This is really welcome news. I feel like I've heard about a vaccine in the works on and off for a long time, I didn't realize they'd reached this stage with it. Where I grew up, every spring our...
This is really welcome news. I feel like I've heard about a vaccine in the works on and off for a long time, I didn't realize they'd reached this stage with it.
Where I grew up, every spring our school would go over tick protocol and give us cards like this. I used to get ticks all the time. I've had friends and family members get extremely sick from Lyme disease.
I now live in an area where folks barely seem to know what Lyme disease is, it's so odd to me.
As a kid I had classmates who were in and out of school for months at a time because of Lyme. I remember us all writing "get well soon" cards to them. Beyond the physical symptoms (which were...
As a kid I had classmates who were in and out of school for months at a time because of Lyme. I remember us all writing "get well soon" cards to them. Beyond the physical symptoms (which were awful), it must have been miserable to be so isolated. That's a hard childhood. And everyone knew about Lyme, literally everyone.
Chaotic/amusing (in hindsight) anecdote: I developed localized Lyme symptoms in a small town in Scotland, probably from hiking several weeks prior. I had some nasty symptoms (fatigue, joint pain, soreness, bullseye rash), but the world had tunnel vision in the wake of COVID-19, so a negative test gave me false security.
When I realized my mistake and sought antibiotics, I was shocked by the lack of knowledge and urgency exhibited there. It was unpleasant to spend an entire day convincing miscellaneous hospital staff that:
Lyme disease was... real (??) and also not a minor condition
The chemist cannot provide this particular medication; I need to see a doctor
The NHS refuses to speak with temporary residents; I need to see a real in-person doctor
You can't just send me to another department when you're confused or skeptical
No, I really do not need a UK-based phone number in order to receive an emergency prescription
The hospital remained resistant, but after a few hours of this I just refused to leave. Not knowing how long I'd had it or how much it had disseminated, I was pretty worried! A physician eventually happened to notice me sitting in an odd place and asked if I needed help, then immediately wrote a prescription. I guess that's the difference between people who swore on a Hippocratic Oath and those who just work in medicine.
I understand that Scotland didn't have the same problem with Lyme as Massachusetts, but it did have ticks and reported Lyme cases, plus visitors from tick-heavy parts of the world (...like Massachusetts) are hardly rare in the United Kingdom. I wasn't going to die on the spot, but I was still baffled by their indifference.
That's all to say that a Lyme vaccine will be amazing. I love that modern medicine has brought us so far. I had no idea that there WAS a vaccine that got pulled because of "low demand" (is that really how it works?). I hope this trial succeeds because Lyme is a big deal and needs to be taken seriously.
Similar experience, a friend was visiting from Australia and his son, I think about 10 years old at the time, got a tick and developed obvious lyme symptoms with the target-shaped rash around the...
Similar experience, a friend was visiting from Australia and his son, I think about 10 years old at the time, got a tick and developed obvious lyme symptoms with the target-shaped rash around the time when they flew back home. Not only was their australian pediatrist completely ignorant regarding the existence of lyme or tick-borne illnesses in general, for some reason (and this is supposedly a trend over there) she almost completely refused to speak to the parents and talked exclusively to the kid. So it did not matter that the father (being an immigrant born in a country full of ticks) knew everything necessary because the doctor did not give shit. He eventually forced her to listen to him somehow, but it took significant effort.
Yeah, I’ve gotten Lyme before and had to do a pretty extensive treatment regime from a specialized tick borne illness doctor for 3-4 months to get rid of it. That was after catching the tick on me...
Yeah, I’ve gotten Lyme before and had to do a pretty extensive treatment regime from a specialized tick borne illness doctor for 3-4 months to get rid of it.
That was after catching the tick on me a day after being in the woods and starting the standard doxycycline course the day I found the tick.
I’ll sign up to get this vaccine the first day it’s available to me.
Damn, that sounds crazy to me. I know lyme is no joke, but neither is taking doxycycline (for your body and especially your microbiome) and creating antibiotic resistant bacteria by using...
Damn, that sounds crazy to me. I know lyme is no joke, but neither is taking doxycycline (for your body and especially your microbiome) and creating antibiotic resistant bacteria by using antibiotics just in case. I live in an area with relatively high lyme prevalence in ticks and no doctor here would prescribe antibiotics just like that.
