The core problem with the original vaccine is that 80% effectiveness is terrible-- that's not sufficient, you still need to take all normal precautions. The second problem is that many people at high risk for Lyme may already have it, or have other tick-borne diseases that are difficult to diagnose and can be chronic-- that probably explains the "side effects" problem.
Lyme is at the center of a number of nasty bacteria and parasites that you can get from a deer tick. The most effective thing we can do is reduce deer populations.
> The most effective thing we can do is reduce deer populations.
The disease comes from mice, not deer. Deer do help spread the ticks around, but reducing the deer population wouldn't significantly help with lyme disease prevalence.
I'm actually currently on roughly day 14 of doxycycline for possibly having it or some other tick infection. I got bit on the shoulder by a nymph, found at somewhere between 18 - 24 hours later still unengorged. I then got the 200mg prophylaxis later that day, meaning that my odds of getting anything should have been less than 1%.
I never developed a lyme rash, only a local rash, but my shoulder and arm started hurting within a couple days. I tried to convince myself it was just from using my laptop even though I've never had any RSI problems, or else just from being tense from worrying about it, but it was still sore on and off for the next 20 days. Finally woke up and my whole arm was burning, so I drove down to the pharmacy and had the scrip filled within the hour. It's frustrating though because there's really no way to know if you have it in the first place, and also no way to know if you're actually cured once you finish the treatment. The symptoms did go away pretty much as soon as I started taking the meds, but who knows what that really means.
What's wrong with 80% effectiveness? I didn't know anything about the effectiveness of vaccines, but 80% effective struck me as being 'pretty good'. I looked up the effectiveness of flu vaccines for comparison, and found a source [1] that said it varies in effectiveness from 70 to 90%, so just about the same.
I've never felt compelled to be more careless after taking a vaccine (I'm not even sure what I'd do differently if I did); I just get vaccines to minimize the expected number of times I get a disease in my lifetime.
According to wikipedia, 7.9 people per 100,000, so ~21k people, get Lyme Disease every year. Imagine if suddenly ~16k fewer people got the disease, do you think those people would find the vaccine terrible?
The New York Times wrote an article about the Lyme disease vaccine in 1999. It gives a bit of a different perspective. The long and short of it is, it seemed too new and too much of a pain, and a lot of people didn't see a benefit due to the presence of other tick-borne diseases that necessitated the same checks for ticks even with the vaccine.
An interesting feature of lyme disease specifically (unlike some other tick-borne diseases) is that tick checks are very effective, because it doesn't migrate from the tick to the human bloodstream in sufficient quantities to produce infection until around 36-48 hours after attachment.
When she was in high school, my girlfriend contracted Lyme disease unknowingly. By a mad stroke of luck, it was soon killed by a round of antibiotics for an unrelated illness. However, she still suffers from nightly joint pain; having seen the suffering (relatively minor, thank goodness) brought on by such a simple thing to prevent, I would like nothing more than to see a human vaccine become widespread.
A friend of mine in college suffered terribly from Lyme in the early 1990s, when the disease wasn't as readily diagnosed and treatment protocols weren't established. He lost 100 pounds and dropped out of school. Lyme today is the most common infectious disease in New England.
I always thought the fear of Lyme was exaggerated (though I'd learned to remove ticks carefully). But this spring, a niece got a really bad case of Lyme. Spent a long time in the hospital, and is still recovering. I don't know all the medical details, but I suspect she'll have to learn to live with aching joints for the rest of her life, which is hopefully a long time; she's 8.
My Dad was part of the Lyme Disease vaccine trials. He ended up receiving the placebo, but was then given the option to get the actual vaccine and he took it. If I remember correctly, it didn't last that long, so it has almost certainly worn off by now.
>"But then opponents spoke out: self-described ‘vaccine victims’ — perhaps similar to people today who claim the MMR vaccine causes autism. Back then, they said that the Lyme vaccine gave them arthritis."
Okay, vaccines can harm people. It's a fact, get over it, now let's see an honest discussion with more facts and less name-calling.
