subject: Lyme - The Three Stages Of Lyme Disease [print this page] Nymph and adult ticks can transfer the BNymph and adult ticks can transfer the B. Burgdorferi bacteria that cause this disease to humans. The illness is named after the city of Lyme, Connecticut because there were a lot of cases there in 1975. It is the most common tick-borne illness in North America and can affect adults, children, and even pets. Allen Steere discovered that it came from tick bites, and Willy Burgdorfer isolated the bacteria (B. Burgdorferi) that causes the illness. The deer tick, black-legged tick, and Pacific tick are the most likely culprits for transmitting this terrible sickness. The disease progresses in three general stages: exposure/early, intermediate, and advanced.
Exposure: The easiest way to diagnose it is seeing a bulls-eye circle rash at the tick bite site. Accompanying this rash are usually fever, fatigue, headache, and depression. If treated early with a course of antibiotics, these symptoms are fairly minor and go away. However, the symptoms become much more severe if Lyme is left untreated. The infection begins to spread into the bloodstream within a couple weeks, sometimes days. The Intermediate Stage of the illness can be characterized by dizziness, heart palpitations, and pain in muscles, joints, and tendons. If patients are left untreated, neurological disorders, like facial palsy, meningitis, encephalitis, and radiculoneuritis, can develop.
In the Advanced Stage of the disease, the infection attacks the brain, eyes, joints, nerves, and heart, sometimes resulting in paraplegia and severe neurological disorders, such as schizophrenia, fibromyalgia, bipolar disorder, depersonalization, vertigo, and even frank psychosis. Crippling Lyme arthritis commonly affects the knees, but can move to other joints as well. Other symptoms include memory loss, debilitating fatigue, and delusions. Patients suffering in the advanced stage experience chronic and nearly constant pain, and are often disabled by the effects of the illness.
The disease affects pets differently as well. It takes longer for animals to feel the effects of contracting the illness, lying dormant for two to five months. Dogs typically run a fever (103-105 degrees) and can experience swollen lymph nodes, lameness, lethargy, swelling in the joints, and loss of appetite. Though Lyme has occurred in horses and cats, these are very rare even when the disease is rampant in the human population around them. Whether in human or canine members of the family, treating this sickness early is the best way to prevent irreversible damage to the organs and systems of the body. Diagnosis is reliant upon likelihood of exposure, symptoms, and visual inspection for a bulls-eye rash.
Sufferers with this illness have been helped with a new colloidal silver breakthrough. In the manufacturing process nano-sized silver particles are suspended in clustered double distilled water at high concentration levels that are very successful at killing pathogens in the body, such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi. These silver particles switch off the infection's ability to use oxygen, so they suffocate and die in a few minutes while having no side effects to the person.