Can't wait for the vaccine so that this is less of an issue.
edit: the reason why it sounds crazy is because around here if you spend a lot of time in the forest it's normal to have a couple ticks every year, so taking doxycycline for each of them would be a really bad idea.
We had a friend nearly die from Lyme after a tick bite in the past couple years. Didn't have the bull's-eye rash and at this point I don't recall the protocol or what his initial response to the...
We had a friend nearly die from Lyme after a tick bite in the past couple years. Didn't have the bull's-eye rash and at this point I don't recall the protocol or what his initial response to the tick bite was. But it came out that there were tick issues at multiple of the campgrounds my LARP chapters used, higher number of ticks and huge increase in Lyme carrying ticks and thus infections in campers. (Reporting changes have caused another huge jump in 2023 so numbers get wonky there.) It seems to be another climate change issue.
That may be why guidance is currently to get antibiotics if you find a tick on you for more than 24 hours, especially as some of the less visible symptoms get tracked better on the new reporting guidelines.
It’s not every tick, if that makes it any better. It needs to be a deer tick that’s been attached for a day or more (or at least, you suspect it has). This was the only time I’ve been on...
It’s not every tick, if that makes it any better. It needs to be a deer tick that’s been attached for a day or more (or at least, you suspect it has). This was the only time I’ve been on doxycycline for Lyme (though I’m way more careful these days post hikes) and I live close enough that I’ve driven through Lyme (the town) in the last 3 months
Yeah, I have a bit of a bias here. The gut microbiome is sort of flexible and when you push it out of balance, it tends to bounce back approximately to where it was because the bacteria and phages...
Yeah, I have a bit of a bias here. The gut microbiome is sort of flexible and when you push it out of balance, it tends to bounce back approximately to where it was because the bacteria and phages keep each other in check through competing for food, killing each other (some bacteria produce their own antibiotics), symbiotic relationships (one bacteria producing metabolites consumed by another) etc., these mechanisms together are relatively strong.
However, when you knock it sufficiently out of shape (for example through needing to take antibiotics too often, plus most infections, even viral, also negatively affect it), it shifts into a new stable state that is usually bad and often causes health issues. And then whenever you try to change it back, the same thing as with a healthy microbiome happens: it bounces back to the pathological state. This is called a stable microbiome dysfunction and there is no real treatment for it apart from basically experimenting on yourself, because apart from again needing to do a big shift to introduce lasting changes, stuff that makes "normal" people better can make you worse and vice versa.
I am one of the unlucky people suffering from this and I wish other people could avoid it, so I'm overly cautious in this area.
Lyme disease can have permenant implications for you if you do not treat it early on (So the earlier you can treat it the better) and I think in general it's common enough in deer ticks that if...
Lyme disease can have permenant implications for you if you do not treat it early on (So the earlier you can treat it the better) and I think in general it's common enough in deer ticks that if you've been bitten for one long enough (it has to be on there long enough to transfer the virus) it is just better to assume you got it. Especially as the one obvious sign that gives you early warning doesn't happen in everyone (not everyone gets the bullseye rash).
And permenant implications I know off the top of my head include arthritus and dementia.... Lyme disease is a very weird disease.
I grew up in northeast Ohio and while I knew in the abstract about ticks and Lyme disease from reading too much, it was never something they warned us about in school. When I went to summer camp...
I grew up in northeast Ohio and while I knew in the abstract about ticks and Lyme disease from reading too much, it was never something they warned us about in school. When I went to summer camp they'd have us wear long pants when going in the woods to avoid poison ivy, but ticks were never mentioned (and never seemed to be an issue -- I don't recall anyone in my cabin needing help with ticks and I've never been bitten by one as far as I know). I never heard of anyone living around me getting Lyme disease until I was an adult, and even then it was from some people with... sketchy alternative medicine sources.
But my parents have recently mentioned ticks as a summer problem and I wonder if it's a newer thing due to climate change or something. I think I've heard that ticks with higher risk of Lyme have been spreading northwards and it's certainly not the only such change (those shield-looking stink bugs were never around when I was a kid and are crazy common now).
