Target New Jersey; Lyme Disease: In Our Own Backyard
- Transcript
<v Speaker>We have a lot of wildlife through here. There are deer that are under the swing set, <v Speaker>sometimes my children swing set and they drop ticks off of them, which are then a <v Speaker>potential hazard to my children. <v Speaker>This isn't something that you went out and asked for. <v Speaker>This is something that was done to you by a little creature out there <v Speaker>who packs a powerful punch. <v Speaker>I've gotten calls from Garfield, calls that Rutherford, North <v Speaker>Arlington, Fairlawn, Fairfield, all this area that people <v Speaker>have Lyme. They've gotten it in their own backyards. <v Speaker>Just checking here and make sure that... <v Kent Manahan>Seeing a mother check her children for ticks after playing outside is becoming <v Kent Manahan>a more common experience throughout the country. <v Kent Manahan>That's because a particular tick, sometimes smaller than a pinhead,
<v Kent Manahan>carries the microscopic bacterium called a spirochete. <v Kent Manahan>This spirochete causes Lyme disease. <v Kent Manahan>I'm Kent Manahan. During the next hour, we'll examine what Lyme disease <v Kent Manahan>is, how it's treated, and better understand the risks associated <v Kent Manahan>with this spreading disease. <v Speaker>Hi Matthew. How you doing today? <v Speaker>[Matthew: good] Are you? <v Speaker>Any-. <v Matthew>My back hurts, my stomach hurt, my head hurts, and my leg hurts. <v Speaker>And you're doing ok, right? <v Patricia Walsh>It doesn't matter how they look, they can feel like they wish they were dead. <v Patricia Walsh>The pain is so bad and no one understands because, gee, they look good. <v Patricia Walsh>You can't see the pain they're in. You can't measure it. <v Speaker>I hate. this. chair. <v Patricia Walsh>Yeah, you can see a wheelchair. And you can see sunglasses and you can see I.V.
<v Patricia Walsh>insertion. But I mean, you can't even tell most of these kids have catheters <v Patricia Walsh>embedded in their chest or in their arms. <v Patricia Walsh>They're in a lot of pain. <v nurse>One day. I'm gonna hook you up now ok? <v Patricia Walsh>When they talk about the headache, the headache. <v Patricia Walsh>Like no one else has ever had before. This crushing headache in the center of their head <v Patricia Walsh>or the fact that they can't focus. <v Patricia Walsh>Or their joints hurt so badly they can barely walk or move. <v Patricia Walsh>These are things that you cannot see that you cannot test. <v Patricia Walsh>Sure maybe you can even see the sunglasses. <v Patricia Walsh>But you have no idea that they have double vision peripherally. <v Patricia Walsh>Or that they can't focus. Or they have conjunctivitis behind their eyes. <v Patricia Walsh>You don't see those things. But these kids feel the pain. <v Allison Burrell>You just put a piece of tape there. And then, like the nurses do, I remember, <v Allison Burrell>they do this. When the doctor saw me and we told her that we never <v Allison Burrell>had a tick, but we had a rash. <v Allison Burrell>And then she said, how long has the symptoms been?
<v Allison Burrell>My mom told her like because I had blurry vision <v Allison Burrell>and fatigue and everything like that for like <v Allison Burrell>about two years. <v Allison Burrell>And so the doctor said that I might have had Lyme disease for at least two years. <v Patricia Walsh>Most people right in our own communities have no idea how many children are homebound <v Patricia Walsh>with Lyme because they don't see them. <v Patricia Walsh>They're so sick that you don't see them. <v Patricia Walsh>Today, there are kids that couldn't come that are on our list, that are in our group <v Patricia Walsh>that couldn't come because they are so sick. <v Speaker>I had vague symptoms and till about three <v Speaker>years ago when I got awful, awful migraines, headaches. <v Niki Giberson>13 people on our street have Lyme disease, have been diagnosed with Lyme disease and nine <v Niki Giberson>people that I know of at this point do not have it. <v Niki Giberson>10 percent of the population in Port Republic has been diagnosed positively with Lyme <v Niki Giberson>disease. 10 percent.
<v Niki Giberson>You won't get those numbers from the county or from the state or from the nation for some <v Niki Giberson>reason. But. <v Niki Giberson>I'm trying to do the best I can to get the word out, at least so that if you do get a <v Niki Giberson>tick bite, don't ignore it. <v Kent Manahan>Lyme disease can be a very debilitating disease that is sometimes hard to diagnose. <v Kent Manahan>If left untreated, a person with Lyme disease can develop serious arthritis <v Kent Manahan>and have heart or nervous system problems. <v Kent Manahan>What's happening in Port Republic, a small South Jersey coastal town, is not <v Kent Manahan>unusual or even limited to just small towns. <v Kent Manahan>Dr. Durland Fish describes his research in a more densely populated suburban <v Kent Manahan>New York county. <v Dr. Durland Fish>We know that about 70 percent of the people acquired the tick bite at home <v Dr. Durland Fish>on their own, their own property. <v Dr. Durland Fish>That's here in Westchester County may not be true for other areas. <v Dr. Durland Fish>But here in Westchester County, where we have primarily a residential community <v Dr. Durland Fish>nestled in the natural forest habitat.
