Lyme Disease

How Can Lyme Disease Be Prevented?

The best way to prevent Lyme disease is to:

• Take protective measures to avoid tick bites
• Reduce the number of deer in and around your property
• Remove a tick from the skin promptly
• About the Lyme Disease vaccine

Protective Measures

Avoiding wooded or grassy areas, especially between May and August, is one way to prevent getting bitten by ticks. But many people live or work in such areas, or enjoy outdoor recreation. To help prevent tick bites:

• Wear protective clothing such as hats, long sleeves, and long pants tucked into socks or boots. Light-colored clothing allows ticks to be spotted more easily.
• Apply tick repellant containing DEET on exposed skin (except on the face, and also avoid putting the repellant on the hands of young children), or treat clothing with permethrin, which kills ticks.
• Keep to the center of trails, avoiding grasses and brush.
• Inspect clothing often while outdoors, and have a companion inspect your back. Inspect children at least daily, and every few hours in heavily infested areas.
• Shower and check your body carefully for ticks after outdoor activities, especially the groin, navel, armpits, head, and behind knees and ears. Have someone check your back, or use a mirror.
• Wash clothes and put them in the dryer for at least 30 minutes to kill any remaining ticks.
• Keep lawn mown and brush cut back. Avoid plantings attractive to deer and other animals. Limit watering of lawn. In some areas, careful use of environmental insecticides may be advisable.
• Keep domestic animals out of tick-infested areas, check them for ticks, and use tick-control products as recommended by your veterinarian.

Reduce the number of deer

1. People living in Lyme Disease areas should consider lobbying their town or state legislators to reduce the deer herd to less than 8 per square mile so that the tick’s life cycle is interrupted. Interrupting the tick’s life cycle is the way to prevent and eventually eradicate Lyme disease. The aim would be to go back to the pre-Lyme era when there were very few deer in the community.
2. Take part in a town-wide plan to reduce deer numbers in your area
3. Avoid attracting deer with unprotected plantings or bird feeders

For more information go to www.deeralliance.com the Fairfield County Municipal Deer Management Alliance, a group of 13 towns in Connecticut trying to advocate for more responsible deer herd management so that Lyme can become a disease of the past.

What About The Lyme Disease Vaccine?

In 1998 the FDA approved a vaccine for Lyme disease, called LYMErix, for people ages 15 to 70, but it was withdrawn from the market in 2002, due to lack of commercial success and pressure from Lyme advocacy groups. A vaccine is still available for animals. It is possible the vaccine could be re-introduced if there was a significant demand for its return. Those that had the vaccine were mostly pleased with it. It had an efficacy of 76%.

Like most vaccines, LYMErix causes the body to produce antibodies against the disease. However, the Lyme disease vaccine is unusual because the antibodies it generates seem to enter the body of the biting tick and kill the spirochetes there, instead of fighting their battle in the human bloodstream.

The FDA emphasized at the time that the LYMErix vaccine is not 100 percent effective, and it shouldn’t be used as a substitute for other measures such as protective clothing or tick repellent. It required three injections over a period of a year. It is not known how long protection against Lyme disease lasts after vaccination.

There was some concern at the possibility of a small chance of arthritis as a side effect of the vaccine. This can occur if the body is “fooled” and reacts as if it were fighting off an actual Lyme disease invasion. Inflammation such as that which occurs in Lyme-related arthritis is a side effect of the vaccine.

Of the 600,000 people who received the LYMErix vaccine the first year it was available, 29 reported experiencing chronic arthritis. However, in some cases this might not have been a reaction to the vaccine, but rather a failure of the vaccine; that is, a symptom of an actual Lyme disease infection.