Those shield bugs are awful. The first year I saw them they were covering my screen door, trying to get in. I'm not sure if I see them less now because I have cats or because there's some kind of...
Those shield bugs are awful. The first year I saw them they were covering my screen door, trying to get in. I'm not sure if I see them less now because I have cats or because there's some kind of cycle.
I don't think long pants would have helped if they had been concerned about ticks. Ticks always seem to end up under hair and behind ears.
The one time I remember seeing ticks as a kid was when visiting relatives in Tennessee. We went strawberry-picking and I swore I saw a tick the size of a quarter. My mom didn't believe me.
The one time I remember seeing ticks as a kid was when visiting relatives in Tennessee. We went strawberry-picking and I swore I saw a tick the size of a quarter. My mom didn't believe me.
Yeah, there have been studies and the ticks that carry lyme disease are getting larger range now due to climate change. So yeah, you are seeing it in areas that used to not have it (and it's...
Yeah, there have been studies and the ticks that carry lyme disease are getting larger range now due to climate change. So yeah, you are seeing it in areas that used to not have it (and it's gotten much more prevalent in the original area. Everytime I visit my mom in Long Island now some one has a story of getting a deer tick and having to be treated for Lyme disease).
This article is kinda old, but the latest info seems to suggest that things are going well, and they're hoping to go live in 2026. https://valneva.com/research-development/lyme-disease/
This article is kinda old, but the latest info seems to suggest that things are going well, and they're hoping to go live in 2026.
Pfizer is currently aiming to submit a Biologics License Application (BLA) to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Marketing Authorization Application (MAA) to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in 2026, subject to positive Phase 3 data.
Thanks. I disagreed with this article's headline that it had "All you need to know"; in fact, it seemed like it gave me everything but what I was interested in knowing (such as the current status...
Thanks. I disagreed with this article's headline that it had "All you need to know"; in fact, it seemed like it gave me everything but what I was interested in knowing (such as the current status of the vaccine and how it was progressing). Looking forward to this. I pretty much always want to be outside, and while ticks aren't terrible here (west Michigan area), I suspect that climate change will make them worse. This would be great to reduce ticks to nothing but their ick-factor.
Awesome. Just gotta hold on for another few years and not yet Lyme in the mean time I hope it'll be publicly available for all when it is approved in Canada.
Awesome. Just gotta hold on for another few years and not yet Lyme in the mean time
I hope it'll be publicly available for all when it is approved in Canada.
Can anyone shed light on this source? Im not particularly familiar with the website but this article is giving me written-by-ai vibes (or just bad writing). Quality aside, I'll be first in line...
Can anyone shed light on this source? Im not particularly familiar with the website but this article is giving me written-by-ai vibes (or just bad writing).
Quality aside, I'll be first in line for a lyme vaccine when one becomes publicly available. I grew up in an area without lyme, which is now a hotspot for it. I miss the days of running around in the woods wearing sandles and shorts without having to worry about ticks.
The Economic Times is kind of a big deal. Second largest English news publication in the world. Same ownership as the Times of India. They're also kind of trash, and frequently publish fake news,...
The Economic Times is kind of a big deal. Second largest English news publication in the world. Same ownership as the Times of India. They're also kind of trash, and frequently publish fake news, but I think the weird vibe is just from it being written by an Indian-dialect speaker.
Overall, we rate the Economic Times Right-Center biased and Questionable based on numerous failed fact checks. (D. Van Zandt 5/18/2016) Updated (12/16/2020)
Ah, thanks for sharing, Ill have to bookmark that fact checker! Tbh, I feel kind of silly missing the Times of India part of the URL, but Im going to just blame being on mobile :)
Ah, thanks for sharing, Ill have to bookmark that fact checker! Tbh, I feel kind of silly missing the Times of India part of the URL, but Im going to just blame being on mobile :)
That is good news! The sad thing is that we had a Lyme disease vaccine available more than 20 years ago but it was discontinued due to lack of demand. https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/prev/vaccine.html I...
That is good news! The sad thing is that we had a Lyme disease vaccine available more than 20 years ago but it was discontinued due to lack of demand.