<v Dr. Durland Fish>Very beautiful. Very nice place to live. <v Dr. Durland Fish>But we have a lot of ticks here in the forest, too. <v Dr. Durland Fish>And people are living in the forest. <v Dr. Durland Fish>And they're finding ticks and they're in their yards. <v Dr. Durland Fish>Sometimes in the lawn, sometimes in the ornamental plantings, sometimes <v Dr. Durland Fish>in the woods, uh, between the properties, but the ticks, <v Dr. Durland Fish>the ticks are there and most of the people are getting Lyme disease from ticks- <v Dr. Durland Fish>tick bites acquired at home. <v Dr. Russel Johnson>Lyme disease is, uh, I think, overdiagnosed, underdiagnosed, <v Dr. Russel Johnson>over-reported and underreported. <v Dr. Russel Johnson>It's very difficult because it is a difficult disease to diagnose. <v Kent Manahan>Throughout the country people have organized self-help groups to better understand <v Kent Manahan>and cope with the difficulties related to Lyme disease. <v Kent Manahan>We attended support group meetings in New York, New Jersey and California. <v Thora Graves>The beginning of my illness was a bull's eye rash. <v Thora Graves>Was on my neck. It went from the rash on my neck to <v Thora Graves>heart palpitations, chest pain, numbness
<v Thora Graves>in my left arm, numbness in my left cheek. <v Thora Graves>Stiff, very, very stiff neck back pain. <v Thora Graves>They thought I had a herniated disc. <v Thora Graves>They were going to do disc surgery in my neck. <v Thora Graves>Then it was possible that I had rheumatoid arthritis, <v Thora Graves>multiple sclerosis, and I was told I had lupus. <v Thora Graves>There's nothing else that I can think of that can mimic so many different things. <v Thora Graves>And because of the bull's eye rash. <v Thora Graves>It was pretty certain that I had Lyme. <v Dr. Leonard Sigal>There's an epidemic of it now for a variety of reasons. <v Dr. Leonard Sigal>And here we sit in the middle of it in New Jersey. <v Kent Manahan>Every county in New Jersey reports Lyme disease. <v Kent Manahan>But the State Health Department reports the incidence of Lyme disease is greater in some <v Kent Manahan>of the coastal counties. Ocean, Atlantic and Monmouth. <v Speaker>My heart breaks for the people that are going in and out of these doctor's offices every
<v Speaker>day and they don't know what they have and they're not being treated. <v Kent Manahan>Betty Gross saw 56 doctors in less than eight weeks. <v Betty Gross>What made me know they were wrong? <v Betty Gross>I never had a negative experience of that nature before. <v Betty Gross>So why would I suddenly viscerally know something was <v Betty Gross>out of kilter? <v Thora Graves>What else could be so bizarre? <v Thora Graves>If you go to the doctor with symptom after symptom, with no answer, you have <v Thora Graves>to have a name for what you're suffering for. <v Thora Graves>And it's, it's Lyme. <v Dr. Leonard Sigal>A good physician is all ears and all sort of sensory organs. <v Dr. Leonard Sigal>And you have to pick up as much information as you possibly can from your patient. <v Dr. Leonard Sigal>And you can't you cannot throw out information because <v Dr. Leonard Sigal>you're not prepared to accept it. <v Dr. Leonard Sigal>Physicians who don't listen are not really very good physicians. <v Kent Manahan>In the early 1960s, Polly Murray moved to the east bank of the Connecticut River <v Kent Manahan>and began having terrible symptoms that kept recurring.
<v Kent Manahan>Rashes, headaches and stiff necks. <v Polly Murray>And then by 1971, my symptoms were so bad that I was hospitalized <v Polly Murray>three times that year. <v Dr. Stephen Malawista>Polly Murray and Judith Mench really discovered <v Dr. Stephen Malawista>Lyme disease. They called our attention to Lyme disease. <v Dr. Stephen Malawista>They had. <v Dr. Stephen Malawista>Children, relatives and neighbors who were having attacks <v Dr. Stephen Malawista>of arthritis. <v Polly Murray>I became quite desperate for a diagnosis and started doing research on my own <v Polly Murray>so that I had looked up all the different differential diagnoses to <v Polly Murray>lupus and to rheumatoid arthritis and two other things that the doctors thought <v Polly Murray>I might possibly have. <v Kent Manahan>In 1977, Good Housekeeping magazine labeled Polly Mary's battle <v Kent Manahan>with Lyme disease. Mrs. Murray's mystery disease. <v Polly Murray>We were all doing reacting the same way, but I couldn't convince any doctors <v Polly Murray>that this was true. <v Dr. Leonard Sigal>Those physicians just didn't want to hear it.
<v Dr. Leonard Sigal>They ignored these housewives and found excuses for not dealing with the problem. <v Kent Manahan>Lyme disease got its name because Polly Murray, who spearheaded initial research <v Kent Manahan>into the disease, lives in Lyme, Connecticut. <v Polly Murray>It was in the fall of 1975 when things got very bad <v Polly Murray>and their, their symptoms were just really very critical that <v Polly Murray>I decided to call the State Health Department and ask if they had <v Polly Murray>known of any other instances. <v Kent Manahan>The public health department in Connecticut suggested she contact Yale's medical <v Kent Manahan>center. <v Dr. Stephen Malawista>When we heard about this, I was the chief of rheumatology. <v Dr. Stephen Malawista>Alan Steerer was my first year fellow who'd just come to learn about rheumatology. <v Dr. Stephen Malawista>And we thought this might be a good project for him to cut his rheumatologic <v Dr. Stephen Malawista>teeth on. <v Speaker>And from October 16th until November 20th, when I saw Alan Steere, I gathered <v Speaker>35 more case histories. I took all these case histories and plus our whole history <v Speaker>of all of our symptoms. And we spent hours going over these lists
<v Speaker>of information that I had. <v Speaker>And then that started really the initiation of the investigation <v Speaker>into Lyme disease, some project. <v Speaker>It's now a disorder that is found worldwide <v Speaker>and 40 on every continent except Antarctica and 43 <v Speaker>of the 50 states. And there's tremendous activity going on in the world <v Speaker>and the further elucidation of a of Lyme disease. <v Speaker>So it turned out that was a very good thing to work on. <v Speaker>Research activities in Lyme, Connecticut, continued using a network <v Speaker>of mothers and children with the disease and their neighbors. <v Speaker>Dr. Steere and Dr. Marla Wistow found 51 people with Lyme disease. <v Speaker>They were children and adults. <v Speaker>A quarter of these patients, when we were asking them what their <v Speaker>history was. Told us that many weeks before <v Speaker>the arthritis occurred, they'd had an expanding red
<v Speaker>rash. <v Speaker>And one patient even remembered having had a tick by finding the agent <v Speaker>in the tick that was causing the disease would not be as quickly discovered <v Speaker>six years later in 1981. <v Speaker>In an activity that has been described as scientific serendipity, Dr. <v Speaker>Willie Bergdoll offer from the Centers for Disease Control Laboratory in Hamilton, <v Speaker>Montana, and Dr. Hawkei Binoche at the State University of New York <v Speaker>at Stony Brook. We're looking for a new strain of Rocky Mountain spotted fever. <v Speaker>Their work brought them to look at a small, newly identified tick, the deer <v Speaker>tick. Dr. Bergdorf, four, asked Dr. Binoche for more of these ticks. <v Speaker>And he said it's going to be a cinch to get hundreds of <v Speaker>Damini. <v Speaker>And he said to me, Dr. Bergdorf didn't find the bacterium <v Speaker>that caused Rocky Mountain spotted fever. <v Speaker>Instead, he found two ticks with another bacterium that led him to search <v Speaker>for a pathogen in an unusual place.
