Peekskill Lyme Incidence

Mostly this makes me sad that no one has decided to manufacture the FDA-approved Lyme vaccine LYMErix, whose patent expired in 2014.

It seems like LYMErix is basically the OspA lipoprotein + alum (aluminum hydroxide) as adjuvant. OspA lipoprotein is readily commercially available and on the page they both tell you about which adjuvant the vaccine is conjugated with and allow you to order the protein with a conjugation with a free form field. 

That suggest it's relatively easy for someone with access to a clean room and the lab skills to order the materials and mix them together. 

It's conveniently also a relatively small protein which means that it should be possible to also order subparts of it if someone wants to do something more thoughtful then just repeating the old formula.

A very effective Lyme vaccine is in fact manufactured and sold, but only for use on dogs.  Just find yourself a morally flexible vet.  Failing that, monitoring for symptoms and taking a large dose of antibiotics within ~48 hours of symptoms is extremely effective.

I live near Peekskill and have had Lyme twice.  The first time it took a while to diagnose, as I knew nothing about it, and it had a negative impact on my summer for sure.  The second time I had purchased grey market antibiotics and immediately took a large dose when symptoms appeared.  I then went to the doctor, who strongly approved of my decision.

My impression is that the kind of person who is paranoid enough about Lyme to have written this post is not the kind of person who ends up with any kind of long term adverse effects.  You have symptoms, you take the antibiotics, and they work.  If you're worried about gut flora or whatever, follow up with probiotics, or a high quality yogurt.  You'll be fine.

Properly diagnosed and treated Lyme is significantly less annoying than the flu.  You just have to know what to look out for -- the red ring rash, night sweats, lethargy, etc.  If you catch it before you have major joint swelling (which takes months), you're A-OK.  The western blot test for it is cheap, but also, very occasionally taking antibiotics unnecessarily has few consequences -- it's the same stuff people take for such horrifying scourges as teenage acne.

There are some studies suggesting that reported rates are usually about 10x below actual rates. Though I can't find them right now (somebody else mentioned this in a separate discussion). If true, this would of course imply a very high chance of catching Lyme.

Boy, the historyofvaccines.org page on LYMErix is pretty brutal. 
https://www.historyofvaccines.org/index.php/content/articles/history-lyme-disease-vaccine

Looks like a French company has another candidate, VLA15 that is heading (headed? as of this past March) into Phase II trials (with some help from Pfizer) for ages 5 and up. 

https://valneva.com/press-release/valneva-and-pfizer-announce-initiation-of-phase-2-study-for-lyme-disease-vaccine-candidate/

Does anyone know how to find out where these trials happen? Would love to sign up if it's not too late. 

I was diagnosed with Lyme disease last October. I have been hiking a decent amount (1-2 times per week) in New Hampshire, and I am on pace for 3-4 times a year finding a tick on me (although this spring I've already found three, it's really bad this year). Fortunately, my tick bite site was easy to observe, I noticed the ring rash and went to the doc, they gave me antibiotics and I had no other effects that I noticed. Dunno if this helps anyone.

I find it fascinating that the modern range of lyme disease overlaps with the range of the chronic wasting prion disease of deer.  The two large clusters of lyme in North America overlap with the more recent two clusters of wasting disease (later spread than the first major cluster further west).  This suggests to me that there's a common factor driving the spread of both, probably something about messed up forest ecology.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned permethrin yet. It's an insecticide you treat your clothes with, and it rapidly kills ticks (and mosquitos). Ticks can't fly, so even treating your socks is supposed to be pretty effective. I'm not sure how that compares to a vaccine, but maybe it's the next best thing.