Lyme disease can be brutal... A friend of mine in the boy scouts got it as a teenager and lost the ability to eat gluten, it was pretty sad because summer camps didn't have much choice for gluten...
Lyme disease can be brutal... A friend of mine in the boy scouts got it as a teenager and lost the ability to eat gluten, it was pretty sad because summer camps didn't have much choice for gluten free stuff back then.
I was vaccinated against Lyme in Wisconsin, back around 2002-ish. There was a vaccine available for a brief period, but got cancelled. The reasons I've heard for it being discontinued have varied...
I was vaccinated against Lyme in Wisconsin, back around 2002-ish. There was a vaccine available for a brief period, but got cancelled. The reasons I've heard for it being discontinued have varied over the years, from claims of problematic side-effects (I had none), to lack of interest (that seems unlikely), to ineffectiveness (apparently there are/were multiple variations of Lyme, and the vaccine only worked against one of them).
Fast-forward 20 years ... I got Lyme disease in Germany ... probably. Tick-infested region; I checked myself regularly after being out, never saw a tick bite me, but I did see a long-lasting odd bruise on my heel and thought it could be a warped "bullseye" bite rash.
Went in, got tested, the doctor said that the test results were "weird" (her word), that I did have Lyme, but they couldn't tell how long ago I got it, might have had it for years. I've never had any symptoms (probably; at least, none of the obvious ones).
Told her about the 20-year-old vaccination, she said there was a reasonable chance it might be mucking up the test results. Also might actually have helped my immune response to the infection. She couldn't be sure; old, discontinued vaccine, different country, etc.
Gave me antibiotics ... I took 'em, but never actually followed up. I still need to go back in for a follow-up test to make sure the antibiotics cleared it up.
This is really welcome news. I feel like I've heard about a vaccine in the works on and off for a long time, I didn't realize they'd reached this stage with it.
Where I grew up, every spring our school would go over tick protocol and give us cards like this. I used to get ticks all the time. I've had friends and family members get extremely sick from Lyme disease.
I now live in an area where folks barely seem to know what Lyme disease is, it's so odd to me.
As a kid I had classmates who were in and out of school for months at a time because of Lyme. I remember us all writing "get well soon" cards to them. Beyond the physical symptoms (which were awful), it must have been miserable to be so isolated. That's a hard childhood. And everyone knew about Lyme, literally everyone.
Chaotic/amusing (in hindsight) anecdote: I developed localized Lyme symptoms in a small town in Scotland, probably from hiking several weeks prior. I had some nasty symptoms (fatigue, joint pain, soreness, bullseye rash), but the world had tunnel vision in the wake of COVID-19, so a negative test gave me false security.
When I realized my mistake and sought antibiotics, I was shocked by the lack of knowledge and urgency exhibited there. It was unpleasant to spend an entire day convincing miscellaneous hospital staff that:
The hospital remained resistant, but after a few hours of this I just refused to leave. Not knowing how long I'd had it or how much it had disseminated, I was pretty worried! A physician eventually happened to notice me sitting in an odd place and asked if I needed help, then immediately wrote a prescription. I guess that's the difference between people who swore on a Hippocratic Oath and those who just work in medicine.
I understand that Scotland didn't have the same problem with Lyme as Massachusetts, but it did have ticks and reported Lyme cases, plus visitors from tick-heavy parts of the world (...like Massachusetts) are hardly rare in the United Kingdom. I wasn't going to die on the spot, but I was still baffled by their indifference.
That's all to say that a Lyme vaccine will be amazing. I love that modern medicine has brought us so far. I had no idea that there WAS a vaccine that got pulled because of "low demand" (is that really how it works?). I hope this trial succeeds because Lyme is a big deal and needs to be taken seriously.
Similar experience, a friend was visiting from Australia and his son, I think about 10 years old at the time, got a tick and developed obvious lyme symptoms with the target-shaped rash around the time when they flew back home. Not only was their australian pediatrist completely ignorant regarding the existence of lyme or tick-borne illnesses in general, for some reason (and this is supposedly a trend over there) she almost completely refused to speak to the parents and talked exclusively to the kid. So it did not matter that the father (being an immigrant born in a country full of ticks) knew everything necessary because the doctor did not give shit. He eventually forced her to listen to him somehow, but it took significant effort.