<v Speaker>The mid gut of the tick, I found disparities. <v Speaker>And then came next, a telephone call to Dr. Vonage. <v Speaker>This what we found. We need more ticks and in no time. <v Speaker>We had several hundred takes investigating for aspiring kids and found that <v Speaker>60 percent of them were infected with that spiral. <v Speaker>Dr. Berghofer went on to confirm that the spiral kit was the cause of <v Speaker>Lyme disease. But identifying a new spiral Ketel based disease created <v Speaker>an important concern. <v Speaker>The organism is very similar to the organism that is <v Speaker>causing syphilis. <v Speaker>Syphilis is a highly complex disease and so is Lyme disease, syphilis <v Speaker>was a killing disease. <v Speaker>At the time of Christopher Columbus, mean people died from syphilis <v Speaker>in in large numbers, although the organism is similar and having the same shape is <v Speaker>a very different organism. <v Speaker>And it's been extremely elusive. <v Speaker>Scientists have yet to develop a vaccine for syphilis and like
<v Speaker>syphilis, if the early skin rash of Lyme disease is overlooked. <v Speaker>More complicated neurological symptoms can develop like syphilis. <v Speaker>The spirochete that causes Lyme disease can cross the placenta and is <v Speaker>known to infect the fetus. <v Speaker>Now, in the case of syphilis, you have a high incidence <v Speaker>of infection of the fetus as high as 100 percent in the early <v Speaker>stages of the pregnancy when the moment becomes infected. <v Speaker>We don't have that situation according to Lyme disease. <v Speaker>The good news is that if someone has Lyme is under treatment and then becomes pregnant, <v Speaker>even if the line is not completely gone. Apparently the immune system is strong enough to <v Speaker>prevent it from transmitting to the child. <v Speaker>Likewise, if someone does contract Lyme during pregnancy, even the first trimester with <v Speaker>good treatment, nothing bad usually comes from that. <v Speaker>And I've handled several dozen cases of patients who were pregnant. <v Speaker>The headline with before, during or toward the end of pregnancy and if they're properly <v Speaker>diagnosed and treated. Not a single case of bad outcome resulted. <v Speaker>It looks as though.
<v Speaker>The more we learn about Lyme disease, the more we understand some of the problems that <v Speaker>are caused by syphilis, and we can learn some things from the syphilis <v Speaker>experience that seem to be directly applicable to the organism that causes Lyme <v Speaker>disease. <v Speaker>Although there have been one or more reports that the spy rocket might be transmitted <v Speaker>by other blood sucking insects like mosquitoes, force or deer flies <v Speaker>or even urine from an infected mouse, research to date has been very <v Speaker>clear as far as we know at this point in time. <v Speaker>The only way you can get Lyme disease is by being bitten by a tick that carries <v Speaker>the sparkie. The causes Lyme disease. <v Speaker>Insects that transmit disease to humans and other mammals are called vectors. <v Speaker>Three different, yet very similar ticks are known to carry Borrelia Bergdorf <v Speaker>awry. The spirochete that causes Lyme disease. <v Speaker>In the upper Midwest, primarily Wisconsin and Minnesota, a tick called <v Speaker>ixodes damini is present.
<v Speaker>This tick, known as the Deer Tick, also occurs on the eastern seaboard <v Speaker>from Maine through Maryland and into northern Virginia, in the <v Speaker>south, along the Atlantic seaboard, well into Florida and westward into the central <v Speaker>part of Texas. There is another similar species of tick known as <v Speaker>the black legged tick or ixodes scapularus. <v Speaker>In the far west, running from near the California Mexican border, up along <v Speaker>the Pacific coast, all the way to northern Washington and into the southern most <v Speaker>part of British Columbia, there is another similar species of tick known as <v Speaker>the Western black legged tick or ixodes pacificus. <v Speaker>We have forty nine species of ticks all together in California, <v Speaker>but easily the most widespread tick. <v Speaker>It's exciting, specific. <v Speaker>What this says is that not only is the vector widespread in California,
<v Speaker>but the disease is widespread in California. <v Speaker>Over here, we have a tick on a piece of grass, it's a little bit high. <v Speaker>That's that's kind of unusual. But you see what. <v Speaker>What this female is doing right here. <v Speaker>She's she's got her her legs wrapped around this. <v Speaker>This piece of grass she's hanging on. <v Speaker>Now, if you happen to breathe on her or move her in some way, she'll throw out <v Speaker>those front legs like this. And she's got a little grappling hooks at the ends of her <v Speaker>legs. And if you happen to brush up against that, she swings <v Speaker>the boards and grabs hold. <v Speaker>It swings the board and starts climbing up looking for a place to feed. <v Speaker>Now, watch your breathe on her and you can see here throughout her leg. <v Speaker>It's. It's not a local problem, while <v Speaker>certainly most of the human cases have come from the north coast and the <v Speaker>western slope of the Sierra Nevada. <v Speaker>We have cases from the Mexican border to the Oregon border.
<v Speaker>The small one is the male, larger one is a female. <v Speaker>National surveillance of the disease really wasn't initiated until nineteen eighty <v Speaker>three between 1983 and present. <v Speaker>CDC kept. Statistics of reported cases from from <v Speaker>the various states and as compiled of surveillance reports, <v Speaker>over 30000 people are reported to have had Lyme disease. <v Speaker>Since the Centers for Disease Control began keeping records in 1983. <v Speaker>Yet it's clear this disease has been around for some time. <v Speaker>Scientists have shown that the spiral, Keith, was present in deer ticks collected <v Speaker>in the 1940s. <v Speaker>What that tells you is that a generation before we discovered Lyme disease, <v Speaker>the right tick had the right spider ketel genetic material <v Speaker>in it to make that disease. <v Speaker>Certainly the first example of a skin rash, erythema, chronic migraines
<v Speaker>was described in Wisconsin 1970 when it comes to the <v Speaker>published literature, the first article that we now reference <v Speaker>relating to this infection dates to 1883 three out of Central Europe. <v Speaker>We had a similar article describing the same kind of skin condition <v Speaker>in eighteen ninety nine from the United States <v Speaker>to the Lyme disease, been present on the face of the planet for well over a century. <v Speaker>For many years on the eastern tip of Long Island, New York, doctors have recognized <v Speaker>a condition which is now thought to be Lyme disease. <v Speaker>Lime has been present here for many years, both anecdotally by the patients having <v Speaker>symptoms, including a condition called Montauk Knee, which dates back many years even <v Speaker>beyond World War to. <v Speaker>The whole area is full of both ticks and Lyme disease and many victims <v Speaker>of Lyme disease. <v Speaker>Including myself.
<v Speaker>They're everywhere. <v Speaker>I know, I, uh. <v Speaker>Some people say they're not. But those in the know say that they're virtually everywhere. <v Speaker>I think I probably got it golfing as a matter of fact, I now call golf going out to chase <v Speaker>ticks. <v Speaker>We're going out to get Lyme disease innocence. <v Speaker>Years ago, when people lived in cities and decided to move <v Speaker>out in the country or into suburbia the many <v Speaker>years ago with what developers would do is they sort of clear cut a property and put <v Speaker>houses and put these little saplings in front of the houses. <v Speaker>Right. Which people didn't like. <v Speaker>So what they now do and what they've done for product fifteen years or so is instead of <v Speaker>clear cutting those sort of the sort of scoped out a little niche <v Speaker>from the woods. And so what you've now got is a beautiful set of woods just <v Speaker>beyond your backyard, a little bit of brush, low vegetation, and then your <v Speaker>lawn and then your house. And you got this nice window that looks out there.
