I have a friend who got a tick bite on holiday in America many years ago. Turns out they got Lyme disease but no doctors in the UK were experienced with it so they dealt with years of misdiagnosis. I really hope any education effort can get out ahead of that.
Yeah. I think we simply did not see it enough and to be honest far too few doctors ask the "have you travelled" question about unusual disease. It is better now, but I think the "could it be?" thought doesn't occur because the incidence has been low.
There is a more severe risk around rabies. We basically do not have it in the UK or Ireland; it has been eliminated for over a century except a tiny incidence of a virus in the same family in bats. But because we have essentially eradicated it, doctors do not often think to ask about it, even in people who have travelled, which led to someone suffering awfully last year.
And since a dog bite or even a fox bite in the UK or Ireland carries literally zero risk of rabies, those who are bitten or scratched while travelling abroad do not have it uppermost in their mind.
Thats interesting, since there is a lot of research around face palsy & recovery in UK.
Yep.
About 20 years ago my gran got to the facial palsy stage of Lyme's before it was even considered and diagnosed by a visiting locum doctor who'd grown up in another country.
Antibiotics were given, her face recovered (albeit slowly).
It's a horrendous disease.
May I ask: Did the muscles on the side of the face with the affection also restore or does she have an muscle-atrophy until today on that side?
Publicly founded health systems are terrible whe. dealing with Lyme disease. It is impossible to simply and clearly diagnose, and separate ill people from "simulants". Something like "back pain" ormother chronic illnesses.
Nothing really to do with public healthcare. It is literally that there is almost no medical or social experience in the UK of actually seeing developed Lyme disease up close, because it has historically been so unusual, so there are no protocols.
A few thousand cases every year now, when the first indigenous case ever properly recorded in the UK was only in 1986, and it's not like in the USA where really wide areas are high risk. Some of the pockets of highest risk Lyme in the UK are no more than a few miles across.
Nurse stations and pharmacy clinics are great at properly removing ticks if you know you have been bitten, and from there you will now get good advice about Lyme.
But a system that has no endemic experience of Lyme is just not going to test for it. Because it's remote, and people are usually unaware they have been in risk areas, and often unaware they've even been bitten.
1986 is forty years ago. We have Lymes disease in Scotland (I know someone who has it), and a large deer population which has not been properly controlled with substantial remote areas. (Much smaller than the USA but big enough to be reservoirs for the disease.)
> 1986 is forty years ago.
Epidemiologically recent (and also dofm-recent because I'm old).
But the graphs typically show that Scotland ballooned in the last twenty years, from below a hundred a year into the thousands.
Apparently in the UK it is now mostly stable, so it is endemic in deer. Much more common in middle-aged people who are I guess more likely to walk the dog and be keen active gardeners.