That's terrible.
I think the low demand was related to it not working very well.
Yeah, I’ve gotten Lyme before and had to do a pretty extensive treatment regime from a specialized tick borne illness doctor for 3-4 months to get rid of it.
That was after catching the tick on me a day after being in the woods and starting the standard doxycycline course the day I found the tick.
I’ll sign up to get this vaccine the first day it’s available to me.
Wait, how did you know that the tick carried Lyme after less than a day? Did you start doxycycline just in case?
Yeah, if you find a deer tick on you where I live, and it’s been on you for a day they’ll give you antibiotics as a preventative measure:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/lyme-disease/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20374655
Damn, that sounds crazy to me. I know lyme is no joke, but neither is taking doxycycline (for your body and especially your microbiome) and creating antibiotic resistant bacteria by using antibiotics just in case. I live in an area with relatively high lyme prevalence in ticks and no doctor here would prescribe antibiotics just like that.
Can't wait for the vaccine so that this is less of an issue.
edit: the reason why it sounds crazy is because around here if you spend a lot of time in the forest it's normal to have a couple ticks every year, so taking doxycycline for each of them would be a really bad idea.
We had a friend nearly die from Lyme after a tick bite in the past couple years. Didn't have the bull's-eye rash and at this point I don't recall the protocol or what his initial response to the tick bite was. But it came out that there were tick issues at multiple of the campgrounds my LARP chapters used, higher number of ticks and huge increase in Lyme carrying ticks and thus infections in campers. (Reporting changes have caused another huge jump in 2023 so numbers get wonky there.) It seems to be another climate change issue.
That may be why guidance is currently to get antibiotics if you find a tick on you for more than 24 hours, especially as some of the less visible symptoms get tracked better on the new reporting guidelines.
It’s not every tick, if that makes it any better. It needs to be a deer tick that’s been attached for a day or more (or at least, you suspect it has). This was the only time I’ve been on doxycycline for Lyme (though I’m way more careful these days post hikes) and I live close enough that I’ve driven through Lyme (the town) in the last 3 months
Yeah, I have a bit of a bias here. The gut microbiome is sort of flexible and when you push it out of balance, it tends to bounce back approximately to where it was because the bacteria and phages keep each other in check through competing for food, killing each other (some bacteria produce their own antibiotics), symbiotic relationships (one bacteria producing metabolites consumed by another) etc., these mechanisms together are relatively strong.
However, when you knock it sufficiently out of shape (for example through needing to take antibiotics too often, plus most infections, even viral, also negatively affect it), it shifts into a new stable state that is usually bad and often causes health issues. And then whenever you try to change it back, the same thing as with a healthy microbiome happens: it bounces back to the pathological state. This is called a stable microbiome dysfunction and there is no real treatment for it apart from basically experimenting on yourself, because apart from again needing to do a big shift to introduce lasting changes, stuff that makes "normal" people better can make you worse and vice versa.
I am one of the unlucky people suffering from this and I wish other people could avoid it, so I'm overly cautious in this area.
Lyme disease can have permenant implications for you if you do not treat it early on (So the earlier you can treat it the better) and I think in general it's common enough in deer ticks that if you've been bitten for one long enough (it has to be on there long enough to transfer the virus) it is just better to assume you got it. Especially as the one obvious sign that gives you early warning doesn't happen in everyone (not everyone gets the bullseye rash).
And permenant implications I know off the top of my head include arthritus and dementia.... Lyme disease is a very weird disease.
I grew up in northeast Ohio and while I knew in the abstract about ticks and Lyme disease from reading too much, it was never something they warned us about in school. When I went to summer camp they'd have us wear long pants when going in the woods to avoid poison ivy, but ticks were never mentioned (and never seemed to be an issue -- I don't recall anyone in my cabin needing help with ticks and I've never been bitten by one as far as I know). I never heard of anyone living around me getting Lyme disease until I was an adult, and even then it was from some people with... sketchy alternative medicine sources.
But my parents have recently mentioned ticks as a summer problem and I wonder if it's a newer thing due to climate change or something. I think I've heard that ticks with higher risk of Lyme have been spreading northwards and it's certainly not the only such change (those shield-looking stink bugs were never around when I was a kid and are crazy common now).