<v Speaker>And it took a few years ago, people would say, isn't that nice? <v Speaker>The deer coming into the backyard and they're eating the communities. <v Speaker>That's that's nice. Nowadays, what people are beginning to realize is <v Speaker>that we have built the environment for Lyme disease in our backyard. <v Speaker>We've made Lyme disease a problem. <v Speaker>And in addition, we have an exploding deer population in the state of New Jersey and <v Speaker>across the northeast in general. <v Speaker>So all the factors are ripe for having Lyme disease. <v Speaker>A tick is definitely spreading, along with the spreading of a tick spiral kick. <v Speaker>It is going along with it. And so we're having Lyme disease occurring in areas where it <v Speaker>was not before. <v Speaker>And then our studies with birds, we found that migrating birds will carry ticks. <v Speaker>I was quite surprised when we first started looking at wild birds that the numbers <v Speaker>of ticks that one could find, say, on on a robin. <v Speaker>We have found a number of ticks feeding on birds to be carrying the spiral <v Speaker>feed. And we find that those parakeets that we isolate from bird feeding kids.
<v Speaker>Are infectious, birds are a natural means. <v Speaker>For moving. <v Speaker>These ticks relatively long distances. <v Speaker>Immature tics remain attached to their host, Danimal, for an average of three to <v Speaker>five days. In late summer and early fall, birds migrating <v Speaker>south. Can pick up ticks in Massachusetts or Connecticut and drop them off <v Speaker>in New Jersey and further south. <v Speaker>Birds moving north in the spring can pick up ticks in New Jersey and deposit <v Speaker>them further up the coast. <v Speaker>Now, you might say it's sort of on a roll. <v Speaker>There's a lot of ticks and there are a lot of holes that are out there. <v Speaker>And it's definitely moving into all the environments where that is suitable for the <v Speaker>lifecycle. The tick, for instance, in Minnesota is definitely moving into the Twin Cities <v Speaker>area. <v Speaker>Lyme disease now is the leading vector borne disease in the United States. <v Speaker>In nineteen ninety seven thousand nine hundred and ninety five cases of Lyme
<v Speaker>disease were reported to the Centers for Disease Control. <v Speaker>The states with the highest incidence of the disease are Connecticut, New York, <v Speaker>New Jersey, Rhode Island, Delaware, Wisconsin, Maryland and <v Speaker>Pennsylvania. <v Speaker>It's important to understand that there is tremendous regional variation in the. <v Speaker>In the distribution of Lyme disease and most of the cases occur in very specific <v Speaker>areas of the country. It is true that the disease is spreading. <v Speaker>And increasingly, we're finding cases in the Southeast, the Midwest. <v Speaker>That's may actually be more sensitive to Lyme disease than humans. <v Speaker>There is a vaccine for dogs, which is now being tested. <v Speaker>I suspect that we will find that the two juvenile stages, <v Speaker>the larva and the NIMH, will be found feeding on probably <v Speaker>every land mammal. <v Speaker>Here in the Northeast, the dog we think is an extremely important animal <v Speaker>and this person would take to new areas.
<v Speaker>We found as many as 400 one ticks on one dog and twenty seven <v Speaker>percent of these ticks were infected. <v Speaker>And this dog was then brought from a highly endemic area to a non endemic area. <v Speaker>And now that non endemic area was starting to pick up infected ticks. <v Speaker>It's suspected that this occurs because of the large number of eggs a single female <v Speaker>deer tick can lay in. <v Speaker>Adult female produces about 4000 eggs, and those eggs all hatch into <v Speaker>larvae and then they sit around a wait for an animal to go by. <v Speaker>Only one natural predator is known, a small wasp. <v Speaker>To date, this tick has been found feeding on <v Speaker>approximately 50 different kinds of birds. <v Speaker>And perhaps thirty one or thirty two different species of mammals. <v Speaker>The juvenile ticks the larval and the nymphal stage. <v Speaker>Are found frequently on white-footed mice. <v Speaker>But they're also found on other animals such as chipmunks and the white-footed
<v Speaker> mouse here in Connecticut. <v Speaker>In New York and in New Jersey. <v Speaker>I think we will find in areas where Lyme disease is endemic. <v Speaker>We will find 70 to 80 percent or more of those mice during the summer to <v Speaker>be actually infected with the spirochete that causes Lyme disease. <v Speaker> If you can somehow not allow the tick to get the organism. <v Speaker>There's no disease. End of story. <v Speaker>People try all sorts of ways to decrease the number of ticks. <v Speaker>We try to keep our grass cut short, which really does seem to make a difference in <v Speaker>keeping down the tick population. <v Speaker>I'm trying to get a controlled burn now, go through Port Republic so that because <v Speaker>all the old timers in this area say that when we had control burning, the tick problem <v Speaker>was not as bad. <v Speaker>We have everything from raccoons to possums, birds, squirrels, everything, <v Speaker>that just live all over. This is their domain, too, and all of them carry ticks
<v Speaker>which could potentially carry Lyme disease. <v Speaker>So we'd stay out of the woods. We stay out of the grass. <v Speaker>It's knee high. <v Speaker>We just try to keep everything cut as short as we can. <v Speaker>The range of these ticks is expanding. <v Speaker>Now, we have equivalent, in our force here. <v Speaker>We have almost two ticks per square meter per square <v Speaker>yard of forest. <v Speaker>Now, that's a big change. <v Speaker>We can move very, very comfortable with the fact that we know what's what's happened <v Speaker>here. Similar situations have been observed in upstate New York, Massachusetts <v Speaker>and New Jersey. And down in Maryland, Delaware <v Speaker>and into Pennsylvania, these seem to be new infestations of these ticks. <v Speaker>I'd walk through the woods all the time and maybe pull a tick off now and then. <v Speaker>Then I began to notice that even in the wintertime, in February one year, I was walking <v Speaker>through the woods and got a tick on me. They just seemed to be much more resilient. <v Speaker>Now they seem to be even worse.