>" There were a number of East Coast lawyers who started putting together class-action lawsuits."
So? Vaccine manufacturers are immune from lawsuit. Cases are tried in vaccine court[1]. Awards are paid by the gov't.
> "many drug companies say not they’re not interested in working on one."
There is no excuse for this. If we have to suffer the perversion of market forces seen in our vaccine industry, there should be no excuses for companies who don't want to produce an existing product merely because it isn't profitable enough.
> Okay, vaccines can harm people. It's a fact, get over it
It's also a known fact Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 research paper, that tried to discredit the MMR vaccine by linking it to other complications is fraudulent and wrong.
That research paper was nothing more than a work of fiction.
The problem is, decades on 'vaccine victims' still quote Andrew Wakefield’s research paper as a reason to not vaccinate.
Those are the 'vaccine victims' he was referring to and they are alive and well, working hard to bring back the iron lung hospital wards of the 1950s with their stupidity and ignorance.
As far as I know, the immunity only applies for the vaccines listed on the Vaccine Injury Table, which is comprised mostly or entirely of vaccines specifically recommended by the CDC for children. The lyme vaccine, like many other vaccines, isn't on the VIT.
FDA did not clear the vaccine for children, so from this one probably isn't on the list of covered vaccine. The entire vaccine court system was established so that drug companies can make vaccines with minimum headaches. Why would any company produce vaccine when there are other profitable things to make?
Yeah, so can lightning, bathtubs, and aspirin. The risk from vaccines is miniscule, and "vaccine victim" is an appropriate way to castigate people who don't understand statistics. Your kid is at more risk of SIDS than vaccine complications. Or, y'know, a bicycle accident. Pretty much everything is more dangerous than vaccines, from McDonald's to driving to drinking -- even smoking marijuana, for that matter, looking at you Bill Maher.
>So? Vaccine manufacturers are immune from lawsuit.
From the article:
>Subsequently, hundreds of vaccine recipients reported they had developed autoimmune side effects. Supported by some patient advocacy groups, a number of class-action lawsuits were filed against GlaxoSmithKline
In effect, your claim appears to be without basis.
The thing is, a certain proportion of people will develop autoimmune issues randomly at any time. If they've been vaccinated recently, there's a chance they'll blame it on the vaccine, but that does not mean the vaccine caused their autoimmune disorder. That is why science is performed by using randomized controlled trials to study the side-effects of treatments, and these scare tactics are absurd and damaging to society. The actual incidence of problems caused by vaccines is much lower than the incidence of problems incorrectly ascribed to vaccines.
>A clinical trial of over 10,000 adults showed [...] Only mild or moderate, transient vaccine-associated adverse events have been reported after immunization.
Is ten thousand people not enough for you? How many would convince you? A hundred thousand? A million? Are you willing to pay for this, or do you think science falls out of the sky?
>I like your links to photos of Polio victims. Thankfully, people back then weren't afraid to notice that the first generation of Polio vaccines actually gave Polio to some who took them. Instead of denying the possibility that their vaccine was imperfect, or telling everyone "our vaccine is good enough!, sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet", they improved/perfected the vaccine. Good for them. Shame on their successors.
Consider the previous statement about failing to comprehend statistics. Consider also that your statement is blatantly false: the oral polio vaccine developed in the 1950s remains in use today, and has successfully contributed to the eradication of polio in most of the world. Unless of course you mean the disastrous 1936 "vaccine" that didn't actually prevent anything and was basically the virus itself, but I'm sure you're not intent on being so... misleading.
The injected polio vaccine, itself still on its first generation, never carried such risks, but it's hard to get people to agree to an injection -- maybe because of vaccine scaremongry? Anywho, statistics:
>The rate of vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis (VAPP) varies by region but is generally about 1 case per 750,000 vaccine recipients.
