“No less arresting is Lyme disease, which comes from the bite of a tiny deer tick. If undetected, it can lie dormant in the human body for years before erupting in a positive fiesta of maladies. This is a disease for the person who wants to experience it all. The symptoms include, but are not limited to, headaches, fatigue, fever, chills, shortness of breath, dizziness, shooting pains in the extremities, cardiac irregularities, facial paralysis, muscle spasms, severe mental impairment, loss of control of body functions, and — hardly surprising, really — chronic depression.”
Oh... yeah, that's a very accurate description, anecdotally... Not what i expected to read on HN today. Undiagnosed lyme is really bad. I'm very happy there's a vaccine happening (again, since some awful people had the last one shut down because of fear and ignorance).
If you post this list of symptoms on the internet it will make a lot of people believe they have Lyme disease. People that have random muscle spasm once a month might run to their doctors. Or those that found a puzzle on stackexchange and believe themselves to be mentally impaired.
Great news. My 7yo son just got a tick bite while on holiday in Finland, with the tell tale bullseye ring around it appearing in a few days around the itchy bite area. We never saw the tick, would have missed it if not for the skin symptoms.
Fortunately early course of antibiotics has an extremely good success rate against the bacteria - but if it’s undetected it’s much less effective when you get more serious symptoms months later.
Ticks spreading borreliosis are a very common in Northern Europe, you can protect yourself with clothing and thorough check every time you’ve been in long grass or forested areas - but some bites still go unnoticed, this vaccine is fantastic news
This is fantastic! Every step against ticks is a good one.
Now we need to find a way to prevent Lone Star ticks from making us allergic to meat. It's a big deal where I live.
The ticks are not likely something we can vaccinate against, since the mechanism involves the tick priming our immune system to attack innocuous animal carbohydrates present in meat.
I live in a tick-infested area. They come into the house. They bite you at night: I usually find them first thing in the morning as I'm getting dressed (they weren't there the previous evening when I prepared for bed). Their bites are (usually) painless, they stay latched on for one to three weeks, and the bites only really itch after they've dropped off (and then they really really itch and it takes about 18 months for the marks to disappear). And yes, I've been treated for active borelliosis more than once.
Why do people feel compelled to mislead others with something so important. Especially today after everything that happened with the COVID-19 vaccines.
There were adverse events. There were no serious adverse events (SAEs).
No vaccine is 100% safe and effective. The safety and effectiveness is presumably high enough, though, or else they would not be used (or they have found no problems yet, possibly due to the funding and the commercial interests, etc; and/or if there are some bad effects but they are rare). Also presumably they are judged as being better than the alternatives. But, that does not mean that it is 100% good, because none of them are. But still, the time that has elapsed, and tests that have been made, if shows that it is OK, then it is less cause for concern than one which has not been tested yet and might have more severe side effects.
Where I live Lyme disease and TBE are the only ones you really need to worry about, and such is the case in large parts of Europe. TBE vaccines are common with a high rate of protection. A lyme disease vaccine will be very welcome.
Unrelated to the trial but their UX is a little weak: their signup page at least starts with finding a nearby location. If you start with putting in a ZIP code, it populates the drop down with possible autocompletes. Then when you choose one out of range of a site, you get the error "That address can't be located. Please try again."
That rather suggests an address entry error, not (what I can only infer) is a lack of nearby study sites error.
The number of people commenting on how common lyme disease is based on local anecdotes without acknowledging it's an insect borne disease and going to vary wildly by geography is silly.
Here we go again… yes I want my debilitating arthritis to come from the vaccine instead of the actual infection like what happened with Lymerix. Eye roll
The story of Lymerix is a sad one. People want vaccines to have zero side effects, zero risks, and be applicable to the entire population.
With Lymerix, the upsides of the vaccine vastly outweighed the downsides for people who live in areas with Lyme-carrying ticks, (especially those who spend significant time outdoors), but for most of the population it was pure downsides.
It's a damn shame that antivaxers were about to get it taken off the market entirely because it would have helped a lot of people.
Does it do anything against Babesia, Anaplasma, Bartonella, Erlichia, Epstein Barr Virus, HHV-6, Mycoplasma Fermentans, Mycoplasma pneumoniae, Chlamidia trachomatis, Yersinia enterocolitica or any of the other known Lyme coinfections?
I was pretty nervous about Lyme Disease a couple of years ago after there was a lot of publicity about it.
Now I feel like it's all a bit overblown.
I come from a family that's worked in dairy farming for generations on both sides.
People who've worked in hay meadows and silage fields all their lives and there's no history at all of Lyme disease that I know of.
It seems to be towns' people who occasionally visit the country side that are overwhelmingly get struck down with this which sounds to me like there's an element of hysteria about the whole thing, not least because of the number of cases where testing has proven inconclusive.
It depnends on the country I suppose. Here on Poland the problem is real . I personally know two persons (my father and my cousin) who were affected by it. My father had to go to early retirement and stop being a laywer beause lyme destoyed his nervous system and he could not read longer texts anymore. My cousin almost got thrown from medical university (he could not keep up after the symptoms kicked in).