<v Speaker>A lot of it has to do with the lifecycle of the tick. <v Speaker>Different stages are out at different times of the year. <v Speaker>This tick has a two year life cycle and only feeds three times <v Speaker>the adult tick is out seeking a blood meal from October of one year to May <v Speaker>of the next. These ticks are most abundant in the fall, but any <v Speaker>time that it's above 40 degrees in the winter with no snow on the ground, <v Speaker>the adult deer tick will be out. <v Speaker>After the female adult tick lays its eggs, they hatch into the tiny <v Speaker>first stage, the larval stage. <v Speaker>This small tick is out in the spring and late summer, but it doesn't necessarily <v Speaker>transmit Lyme disease. <v Speaker>The middle or nymphal stage of the tick is most abundant. <v Speaker>In May, June and July, even though it may take several hours <v Speaker>for a tick to infect a person with the spirochete that causes Lyme disease. <v Speaker>The nymph is a much more dangerous animal than the adult. <v Speaker>The adult tick is large enough that people can find it and remove it
<v Speaker>before disease transmission can occur. <v Speaker>That's not true with the nymphal stage. <v Speaker>Most people never know that they've been bitten by the nymph. <v Speaker>The nymph feeds it will be on them for four, maybe five days. <v Speaker>But these ticks are such efficient blood feeders that people never notice that they're <v Speaker>there. And the tick will drop off on its own accord and they'll never realize that <v Speaker>they've been bitten by a tick. <v Speaker>And that's the dangerous situation. <v Speaker>If you live in an area where you can find adult deer ticks in the winter, then in <v Speaker>the summer you should be looking for the nymphal tick. <v Speaker>Some people go in a park. They get bitten by a tick. <v Speaker>But it's not their environment, we live in an environment where ticks exist. <v Speaker>So we have a multifaceted problem here. <v Speaker>Important public and in many other towns in New Jersey have the same problem, just living <v Speaker>with the tick. <v Speaker>I have a home that's only twenty two miles from where the first case of actually Lyme <v Speaker>disease, erythema migrans occurred in the U.S. <v Speaker>And then only three ticks that I have found on our property in the last few years
<v Speaker>have all been infected. I enjoy going up there, but I just take proper precau- <v Speaker>precaution. <v Speaker>There's two kinds of response that I've seen from people here. <v Speaker>One is that they're they're good. <v Speaker>They accept the situation. They're not going to go out of their way to to prevent getting <v Speaker>Lyme disease. Essentially, they're still gonna go out to the yard. <v Speaker>They're gonna go hiking. They're going to have pets and they're going to do what they <v Speaker>normally do and take their chances with Lyme disease. <v Speaker>On the other end of the scale, we have people who are who are terrified to go out <v Speaker>out of doors, just the notion that there is a tick out there that could make them or <v Speaker>their children sick. <v Speaker>They don't go outside. <v Speaker>They say they're ready to move back to the city or move into another area. <v Speaker>My husband's family has lived on this property since sixteen, thirty seven. <v Speaker>We're not leaving. We're going to make things better. <v Speaker>We're going to change things. We're going to find an answer to all these questions. <v Speaker>And to me, that's one of the reasons why I'm involved with Lyme disease and with the <v Speaker>support group in South Jersey.
<v Speaker>We can't just run away and pretend it doesn't exist. <v Speaker>It does. We do have a problem here. <v Speaker>But you have to go through a lot of effort to try to protect yourself adequately <v Speaker>from Lyme disease. If you live in an area where these nymphs occur, for instance, <v Speaker>you've got to you've got to dress appropriately. <v Speaker>You know, you've got to tuck your pants into your socks. <v Speaker>You've got to wear insect repellent. You've got to wear light colored clothing so you can <v Speaker>see these ticks on them. And you have to check yourself and your children everyday, <v Speaker>everyday. You have to check for these small my new ticks. <v Speaker>Now, you're not going to do that unless you are convinced <v Speaker>that it's worth your time, that that the ticks are actually there and then you could <v Speaker>prevent Lyme disease by doing it. So you have to know that you live in endemic area. <v Speaker>Another, these ticks are around and you can determine that either by <v Speaker>contacting your local health department or collecting <v Speaker>ticks yourself. <v Speaker>May not have food.
<v Speaker>Sure, haptics in Dutchess County, New York, Gloria Wenke was able <v Speaker>to collect enough ticks to prove that an entire county has a deer tick problem. <v Speaker>Originally, Gloria was told by the health department that there were no deer ticks. <v Speaker>I got a very unsatisfactory answer. <v Speaker>I was told I was wrong and I knew I was right and I had to <v Speaker>get the proof. And that's what started. It was like Pandora's box. <v Speaker>And then I heard about Westchester's problem realized this wasn't that far from <v Speaker>Westchester. Chicks do not observe county or <v Speaker>state lines. And it got started <v Speaker>kind of that way. The handwriting was on the wall. <v Speaker>I think the more facts you have, the easier it is to deal with. <v Speaker>Facts, not fiction. <v Speaker>We don't know how to control the tip properly, Terry shall, with the State Department of <v Speaker>Health here in New Jersey, is doing some very nice work using chemicals in solid <v Speaker>form to try to diminish tick populations in various localized areas. <v Speaker>Very nice work being done by the State Department of Health.
<v Speaker>Our activities are primarily the ecology of Lyme disease, studying <v Speaker>deer ticks, how to reduce their populations, <v Speaker>identify where ticks are based on vegetation, what the principal <v Speaker>hosts or what the rates of infection are, 16 <v Speaker>mice are important in the cycle of this disease and that they provide the principal <v Speaker>source of blood for the immature ticks as well as acting as the <v Speaker>reservoir host. <v Speaker>That is the source from which the ticks acquire the spire Keats. <v Speaker>Since they are such important hosts, we use them to monitor tick populations. <v Speaker>We determine the number of ticks on mice during that particular <v Speaker>deer tick stage before we make applications and then following it. <v Speaker>And then by comparing the two, we're able to determine the effectiveness of <v Speaker>the pesticide intervention.
