A vaccine may soon be available. In the meantime, here’s how to protect yourself from ticks
BY Debby Waldman
WHILE STUDYING ABROAD in Australia in 2016, Ryann McIntire began experiencing severe joint pain, unstable blood-sugar levels, brain fog and other debilitating symptoms. It got so bad that the then 21-year-old flew home to Massachusetts early in search of answers.
After a friend suggested that she might have Lyme disease, McIntire asked her doctor for a blood test, which confirmed she had the antibodies in her system. That result, as well as her symptoms in the years prior, led McIntire’s doctor to conclude that she had been living with Lyme disease for more than a decade—most likely since an elementary-school field trip in the early 2000s near her home in Cape Cod, after which a nurse pulled a tick from her scalp.
Blacklegged ticks transmit the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi, which causes Lyme disease. The condition was first identified in the 1970s in Lyme, Connecticut—hence the name—about 150 miles southwest of McIntire’s fateful field trip. Symptoms include fatigue, fever, joint pain, headache and chills, and they can appear anywhere from three to 30 days after a bite. That makes diagnosis a challenge, as does the fact that the symptoms are common to multiple illnesses, says Janet Sperling, an entomologist and president of CanLyme, the Canadian Lyme Disease Foundation. The one symptom unique to Lyme disease, a bull’s-eye-shaped rash, doesn’t occur in all patients.
Lyme disease is diagnosed by a blood test that detects antibodies made by the body in response to the infection, and it can be treated with antibiotics. But if it goes undiagnosed, like in McIntire’s case, it can affect the central nervous system, resulting in a hard-to-treat, chronic condition called neurologic Lyme disease, characterised by brain fog, pain and muscle weakness.
The good news is that a vaccine to prevent Lyme-disease infection is on the way. Moderna has two novel mRNA Lyme-disease vaccines in development. And Pfizer Inc and French drugmaker Valneva SE have a vaccine currently in Phase III trials. It’s expected to be available to the public in the next few years.
While a vaccine for dogs has been around since the 1990s, the first human Lyme vaccine, LYMErix, was taken off the market by its manufacturer in 2002, after only four years. At the time, sales were low, partly because the market was small and partly because of