That means that VAPP is one of the only things that is actually less likely to happen to you than a terrorist attack. The existence of VAPP at all is due to the use of a live attenuated virus vaccine for poliomyelitis, which itself is due to the fact that polio is just a real bastard to culture and the vaccine was developed a long time ago. Vaccine reactivation is fun to worry about because it's scary, but in all conceivable circumstances presents far less risk than the disease itself.
>There is no excuse for this. If we have to suffer the perversion of market forces seen in our vaccine industry, there should be no excuses for companies who don't want to produce an existing product merely because it isn't profitable enough.
I dunno, the existence of people who are willing to spread pseudo-"cautionary tales" based on misrepresented data who can make marketing the vaccine a largely fruitless endeavor seems like it very well might be enough to discourage even a benevolent nonprofit organization. I'm glad we don't have such people around here.
Also: it's a "perversion of market forces" when a product that doesn't sell is withdrawn from the market?
>It's a fact, get over it, now let's see an honest discussion with more facts and less name-calling.
The reason for the suit was that SmithKline allegedly knew that 30% of people were predisposed to having an incurable adverse reaction, and failed to disclose or warn of that fact after it became known, and that SmithKline also failed to disclose the fact that (frequent) periodic boosters were required to maintain immunity.
I'm no medical expert (of any sort), but my gut feeling says yes. Why? You are trying to learn your immune system to fight of something. This is usually learned by adding a dead(ish) infection.
Possible problems are: A) Not being tuned to humans. B) The method of immunising doesn't work for humans. C) The lymes aren't dead enough for humans and you get lymes deases.
Ow: and ask a fair, honest, open-minded and well educated doctor who will do the research on it.
As someone from a high Lyme area, this doesn't really matter, because any doctor I've met will just give you an acne antibiotic prescription to prevent Lyme if you ask.
Has anyone tried making a tick trap? I read once that you could build something simple with dry ice on a piece of cardboard surrounding by double sided tape. The ticks are attracted to the CO2 and get stuck on the tape.
I wonder why there are no simple commercial products like that?
Other ideas I've had is a company that runs dogs or horses around your property for a few days hopefully to pick up all the ticks. They obviously then carefully remove the ticks from the animals.
I read that ticks detect the ground shaking, and hope that means an animal will walk by soon, and they climb onto a stalk of grass/branch and put their legs out for a free ride.
The ticks are so terrible this year in Missouri. It's not clear if we have proper Lyme disease here. They call it "Lyme-like" diseases. It's relatively uncommon, still, I think. Lyme disease hasn't been isolated here in a replicated study.
I sure am glad of this. I'd never go in the woods (brambles) if that were the case.
I'm also glad you can't get any diseases from the chiggers. Damn those chiggers.
I truly wish that a lyme disease vaccine gets released in the near future. I got it twice (!) within two years when I was younger and boy was I sick. At least the first time. It is not fun at all, though I seem have managed without any permanent problems as far as I know.
I did not get sick until something like 4 months after getting bitten, which lead in turn lead to the diagnosis being delayed a lot. Not fun at all.
From my personal experience places I go will either have lots of ticks or none. The best explanatory variable I can come up with is the deer to human ratio. In places with a lot of deer but few humans the ticks are all just waiting around to bite people that come by. But I'm guessing in places with lots of people, other people have already come by and "used up the tick supply".
Climate plays a big role too. Ticks have a pretty narrow band where they are active. We have ticks in my area for a couple of weeks in the damp, cool spring. After that it's too dry and hot.
[+] [-] newbie12|12 years ago|reply
The core problem with the original vaccine is that 80% effectiveness is terrible-- that's not sufficient, you still need to take all normal precautions. The second problem is that many people at high risk for Lyme may already have it, or have other tick-borne diseases that are difficult to diagnose and can be chronic-- that probably explains the "side effects" problem.
Lyme is at the center of a number of nasty bacteria and parasites that you can get from a deer tick. The most effective thing we can do is reduce deer populations.
[+] [-] Alex3917|12 years ago|reply
The disease comes from mice, not deer. Deer do help spread the ticks around, but reducing the deer population wouldn't significantly help with lyme disease prevalence.