<v Speaker>So what we'll do is at various sites, we'll go through and monitor <v Speaker>our trapping grids two days a week. <v Speaker>We will bring them back to a vehicle. <v Speaker>Nesta ties them, count the immature deer ticks on each mouse. <v Speaker>We'll compare those data later on to what we've found at the <v Speaker>areas that were untreated. Give some relative idea of how successful we <v Speaker>are. <v Speaker>We've evaluated all these sites prior to our application and found that they had <v Speaker>the same population of deer ticks. <v Speaker>So any kind of intervention we have will be based solely on <v Speaker>the chemicals we put down. <v Speaker>We're using mice simply because the alternative <v Speaker>methods of collecting subadult ticks are even more labor intensive. <v Speaker>You have an item, Gord's larval deer tick. <v Speaker>So you can see how small the tick is. <v Speaker>The lifecycle of the deer tick is at least two years long, so that
<v Speaker>if you are trying to develop an intervention, a tick control <v Speaker>program needs to be followed through the entire lifecycle of the tick <v Speaker>so that every study that you become involved in is a minimum of two years study. <v Speaker>You're around the eyes and around the muzzle give you some idea about the relative <v Speaker>success of this study. <v Speaker>The mice from the site this morning had an average of fifty five larval ticks <v Speaker>on the site. We just looked that at one point <v Speaker>seven larvae. <v Speaker>Mouse ticks are notorious for being almost impossible to control, although <v Speaker>no attempts are being made in that direction. <v Speaker>So the best means of controlling. <v Speaker>But then the disease would do by vaccination. <v Speaker>They'll probably be at least three to five years. <v Speaker>Once a human vaccine company starts working on the development of a vaccine <v Speaker>before it's going to be available for the public because of its close links to the
<v Speaker>environment and because it is centered in in some places rather than <v Speaker>others, I think it is appropriate to view it as a public health problem, much like AIDS. <v Speaker>Lyme disease is a public health problem that came to the forefront because of the efforts <v Speaker>of people who have gotten the disease. <v Speaker>It is a personal health problem for the individual and for the individual's physician who <v Speaker>they have to treat it as they would any disease. <v Speaker>We have videos. We have one that's available for. <v Speaker>crosstream borrowing's and the videotape stores. <v Speaker>Of course, you might feel tired or have a headache, fever and stiff neck for <v Speaker>a lot of other reasons besides Lyme disease. <v Speaker>Didn't a lot of smoke, but not a whole lot of fire when it comes to properly educating <v Speaker>the population. <v Speaker>Many physicians are not adequately informed about it in early <v Speaker>disease. <v Speaker>Certainly people who come in with with the skin rash, erythema, chronic of migrants. <v Speaker>When you treat them. <v Speaker>With all antibiotics, the overwhelming majority of those patients will be treated and
<v Speaker>cured. <v Speaker>If you have any discomfort as I compress or moving joints there, there's more to <v Speaker>diagnosing Lyme disease and recognizing a rash. <v Speaker>As many as 60 percent of the people who get the disease will not recall a <v Speaker>tick bite. Nor will they get the classic identifiable rash <v Speaker>without the rash. As a major presenting symptom, Lyme disease can be <v Speaker>very hard to diagnose. <v Speaker>I see the gamut. People come into me as a tick still attached. <v Speaker>I see people coming in after the fact, having rashes, and I see people coming in much <v Speaker>later on complaining of. <v Speaker>Lyme symptoms like having a flu that doesn't go away. <v Speaker>Headaches, body aches, extreme fatigue, stiffness of the joints, sometimes heart <v Speaker>flutters, sometimes chest tightness. <v Speaker>The list goes on and on. <v Speaker>It's an important disease. It's a potentially very serious disease. <v Speaker>We're only now learning how bad it can be for some, but by no means all the people <v Speaker>who are affected. <v Speaker>One of the more disturbing things is if it affects the central nervous system as a main
<v Speaker>symptom, they can complain of dizziness and effects on the hearing and vision. <v Speaker>But confusion and forgetfulness and some people even get so <v Speaker>confused they have trouble functioning on a daily world. <v Speaker>My first test was negative. <v Speaker>And the disease just progressed and got deeper and deeper and worse. <v Speaker>Many, many people out there that have Lyme disease that are getting <v Speaker>negative tests. And because of that, the doctors say they don't <v Speaker>have life. And I think that's that's really unfortunate, <v Speaker>because the result is that that every day that goes by without <v Speaker>some kind of an antibiotic therapy. <v Speaker>It's going to progress and get more debilitating. <v Speaker>The people who are easy to treat, were easy to cure, are being treated and are being shot <v Speaker>and they're disappearing. The people, though, who are remaining are those who are the <v Speaker>difficult cases. <v Speaker>But they're also the ones who are disabled, who are losing their jobs, who are losing <v Speaker>their income and are the ones who are causing a big problem. <v Speaker>You can't believe how many people are out there lying at home disabled because of Lyme
<v Speaker>disease. And they're told, well, you had two weeks of antibiotics, you're over. <v Speaker>Laboratory tests that help physicians diagnose Lyme disease can be both <v Speaker>inaccurate and nonspecific. <v Speaker>It stated it's every medical journal. <v Speaker>Article, they will say to begin with, if it's caught early, <v Speaker>it's curable and you can go around this room and most of the people that are here <v Speaker>are victims that were patients that were not caught early. <v Speaker>And even those who were caught early may not be here because the relatively <v Speaker>new people are still not sure in the sense <v Speaker>that they're still having symptoms that the doctors ordered. <v Speaker>No. <v Speaker>There is no doubt but that patients can become symptomatically cured <v Speaker>after a period of therapy. <v Speaker>The period of therapy, I find is variable from person to person and seems <v Speaker>to be influenced by the duration of the infection and especially
<v Speaker>the duration of the illness preceding the onset of therapy. <v Speaker>My doctor thought that my positive test could be a false positive. <v Speaker>And it kept saying, well, maybe you don't have Lyme disease, even though my test was <v Speaker>positive. So we would try something for two weeks and then he'd say, well, you don't have <v Speaker>it because the two weeks is up and the antibiotic didn't work. <v Speaker>Bacterial logic cure that is getting rid of the last of the infection <v Speaker>is another story. And at this point, I don't think that we have the scientific <v Speaker>means by which to determine when a person is sterilized or this infection. <v Speaker>Polymerase chain reaction is a way of amplifying <v Speaker>genetic material. <v Speaker>Hundreds of millions of times so that you have enough to work with. <v Speaker>And we're using it both to figure out how Lyme disease <v Speaker>works and as an aid and possible aid and diagnosis, <v Speaker>we think. The Spierer key is they're driving the disease <v Speaker>throughout its course. But in order to show that, we have to find evidence
<v Speaker>that it's there and PCR is a very powerful tool <v Speaker>for developing such evidence. <v Speaker>This is a new and wonderful technique, but <v Speaker>it's a tricky one, too. And this is not a diagnostic <v Speaker>test that's available now. <v Speaker>It's been worked out. <v Speaker>There are a lot of problems. <v Speaker>We have great hopes for it, for diagnosis or for showing the perspired future there. <v Speaker>But that time hasn't come yet, and it would be cruel to present it <v Speaker>as a new breakthrough. <v Speaker>So just sending off some specimen now and say PCR, it <v Speaker>is probably a fruitless procedure. <v Speaker>Nobody should underestimate the importance of the clinical disease. <v Speaker>It is an infection. It is a serious infection with potentially very serious <v Speaker>later manifestations later. <v Speaker>Manifestations of Lyme disease may be a bigger problem and may be less amenable to
<v Speaker>therapy. <v Speaker>What is there about? This is a display against Embar. <v Speaker>Why did you need chronic fatigue? Or and this is cause there are <v Speaker>identifiable clustering of symptoms. <v Speaker>That's the phrase. Clustering the symptoms. <v Speaker>You know, certainly are not affiliated with any <v Speaker>long term or as some call it, third stage or tertiary Lyme <v Speaker>disease. Like its cousin, syphilis can be hard to treat. <v Speaker>The one thing with Lyme disease is by the time you find out that you have Lyme disease, <v Speaker>it has devastated your entire life. <v Speaker>I've seen patients have a few weeks of antibiotics and Beacom to the over the illness <v Speaker>called Lyme and never have come back yet. <v Speaker>I've seen people on antibiotics for sometimes as long as two years and I object to <v Speaker>testing showed that spark is still present in their body. <v Speaker>There is no way for them to know whether you're cured. <v Speaker>There's no test to ever know. <v Speaker>So no doctor has ever known cure. <v Speaker>Yet they continually tell patients that they could set them off.