Both of them did not even noticed when the tick bitten them and got through quite a long period of no symptoms.
After this events I am seriously afraid of lyme - as a knowledge worker this is like a death sentence.
Nice anecdata to share from Poland! I did not know that Lyme disease also exists in Europe. Related: Does Poland vaccinate for TCE (tick-borne encephalitis)?
the only person i've heard that were affected by lyme also were living in Poland, in the woods.. They were badly taken care of for years until they couldn't even move from their bed.
Lyme disease is one of those silent diseases. You don't see or hear that much about it because it's so debilitating that those who suffer from it are effectively removed from society. To put it in perspective, a lot of people that suffer from ALS hope that they have Lyme disease, since you might get better with time, but the symptoms are quite similar.
From what I understand, both tick populations and Lyme disease cases are increasing. However, Lyme disease horror stories seem to be from people who had undiagnosed Lyme disease. My partner is currently going through medical school (M4) and believes that we are far better at detecting it today than we used to be (and she is not one to trust the medical system overall.) Of course, this is all anecdotal.
I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I know it does, it's more that it is maybe not as serious a public health issue than the coverage of it would suggest.
Properly a misunderstand. There are other tickborne viruses, and some of them have vaccines. Lithuania is one of the countries with the highest rate of TBE.
There is none. There are other diseases you can get from ticks, such as encephalitis, and there is a vaccine for it, so maybe the friend mixed the two up.
Or they got the Lyme vaccine a couple decades ago.
> In 1998, the FDA approved a new recombinant Lyme vaccine, LYMErix™, which reduced new infections in vaccinated adults by nearly 80%. Just 3 years later, the manufacturer voluntarily withdrew its product from the market amidst media coverage, fears of vaccine side-effects, and declining sales.
It does not appear to be the case that the previous 1998-2001 Lyme vaccine had the problem you claim:
> By 2001, with over 1·4 million Lyme vaccine doses distributed in the United States the VAERS database included 905 reports of mild self-limited reactions and 59 reports of arthritis associated with vaccination.
> The arthritis incidence in the patients receiving Lyme vaccine occurred at the same rate as the background in unvaccinated individuals. In addition, the data did not show a temporal spike in arthritis diagnoses after the second and third vaccine dose expected for an immune-mediated phenomenon.
> The FDA found no suggestion that the Lyme vaccine caused harm to its recipients.
Can you cite a specific incident of it giving someome Lyme disease?
> Most viral vaccines actually infect you with the virus.
It is definitely not true that most vaccines infect you with the virus. Most vaccines do not use live viruses at all, and the ones that do are specifically modified to be extremely weak.
This particular Lyme vaccine, VLA15, is a recombinant protein vaccine. IIUC it is basically just a particular protein that your immune system can learn to recognize and attack.
Scheduled my call with them in a week! Long overdue, but I wonder if the protein subunit still makes sense in an age where mRNA is an option. Obviously too much sunk cost to change the platform even if it was better though.
That's true. Here in Scandinavia it's quite common. In fact, it was only yesterday an acquaintance shared with me they are being treated for a current infection. They were in good spirits though, and health.
While I am sure what you said is true, it really depends on the person. In our family we get a lot of ticks because we are outside a lot. A vaccine against Lyme disease I would get in a heartbeat. If your life is based on going from home to work, bar, restaurant, theater, movies etc. then this is really mostly irrelevant.
I don't know about how common it is, but my understanding is that tests for Lyme are fairly unreliable, leading to many people self-diagnosing themselves with Lyme, kind of like we're seeing now with 'long covid'.
The test detects antibodies. There's only so much to tell from that. What symptoms you'll have, when you'll have them, if you had it a long time ago, if you are infected but haven't produced the antibodies yet... these are things we can't tell just from the presence/absence of antibodies.
In The Netherlands ticks have become very invasive in the past few years, even in cities. I've gotten Lyme, and it certainly wasn't fun. I am happy this vaccine is on the way.
If you have basically any species of deer or elk plus anything green growing it's not that uncommon.
Your doctor friend might have been referring to "chronic Lyme" which is a very divisive issue. There are quack docs who will tell you you have it when you don't, there are docs who will angrily tell you there's no such thing, and then there are docs who wince a little a mutter about how there are things we don't know enough about.
“No less arresting is Lyme disease, which comes from the bite of a tiny deer tick. If undetected, it can lie dormant in the human body for years before erupting in a positive fiesta of maladies. This is a disease for the person who wants to experience it all. The symptoms include, but are not limited to, headaches, fatigue, fever, chills, shortness of breath, dizziness, shooting pains in the extremities, cardiac irregularities, facial paralysis, muscle spasms, severe mental impairment, loss of control of body functions, and — hardly surprising, really — chronic depression.”
Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods
Oh... yeah, that's a very accurate description, anecdotally... Not what i expected to read on HN today. Undiagnosed lyme is really bad. I'm very happy there's a vaccine happening (again, since some awful people had the last one shut down because of fear and ignorance).