I'm actually currently on roughly day 14 of doxycycline for possibly having it or some other tick infection. I got bit on the shoulder by a nymph, found at somewhere between 18 - 24 hours later still unengorged. I then got the 200mg prophylaxis later that day, meaning that my odds of getting anything should have been less than 1%.
I never developed a lyme rash, only a local rash, but my shoulder and arm started hurting within a couple days. I tried to convince myself it was just from using my laptop even though I've never had any RSI problems, or else just from being tense from worrying about it, but it was still sore on and off for the next 20 days. Finally woke up and my whole arm was burning, so I drove down to the pharmacy and had the scrip filled within the hour. It's frustrating though because there's really no way to know if you have it in the first place, and also no way to know if you're actually cured once you finish the treatment. The symptoms did go away pretty much as soon as I started taking the meds, but who knows what that really means.
[+] [-] FaceKicker|12 years ago|reply
I've never felt compelled to be more careless after taking a vaccine (I'm not even sure what I'd do differently if I did); I just get vaccines to minimize the expected number of times I get a disease in my lifetime.
[1] http://www.webmd.com/vaccines/how-effective-is-flu-vaccine
[+] [-] ddlatham|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyree732|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joemaller1|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randomchars|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielharan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BorgHunter|12 years ago|reply
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/13/nyregion/lukewarm-response...
[+] [-] _delirium|12 years ago|reply
(Source: http://www.cdc.gov/lyme/transmission/)
[+] [-] evincarofautumn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newbie12|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcv|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] WillyF|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fnordfnordfnord|12 years ago|reply
Okay, vaccines can harm people. It's a fact, get over it, now let's see an honest discussion with more facts and less name-calling.
>" There were a number of East Coast lawyers who started putting together class-action lawsuits."
So? Vaccine manufacturers are immune from lawsuit. Cases are tried in vaccine court[1]. Awards are paid by the gov't.
> "many drug companies say not they’re not interested in working on one."
There is no excuse for this. If we have to suffer the perversion of market forces seen in our vaccine industry, there should be no excuses for companies who don't want to produce an existing product merely because it isn't profitable enough.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_court
[+] [-] jussij|12 years ago|reply
It's also a known fact Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 research paper, that tried to discredit the MMR vaccine by linking it to other complications is fraudulent and wrong.
That research paper was nothing more than a work of fiction.
The problem is, decades on 'vaccine victims' still quote Andrew Wakefield’s research paper as a reason to not vaccinate.
Those are the 'vaccine victims' he was referring to and they are alive and well, working hard to bring back the iron lung hospital wards of the 1950s with their stupidity and ignorance.
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/goldenage/wonder/Archive/Images/Ir...
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/01/what-ame...
[+] [-] nknighthb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] some_guy_there|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cromulent|12 years ago|reply
I don't see any name calling or dishonesty.
[+] [-] scythe|12 years ago|reply
Yeah, so can lightning, bathtubs, and aspirin. The risk from vaccines is miniscule, and "vaccine victim" is an appropriate way to castigate people who don't understand statistics. Your kid is at more risk of SIDS than vaccine complications. Or, y'know, a bicycle accident. Pretty much everything is more dangerous than vaccines, from McDonald's to driving to drinking -- even smoking marijuana, for that matter, looking at you Bill Maher.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Vaccination
>So? Vaccine manufacturers are immune from lawsuit.
From the article:
>Subsequently, hundreds of vaccine recipients reported they had developed autoimmune side effects. Supported by some patient advocacy groups, a number of class-action lawsuits were filed against GlaxoSmithKline
In effect, your claim appears to be without basis.
The thing is, a certain proportion of people will develop autoimmune issues randomly at any time. If they've been vaccinated recently, there's a chance they'll blame it on the vaccine, but that does not mean the vaccine caused their autoimmune disorder. That is why science is performed by using randomized controlled trials to study the side-effects of treatments, and these scare tactics are absurd and damaging to society. The actual incidence of problems caused by vaccines is much lower than the incidence of problems incorrectly ascribed to vaccines.