<v Speaker>I mean, sometimes treatment can fail. <v Speaker>Antibiotics are the main tools. <v Speaker>And when you no longer can use antibiotics. <v Speaker>There's not much that they can do for. <v Speaker>At this time. <v Speaker>Mandy Schmidt was a 10 year old, a student from Sayreville, New Jersey. <v Speaker>She died in 1990 after two years battling complications <v Speaker>that resulted from Lyme disease. <v Speaker>You never expect such an impact. <v Speaker>From something like Lyme disease, Mandy presented with a rash in October. <v Speaker>So I suspected it could have been we were on a pumpkin farm picking pumpkins. <v Speaker>We'd go every year. And that was a couple of weeks before <v Speaker>Mandy got the rash, some assuming it's from there. <v Speaker>I never saw take on needing. <v Speaker>I saw the rash. But then you take I took her to the pediatrician and she diagnosed a <v Speaker>staph. She didn't culture it as such, though. <v Speaker>And you believe the pediatrician in April, it came to a full head.
<v Speaker>She went to school just like every other day. <v Speaker>That day, she went to religion classes. <v Speaker>She came home. She developed an instant high fever. <v Speaker>She had a grand mal seizure. <v Speaker>And by the time the paramedics came, she was already in a coma in my house. <v Speaker>And that started the whole row to. <v Speaker>Treating Mandy and trying to save her when she came out <v Speaker>of the coma. She was never the same again. <v Speaker>There was evidence of brain damage. <v Speaker>Right at that time. And if anything, she just got progressively <v Speaker>worse. I didn't think Lyme disease at the time. <v Speaker>I started putting all the symptoms together and then I brought it to the doctor's <v Speaker>attention. You know, wait a minute. Why don't you check for line? <v Speaker>I had to bring it up. It's not like we were blaming everything on Lyme disease. <v Speaker>We did make sure, Mandy, we weren't missing anything, that Mandy had nothing else <v Speaker>when she died. <v Speaker>There was controversy over what caused her death. <v Speaker>Mandy had severe brain damage due to the Lyme disease.
<v Speaker>I would like to invite all them skeptics so they could sit with me and my <v Speaker>husband. And watch what she went through. <v Speaker>Her swelling of her joints, the recurrent Lyme rashes. <v Speaker>Which was documented by doctors as DCM Rash. <v Speaker>Mandy Ross, the use of her arms, her legs. <v Speaker>She stopped eating this. All her muscles were affected. <v Speaker>Her swallowing muscles. <v Speaker>At the end, Mandy was totally blind. <v Speaker>Mandy's mother vowed that she would speak out to make sure that this would never <v Speaker>happen to anyone else. <v Speaker>She should have been allowed to grow up and have a normal life like I did, you know, roll <v Speaker>around in the grass playing leaves. <v Speaker>Can't do that today. Ken, not that every night that you're being paranoid, <v Speaker>you're protecting what's so precious to you. <v Speaker>When antibiotic treatment fails, people may do desperate things, including contracting <v Speaker>malaria to fight Lyme disease. <v Speaker>Sally Tim polling shows that path was a complete antibiotic treatment
<v Speaker>failure and that's what led me <v Speaker>to the malaria therapy. <v Speaker>Malaria was used to fight syphilis infections before the advent of antibiotics. <v Speaker>Sally traveled out of the country to infect herself. <v Speaker>It's not the treatment of choice. <v Speaker>I was very desperate. I was very sick. <v Speaker>I contracted malaria. I came back. <v Speaker>I waited two weeks. Where to start? I got very, very sick. <v Speaker>I almost died. I when I recovered from the antidote, <v Speaker>I was symptom free. <v Speaker>There is a rationale for thinking about <v Speaker>induction of fever as a mechanism of curing Lyme <v Speaker>disease. <v Speaker>A lot of doctors are angry at downright angry at me for <v Speaker>doing this. They said it was a terrible thing to do. <v Speaker>I do not feel that any kind of any any patient <v Speaker>should be advised to receive this therapy in
<v Speaker>an uncontrolled non investigative environment, <v Speaker>because this clearly is experimental therapy with significant <v Speaker>potential hazard for the patient. <v Speaker>Something happened in my body to make my wife's symptoms go away. <v Speaker>I think it's the job of every doctor, every researcher out there to find out exactly what <v Speaker>happened. <v Speaker>We all see patients. <v Speaker>Physicians running Lyme disease centers throughout endemic areas for this illness <v Speaker>see patients in whom the diagnosis is in question and we'll see many individuals who have <v Speaker>received unconventional forms of therapy. <v Speaker>We do our best to perform objective evaluations <v Speaker>of what might be going on in those patients and in making <v Speaker>recommendations to them regarding what we feel would be the <v Speaker>best approach to treatment for any continuing symptoms. <v Speaker>They haven't even looked at me and maybe they'll call me an anecdotal case and say,
<v Speaker>you can't go by one case. You've got to start somewhere. <v Speaker>After a number of months, Sallie's symptoms began to return. <v Speaker>Many researchers believe that when they find the best treatment for the average case <v Speaker>of Lyme disease, the small number of people who are now difficult to treat <v Speaker>will also be cured. <v Speaker>There's a very big fringe that's growing the <v Speaker>Gaussian distribution that they use, that the level of distribution <v Speaker>is miscued because the statistics in the papers. <v Speaker>It's obvious as more and more states form support groups, that <v Speaker>the number of people who are caught are the fringe seems to be the majority <v Speaker>rather than the minority. <v Speaker>We don't know. They don't know how long it's going to take to cure this thing. <v Speaker>But at least I got better. I'm now able to walk and function as a human being. <v Speaker>A lot of unknowns in many of the questions that come up. <v Speaker>We really don't know the answers to.
