You are here: Home | Magazine | Features | Family Health | Family Health August 2009

Family Health August 2009

If you go down to the woods today...

Welcome to this month's family health section if you have any comments, questions or queries relating to family health please include them on the family health section of Candis Chat.

Many people - including doctors - have never heard of Lyme disease. Jo Carlowe investigates whether this ignorance is needlessly ruining people's lives .

When Joan Crawford, 35, from Chester, was bitten by a tick at the age of 12 she had little idea that this seemingly harmless bite would devastate her life for the next 20 years.

She would spend periods of her adolescence and early adulthood feeling exhausted, would be misdiagnosed as suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME) and even offered treatment for depression. She now lives on a permanent regime of antibiotics. Joan thinks of herself as one of the lucky ones - she has at least been diagnosed.

Like millions of British families, the Crawfords enjoyed spending their holidays in the UK. In 1986 they went to stay on the west coast of Scotland. They could never have known that this area is one of the hotspots for the seemingly innocuous ticks that would lead to Joan's debilitating illness.

These blood-sucking parasites mostly live on deer, sheep and pheasants, but will happily feed on humans too. On transmission to the blood of its host, the bacterium from the tick develops into Lyme borreliosis - better known as Lyme disease. Caught early, the disease causes little more than a rash and flu-like symptoms curable with antibiotics but, left untreated, it can damage your heart, joints and even the brain.

"After around six months it can enter its second phase," explains Terence Daymond, a consultant in rheumatology at the Breakspear Medical Clinic in Hertfordshire, "causing neurological problems, nerve palsies (muscle weakness), painful joints or arthritis, abnormal heart rhythms, hearing problems and severe malaise."

In rare cases the disease moves into a third phase, slowly destroying the nervous system, causing numbing, chronic arthritis (even in children), encephalitis (inflammation of the brain), and the development of dementia.

To read more of this article please join Candis