From a later post of yours:
>They can just use the CDC data or the NVIC data.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Citation_needed
Vaccines are by and large rigorously tested before entering the marketplace. Here's an example of the tests done on the Lyme disease vaccine:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X00...
>A clinical trial of over 10,000 adults showed [...] Only mild or moderate, transient vaccine-associated adverse events have been reported after immunization.
Is ten thousand people not enough for you? How many would convince you? A hundred thousand? A million? Are you willing to pay for this, or do you think science falls out of the sky?
>I like your links to photos of Polio victims. Thankfully, people back then weren't afraid to notice that the first generation of Polio vaccines actually gave Polio to some who took them. Instead of denying the possibility that their vaccine was imperfect, or telling everyone "our vaccine is good enough!, sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet", they improved/perfected the vaccine. Good for them. Shame on their successors.
Consider the previous statement about failing to comprehend statistics. Consider also that your statement is blatantly false: the oral polio vaccine developed in the 1950s remains in use today, and has successfully contributed to the eradication of polio in most of the world. Unless of course you mean the disastrous 1936 "vaccine" that didn't actually prevent anything and was basically the virus itself, but I'm sure you're not intent on being so... misleading.
The injected polio vaccine, itself still on its first generation, never carried such risks, but it's hard to get people to agree to an injection -- maybe because of vaccine scaremongry? Anywho, statistics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#Iatrogenic_.28vac...
>The rate of vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis (VAPP) varies by region but is generally about 1 case per 750,000 vaccine recipients.
That means that VAPP is one of the only things that is actually less likely to happen to you than a terrorist attack. The existence of VAPP at all is due to the use of a live attenuated virus vaccine for poliomyelitis, which itself is due to the fact that polio is just a real bastard to culture and the vaccine was developed a long time ago. Vaccine reactivation is fun to worry about because it's scary, but in all conceivable circumstances presents far less risk than the disease itself.
>There is no excuse for this. If we have to suffer the perversion of market forces seen in our vaccine industry, there should be no excuses for companies who don't want to produce an existing product merely because it isn't profitable enough.
I dunno, the existence of people who are willing to spread pseudo-"cautionary tales" based on misrepresented data who can make marketing the vaccine a largely fruitless endeavor seems like it very well might be enough to discourage even a benevolent nonprofit organization. I'm glad we don't have such people around here.
Also: it's a "perversion of market forces" when a product that doesn't sell is withdrawn from the market?
>It's a fact, get over it, now let's see an honest discussion with more facts and less name-calling.
Fact #n+1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy#Impact_...
[+] [-] pc86|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balqan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fnordfnordfnord|12 years ago|reply
http://www3.jsonline.com/bym/news/ap/jul03/ap-lyme-vaccine-s...
[+] [-] fenugreek|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Qantourisc|12 years ago|reply
Possible problems are: A) Not being tuned to humans. B) The method of immunising doesn't work for humans. C) The lymes aren't dead enough for humans and you get lymes deases.
Ow: and ask a fair, honest, open-minded and well educated doctor who will do the research on it.
[+] [-] MSexton|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lnanek2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tocomment|12 years ago|reply
I wonder why there are no simple commercial products like that?
Other ideas I've had is a company that runs dogs or horses around your property for a few days hopefully to pick up all the ticks. They obviously then carefully remove the ticks from the animals.
[+] [-] DennisP|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digitalsushi|12 years ago|reply
I would like to know if the CO2 trick is true.
[+] [-] cantankerous|12 years ago|reply
I sure am glad of this. I'd never go in the woods (brambles) if that were the case.
I'm also glad you can't get any diseases from the chiggers. Damn those chiggers.
[+] [-] pathy|12 years ago|reply
I did not get sick until something like 4 months after getting bitten, which lead in turn lead to the diagnosis being delayed a lot. Not fun at all.
[+] [-] tocomment|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaustin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tieTYT|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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