<v Speaker>And there's a rigidity in the medical profession. <v Speaker>Then again, it is there people going <v Speaker>untreated and that is criminal. <v Speaker>Medical research can't predict the chances of getting Lyme disease. <v Speaker>What is known is that not every deer tick carries the spirochete. <v Speaker>But even if the tick is infected, it would have to be attached to your body for several <v Speaker>hours before you could get the disease. <v Speaker>The best precaution is to avoid being bitten by a tick. <v Speaker>If you are outside in an area where you think there could be ticks, where proper clothing <v Speaker>checked for ticks. Remove them if you are bitten. <v Speaker>Senior doctor, you have to treat the patient as an individual. <v Speaker>Really, really do. And if you have the patient improving to the point, you say maybe you <v Speaker>can stop the antibiotics. So stop them. <v Speaker>The patient stays. Well, that's fine if they relapse. <v Speaker>Don't start saying that. Having a psychiatric disorder. <v Speaker>Some of the symptoms of Lyme disease may sound like depression. <v Speaker>And as people go from doctor to doctor, some in the medical profession discount
<v Speaker>their symptoms. <v Speaker>It's only the courageous doctors who will stick their neck out <v Speaker>and treat these suffering patients. <v Speaker>We have to function within the limits of our technology, within the limits of <v Speaker>our technology. We take patients very seriously. <v Speaker>We look for evidence of Lyme disease, both by history and physical and by laboratory <v Speaker>testing, and occasionally a patient will arrive who we <v Speaker>just can not make the diagnosis of Lyme disease. <v Speaker>I'm not. I will tell people that I don't think they had Lyme disease. <v Speaker>I have a physician that I'd say he is a brave man. <v Speaker>He's willing to try all forms of treatment, whatever, just to <v Speaker>try to get something that works. <v Speaker>And it's been a long haul to finally find a man, a doctor <v Speaker>that would be willing to try some some new things. <v Speaker>He also is under a lot of pressure from his peers.
<v Speaker>A lot of physicians are in disagreement about current forms of treatment <v Speaker>and he's willing to stick his neck out and actually try to help me. <v Speaker>Many physicians are concerned that some of these long term symptoms may not be <v Speaker>Lyme disease and may indicate something else. <v Speaker>Does the scientific approach to diagnosing Lyme disease miss patients who <v Speaker>in fact have Lyme disease but can't be diagnosed using that scientific approach? <v Speaker>And I think the answer is possibly. <v Speaker>I'm really glad that we've got the doctors out there right now that are trying to become <v Speaker>knowledgeable about Lyme disease and they're willing to just stick with us <v Speaker>no matter if we don't get well right away. <v Speaker>But they don't abandon us. <v Speaker>We need to get a better sense of what the optimum therapy is. <v Speaker>We really don't know there are lots of antibiotics that are being used. <v Speaker>There are lots of antibiotics being used for different at different dosages, for
<v Speaker>different durations, in different dosing schedules. <v Speaker>And there's a lot of information out there, but it's not well-organized and it's not done <v Speaker>in prospective studies so that you can say, aha, the best form of therapy <v Speaker>for Lyme disease is such and such. <v Speaker>Taken this way and done that way. <v Speaker>It'll be a very nice thing to know. We don't know that as of yet. <v Speaker>We don't know the full clinical spectrum of the disease. <v Speaker>I think it's very important to tell everybody again to be very, very strong <v Speaker>and to know exactly your body and what you're going through. <v Speaker>And to tell your doctors that you really know what your body is doing <v Speaker>and how it reacts and to understand the treatment that you think you <v Speaker>have to have and not force, but to be strong enough to tell your doctor. <v Speaker>Doctor, this is what we have to try. <v Speaker>If it's working, it's going to make me better. <v Speaker>If it's not working. Why isn't it working? <v Speaker>The best doctors in Lyme will tell you that they still are fumbling <v Speaker>around in the dark.
<v Speaker>Polly Murray's mystery disease remains a mystery and consequently presents <v Speaker>all of us with a major problem. <v Speaker>It's a disease that is not yet fully understood or defined. <v Speaker>It's a disease for which treatment is known to fail. <v Speaker>It's a disease that for many is hard to diagnose. <v Speaker>Its symptoms may be vague, mimicking many other diseases. <v Speaker>It's transmitted by a tick that is easily missed. <v Speaker>Lyme disease is a public health problem that requires significant funds for education, <v Speaker>surveillance and control at a time when our country's public health system is <v Speaker>already stressed. It's a disease that pushes the limits of current science. <v Speaker>And it's a disease we can get in our own backyard.
- Series
- Target New Jersey
- Producing Organization
- New Jersey Network (Firm)
- Contributing Organization
- WQED (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
- The Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia (Athens, Georgia)
- AAPB ID
- cpb-aacip-259-tm71zg8k
If you have more information about this item than what is given here, or if you have concerns about this record, we want to know! Contact us, indicating the AAPB ID (cpb-aacip-259-tm71zg8k).
- Description
- Episode Description
- "'Lyme Disease: In Our Own Backyard' is a one-hour comprehensive special exploring the extent of our knowledge of Lyme Disease, the risks, and the response to the expanding outbreak of Lyme disease. "This program merits consideration by the Peabody Awards program because of how well it explains a very complicated and controversial medical science issues while being sensitive to the diversity of opinion that surrounds our understanding of Lyme disease. "'Lyme Disease: In Own Backyard' was aired during Lyme Disease Awareness Month in New Jersey, and is a program that works to directly impact the need for accurate information and rational discourse about what the disease is, how to recognize early symptoms and how to decrease the risk of getting the disease. "This program tells the stories of doctors, researchers, and families as they seek ways to live with and control the spread of the disease. The program explains how current medical science and understanding of the disease [a]ffect the everyday lives of the people confronted with Lyme disease."--1991 Peabody Awards entry form.
- Broadcast Date
- 1991-05-23
- Created Date
- 1991-05-23
- Asset type
- Episode
- Media type
- Moving Image
- Duration
- 01:03:47.023
- Credits
-
-
Producing Organization: New Jersey Network (Firm)
- AAPB Contributor Holdings
-
WQED-TV
Identifier: cpb-aacip-906cbc1a869 (Filename)
Format: Betacam: SP
Generation: Master
Duration: 00:18:00
-
The Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection at the
University of Georgia
Identifier: cpb-aacip-4d2df93b0d4 (Filename)
Format: U-matic
Duration: 00:57:00
If you have a copy of this asset and would like us to add it to our catalog, please contact us.
- Citations
- Chicago: “Target New Jersey; Lyme Disease: In Our Own Backyard,” 1991-05-23, WQED, The Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed November 21, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-259-tm71zg8k.
- MLA: “Target New Jersey; Lyme Disease: In Our Own Backyard.” 1991-05-23. WQED, The Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. November 21, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-259-tm71zg8k>.
- APA: Target New Jersey; Lyme Disease: In Our Own Backyard. Boston, MA: WQED, The Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-259-tm71zg8k