease in the U.S., but it's thought that many thousands of others suffer from Lyme as well but are not diagnosed.[1]

If you diagnose it properly within the first two weeks, the chances are very good that it's completely curable with heavy treatments of antibiotics. If you don't, it becomes much harder to treat. Some have tried IV infusions of antibiotics, with varying degrees of success.

There are strategies that could be applied to greatly reduce the incidence of Lyme disease. For example, reintroduction of the Northeastern timber rattler would help cut down the mouse population which plays a large role in the deer tick's life cycle. One snake can kill dozens or hundreds of mice a year, reducing the tick population by thousands. These snakes were largely eradicated from the Northeast which has probably contributed to a rodent population boom.[2]

Culling the deer population would also greatly help. Several years ago, Monhegan Island in Maine drastically reduced the deer herds with a special hunt, and since that time there have been almost no new cases of Lyme disease reported.[3] I heard of a similar experiment in a county in Connecticut, with similar results. It came up for a vote on Long Island last year to cull the deer population but it was voted down.

Deer are beautiful animals, but their population has exploded in recent decades. In the 1940s there were thought to be about 300,000 deer in the U.S. (I've read actually that there were around 500,000 in the early 20th C., and unrestricted hunting brought that number down to 30,000 by the 1940s, so it's unclear, but drastically fewer than today in any case), and now there are estimated to be over 32 million deer.

Not just Lyme carriers, they are a menace on the roads and an estimated 200 people die every year in car-deer collisions, plus billions of dollars of damage.[4]

Increased hunting permits to reduce the deer population, reintroduction of predators such as cougars, bobcats, black bear, and wolves into their indigenous habitats in the Northeast (coyotes have been thriving and need no assistance), reintroduction of snakes like the timber rattler, and of course tremendous precautions and application of DEET when venturing into the grasslands and woods will all help to reduce Lyme disease.

I would also advocate more research grants to study the spirochete bacteria and find genetic markers needed to make more effective vaccines and treatments. This is an epidemic that people are only beginning to recognize but there are solutions to be found, if we get moving.

1. http://www.cdc.gov/lyme/stats/humancases.html

2. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130806091815.ht...

3. http://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/health-wellness/2013/07...

4. http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2012/10/24/267...