What Is Lyme Disease?
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Lyme disease, or Lyme borreliosis, is an infectious disease caused by the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi. This bacteria is transmitted to humans through the bite of an infected tick. Once a person is bitten by an infected tick, a rash—often in a bull’s-eye pattern (erythema migrans)—can develop in the area of the bite. Typically, symptoms will include fever, headache, and fatigue. If left untreated, the infection can spread to joints, the heart, and the nervous system.
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According to the Center for Disease Control, Lyme disease affects 300,000 people per year. Those numbers may be much higher due to it being one of the most misdiagnosed infectious diseases. While the tick has to be attached to the skin for at least 36 hours in order to transmit the bacteria, it’s easy for people to be unaware they have been bitten until months or years after the initial tick bite. Lyme disease is notoriously difficult to diagnose—it’s often called “The Great Imitator” because the symptoms imitate many other diseases. Many people are misdiagnosed with other more “curable” illnesses when in reality they have contracted Lyme disease.
How Lyme Disease Got Its Name
In the fall of 1975, the town of Lyme, Connecticut had a mysterious problem. An unusually large number of children were showing signs of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, skin rashes, severe chronic fatigue, headaches, and other seemingly unrelated symptoms. The townspeople brought this problem to the attention of the Connecticut State Department of Health and researchers at Yale, who saw some similarities in the cases:
    • The children who were affected with similar symptoms lives near and played around wooded areas where ticks live.
 
    • The children who were sick started showing symptoms in the summer when ticks are the most active.
 
  • Many children displayed similar rashes that looked like a bulls-eye, and many remembered being bitten by a tick at the site of the rash. 
  In 1982, The researchers’ investigations found that deer ticks (a type commonly found on the east coast of the United States) were the cause of the outbreak. The ticks were infected with a bacteria later named Borrelia burgdorferi after Dr. Willy Burgdorfer, who determined the bacterial infection and deer ticks.
Lyme Disease Today
Even though the mystery of what happened in Lyme, Connecticut has been solved, Lyme disease is far from being cured or completely understood. It’s one of the fastest-growing infections in the United States with more than 300,000 new cases each year. And there’s still a lot of contention between Lyme disease sufferers and the medical community with misdiagnoses and unreliable Lyme disease testing. While science has made leaps and bounds in Lyme research since 1975, there is still much to learn about this disease.
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