A friend called last night to tell me that she's in the hospital getting worked up for potential meningitis (yikes!). Today the update was that while CSF cultures are pending, they are running tests for Lyme disease because they symptoms match and working in veterinary medicine presents a potential for exposure. Now, I teach clinical pathology and am familiar with Lyme disease in pets, prevention, yada yada... but I've never dealt with it in a human! So I ran off to the CDC and started reading about Lyme in humans to see if there might be any differences :) Bottom line, if it's caught early she should recover with no troubles (if it even comes back as Lyme- we really don't know for sure yet).
So at the CDC Lyme page, I spotted this:
http://www.cdc.gov/lyme/quiz/q1/index.html
I did not know about Lyme disease before, thank you for informing us about it. The only disease that I know which is caused by tick bite was Crimean–Congo hemorrhagic fever which is a serious problem in some regions in my country, Turkey, especially in Summer. I hope your friend's case is not serious, and she will get well soon.
ReplyDeleteThank you! My friend is out of the hospital and improving. Test results aren't in yet (?!) but we should hear soon. She's feeling well, so that's good! I'll have to go look up Crimean-Congo fever, I'm not familiar with that. I wish I could get the CDC widget to work... but I haven't figured it out yet.
Delete