- Hello Jeff - This article was posted on my message board.
-
- Patty
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- Health experts want to learn more about
another tick-associated rash, found in the Southeast.
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- By Lisa Greene
- Times Staff Writer
- 7-18-5
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- TAMPA - Dr. John Sinnott, an infectious disease expert
from Tampa, was vacationing in Key West when a man asked him to take a
look at a strange rash.
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- The man's rash looked like the red "bull's eye"
rash found in Lyme disease. But why would a disease most common in the
Northeast turn up in a man who hadn't left Key West in months and couldn't
remember getting bitten by a tick?
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- Lyme disease is rare, although not unknown, in Florida.
But Sinnott decided the man probably had another disease, one doctors know
less about: Southern Tick-Associated Rash Illness, or STARI.
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- Doctors think that, like Lyme disease, STARI is caused
by a bacterium spread by tick bites. It causes a rash and is treated with
antibiotics.
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- The bacterium, Borrelia lonestari , has been found in
lone star ticks. It's related to Borrelia burgdorferi , which causes Lyme
disease and is found in deer ticks. But they have been unable to grow the
bacterium in a lab, aren't positive it causes STARI, and still have many
questions about the disease. The federal Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention wants to learn more about STARI, and is asking doctors across
the Southeast to provide specimens for study.
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- "I don't think anyone knows how much STARI there
is and how much Lyme," said Sinnott, director of the Florida Infectious
Disease Institute at the University of South Florida. "We may have
more STARI than Lyme."
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- Anywhere from 15 to 72 cases of Lyme disease have been
reported in Florida annually over the decade ending in 2003, according
to state health department statistics. But nobody is sure how many cases
of STARI there are. Doctors aren't required to report it.
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- "I believe most things called Lyme disease in Florida
are this separate disease," said Dr. N. Lawrence Edwards, vice chairman
of the medicine department at the University of Florida College of Medicine.
"I have seen Lyme ... but it's almost always in patients who summer
in Connecticut or Maryland, and shortly after leaving come down with the
symptoms."
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- That doesn't mean Lyme disease doesn't happen in Florida.
Some doctors think the cases reported to the state are only a fraction
of the real number. And the disease made the news recently when Florida
State University officials said FSU quarterback Wyatt Sexton had been diagnosed
with Lyme. That news followed Sexton's hospitalization under the Baker
Act after he was found lying in the road, claiming to be God.
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- Such neurological symptoms as part of Lyme disease are
unusual.
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- "Delusional activity is not something I've seen
described," Edwards said, but cautioned that he doesn't know details
of Sexton's case.
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- Lyme can cause cognitive disorders, the CDC says. Two
years ago, novelist Amy Tan reported repeatedly hallucinating that a naked
man was approaching her bed, as well as memory loss and other cognitive
problems before she was diagnosed with Lyme.
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- Meanwhile, scientists at the federal Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention last year started a new study of STARI. They're
asking doctors across the Southeast to do skin biopsies of patients with
tick bites and rashes that appear to be STARI and send them specimens.
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- In 2001, doctors found the lonestari bacterium in a skin
biopsy of a patient with a STARI rash. The patient, who was treated with
antibiotics, had been exposed to ticks in North Carolina and Maryland.
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- If doctors can isolate more samples of the bacterium
from patients with the STARI rash, that would prove a more definite link,
said Larissa Minicucci, a CDC epidemiologist in Colorado.
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- The bacterium "has been isolated from some lone
star ticks, but we don't have a good correlation with that and the illness,"
Minicucci said.
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- Doctors think STARI doesn't cause the same complications
as Lyme, but that's not certain, either.
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- Lyme disease cases in Florida often exhibit strange symptoms,
said Carina Blackmore, the acting state public health veterinarian. Sometimes
patients don't seem to have the classic rash. Often they're sick enough
to be hospitalized, generally because they're diagnosed late.
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- "We want to understand Lyme better than we do in
this state," Blackmore said. "We know it's here, but for some
reason it's not behaving the same way it is in Connecticut and other states,
and we don't quite understand why."
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- STARI might be a piece of the puzzle, she said.
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- "Maybe that's why we have a hard time diagnosing
Lyme - that is it's not Lyme, it's Lyme-like disease," she said.
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- Patricia A. Doyle, PhD
- Please visit my "Emerging Diseases" message
board at: http://www.clickitnews.com/ubbthreads/postlist.php?
Cat=&Board=emergingdiseases
- Zhan le Devlesa tai sastimasa
- Go with God and in Good Health
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