Those shield bugs are awful. The first year I saw them they were covering my screen door, trying to get in. I'm not sure if I see them less now because I have cats or because there's some kind of cycle.
I don't think long pants would have helped if they had been concerned about ticks. Ticks always seem to end up under hair and behind ears.
The one time I remember seeing ticks as a kid was when visiting relatives in Tennessee. We went strawberry-picking and I swore I saw a tick the size of a quarter. My mom didn't believe me.
Yeah, there have been studies and the ticks that carry lyme disease are getting larger range now due to climate change. So yeah, you are seeing it in areas that used to not have it (and it's gotten much more prevalent in the original area. Everytime I visit my mom in Long Island now some one has a story of getting a deer tick and having to be treated for Lyme disease).
This article is kinda old, but the latest info seems to suggest that things are going well, and they're hoping to go live in 2026.
https://valneva.com/research-development/lyme-disease/
Thanks. I disagreed with this article's headline that it had "All you need to know"; in fact, it seemed like it gave me everything but what I was interested in knowing (such as the current status of the vaccine and how it was progressing). Looking forward to this. I pretty much always want to be outside, and while ticks aren't terrible here (west Michigan area), I suspect that climate change will make them worse. This would be great to reduce ticks to nothing but their ick-factor.
Awesome. Just gotta hold on for another few years and not yet Lyme in the mean time
I hope it'll be publicly available for all when it is approved in Canada.
Can anyone shed light on this source? Im not particularly familiar with the website but this article is giving me written-by-ai vibes (or just bad writing).
Quality aside, I'll be first in line for a lyme vaccine when one becomes publicly available. I grew up in an area without lyme, which is now a hotspot for it. I miss the days of running around in the woods wearing sandles and shorts without having to worry about ticks.
The Economic Times is kind of a big deal. Second largest English news publication in the world. Same ownership as the Times of India. They're also kind of trash, and frequently publish fake news, but I think the weird vibe is just from it being written by an Indian-dialect speaker.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-economic-times/
Ah, thanks for sharing, Ill have to bookmark that fact checker! Tbh, I feel kind of silly missing the Times of India part of the URL, but Im going to just blame being on mobile :)
Id love to hear more about the quality of this source. I picked the article up from a news aggregator.
That is good news! The sad thing is that we had a Lyme disease vaccine available more than 20 years ago but it was discontinued due to lack of demand.
https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/prev/vaccine.html
I always wondered why they didn't just resurrect that instead of starting all over.
My mom claimed that they also had a few people claiming some issue (Turned out it wasn't) and it chased people away from taking it.
I'm actually even more excited for the vaccine targeting tick saliva, since there are so many other debilitating tick-borne illnesses.
Lyme disease can be brutal... A friend of mine in the boy scouts got it as a teenager and lost the ability to eat gluten, it was pretty sad because summer camps didn't have much choice for gluten free stuff back then.
I was vaccinated against Lyme in Wisconsin, back around 2002-ish. There was a vaccine available for a brief period, but got cancelled. The reasons I've heard for it being discontinued have varied over the years, from claims of problematic side-effects (I had none), to lack of interest (that seems unlikely), to ineffectiveness (apparently there are/were multiple variations of Lyme, and the vaccine only worked against one of them).
Fast-forward 20 years ... I got Lyme disease in Germany ... probably. Tick-infested region; I checked myself regularly after being out, never saw a tick bite me, but I did see a long-lasting odd bruise on my heel and thought it could be a warped "bullseye" bite rash.
Went in, got tested, the doctor said that the test results were "weird" (her word), that I did have Lyme, but they couldn't tell how long ago I got it, might have had it for years. I've never had any symptoms (probably; at least, none of the obvious ones).
Told her about the 20-year-old vaccination, she said there was a reasonable chance it might be mucking up the test results. Also might actually have helped my immune response to the infection. She couldn't be sure; old, discontinued vaccine, different country, etc.
Gave me antibiotics ... I took 'em, but never actually followed up. I still need to go back in for a follow-up test to make sure the antibiotics cleared it up.