14
votes
Why I blame Wall Street for my Lyme disease
Link information
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- Title
- How Wall Street Unwittingly Caused the Northeast Tick Epidemic
- Authors
- Jim Harding
- Published
- Aug 28 2018
- Word count
- 2265 words
The title is clickbaitish, but relevant in context with the underlying story of unanticipated ecological and public health outcomes from changes in private forest ownership.
"Wall Street" is too big and nebulous to be a singular villain in the piece. The real risks came from the usual assumptions that externalities never need to be considered in arriving at market value, and that there's no governance for public interest required.
I think the title is more tongue-in-cheek than clickbait, personally. The author tied a lot of seemingly unrelated events (to a layman such as myself, anyways), including investors taking over the management of forests in the NE, neatly into his Lyme's disease and its recent rise. Interesting article.
Forestry management, natural history and the unintended consequences of human intervention (or lack thereof) with our environment has always fascinated me. E.g.
The rise in severity of forest fires due to Smokey the Bear.
Wolves being reintroduced to Yellowstone causing the rivers to stop wandering (although that has apparently been debunked).
Coyotes spreading all over North and Central America due to humans trying to eradicate them in the American SW. <- That is an absolutely fascinating podcast episode BTW. Highly recommend listening if natural history interests you at all.
It's funny to think that there's really almost no such thing as a natural environment anymore. Most of the U.S. has been logged at least once (that's the initial extraction of resource value), and the secondary growth is nothing like what was present previously. Dutch Elm disease (another unexpected externality of trade) killed nearly all American chestnut trees, and there have been a few other past or ongoing die-offs due to introduced pests and diseases.
I was only peripherally aware that Japanese barberry was an invasive species. The plant is a common Northern U.S. winter garden feature, as the berries stay bright year-round.
Lucky bastard. Doxy did literally nothing except hide symptoms for me, 4 months later and I'm still on Tetracycline, Azithromycin, a shit load of herbal supplements and even CBD in an attempt to get rid of Lyme.
Great article / post though, I shouldn't hold the author's lucky streak against them :p
Dunno - I got the classic "bull's-eye" rash, fever, and other mentioned symptoms. [Blackberry picking in deer country really requires 100% DEET, not just ordinary deerfly repellant.]
The "classic" acute-phase symptoms only show up (or only get noticed) in about a quarter of the people who test positive.
My guess is that if you have the early phase of symptoms strongly enough to need medical care, you're already building an immune response which will eventually clear the infection. Doxycycline cleaned things right up for me.
I'm sorry to hear you're not one of the lucky ones, though - I knew someone who had full-blown, life-threatening endocarditis before they figured out it was Borrellia infection.
This is a major public health threat that we brought on ourselves. The article doesn't even mention the other ecological management issues we've created by getting rid of wolves. Deer populations, deer ticks.