If you post this list of symptoms on the internet it will make a lot of people believe they have Lyme disease. People that have random muscle spasm once a month might run to their doctors. Or those that found a puzzle on stackexchange and believe themselves to be mentally impaired.
That’s true for most symptom lists of any disease.
Great news. My 7yo son just got a tick bite while on holiday in Finland, with the tell tale bullseye ring around it appearing in a few days around the itchy bite area. We never saw the tick, would have missed it if not for the skin symptoms.
Fortunately early course of antibiotics has an extremely good success rate against the bacteria - but if it’s undetected it’s much less effective when you get more serious symptoms months later.
Ticks spreading borreliosis are a very common in Northern Europe, you can protect yourself with clothing and thorough check every time you’ve been in long grass or forested areas - but some bites still go unnoticed, this vaccine is fantastic news
i got the same thing, but without the ring. When I got antibiotics it had already started affecting my nervous system.
I had to eat antibiotics for 3 months.
Despite having Lyme disease I am not protected. If a vaccine comes In will take it without hesitation.
This is fantastic! Every step against ticks is a good one.
Now we need to find a way to prevent Lone Star ticks from making us allergic to meat. It's a big deal where I live.
The ticks are not likely something we can vaccinate against, since the mechanism involves the tick priming our immune system to attack innocuous animal carbohydrates present in meat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amblyomma_americanum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha-gal_allergy
I can’t wait for this to be available to the general public. It’s pretty much the only thing that really concerns me when I’m out in nature.
I live in a tick-infested area. They come into the house. They bite you at night: I usually find them first thing in the morning as I'm getting dressed (they weren't there the previous evening when I prepared for bed). Their bites are (usually) painless, they stay latched on for one to three weeks, and the bites only really itch after they've dropped off (and then they really really itch and it takes about 18 months for the marks to disappear). And yes, I've been treated for active borelliosis more than once.
You can not escape them. They will come for you.
I hate mosquitos. One reason I like living in the city is bug levels are severely reduced.
Don't forget rabies! Or those California ground squirrels that chew through cars' brake lines.
Some campsites in Southern California having warning signs on their message boards about the Plague.
Rabies already has a vaccine.
1 reply →
There’s also plenty of Hanta Virus around in old cabins and mines.
1 reply →
Not mountain lions? https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/j9w5k2/cougar_stalks_m...
Lyme Disease / Lyme Borreliosis : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease
A Vaccine for Lyme Disease is in its Final Clinical Trial (August 9, 2022) : https://text.npr.org/1116500921
I didn't know text.npr.org was a thing. Thank you!
OT:
I wish there were more text News sites.
A List Of Text-Only News Sites : https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/
Living in the Northeast, I’m tempted to enroll. Anyone know what the previous trial adverse events were?
From Pfizer’s site… but no adverse events were noted from the Phase 2 trial.
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
Why do people feel compelled to mislead others with something so important. Especially today after everything that happened with the COVID-19 vaccines.
There were adverse events. There were no serious adverse events (SAEs).
No. No serious vaccine-related adverse events were reported.
The key word there is "serious".
No vaccine is 100% safe and effective. The safety and effectiveness is presumably high enough, though, or else they would not be used (or they have found no problems yet, possibly due to the funding and the commercial interests, etc; and/or if there are some bad effects but they are rare). Also presumably they are judged as being better than the alternatives. But, that does not mean that it is 100% good, because none of them are. But still, the time that has elapsed, and tests that have been made, if shows that it is OK, then it is less cause for concern than one which has not been tested yet and might have more severe side effects.
An absurd response that has no place on hacker news.
I recommend this video on why vaccines are significantly better than the alternatives.
https://youtu.be/zBkVCpbNnkU
[flagged]
While great, expectations should be set. Ticks carry many diseases, including one that makes you allergic to meat and dairy.
Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha-gal_allergy
Any insect that sucks your blood falls into the same terrible category: tse tse fly, mosquito, kissing bugs.
They plug straight into your blood stream without any sort of intermediate filter mechanisms. Kinda like the USB port of parasitic strategies…
Where I live Lyme disease and TBE are the only ones you really need to worry about, and such is the case in large parts of Europe. TBE vaccines are common with a high rate of protection. A lyme disease vaccine will be very welcome.
Unrelated to the trial but their UX is a little weak: their signup page at least starts with finding a nearby location. If you start with putting in a ZIP code, it populates the drop down with possible autocompletes. Then when you choose one out of range of a site, you get the error "That address can't be located. Please try again."
That rather suggests an address entry error, not (what I can only infer) is a lack of nearby study sites error.
If you're not near a site for this study, you might also try the Valor study: https://www.valorlymestudy.com/
I am not a doctor, and I cannot speak to the relative merits of one over the other. I'm also too far from either to participate :-/
I haven't read everything about it yet, but will this vaccine also help if you already have Lyme?
This is presumably for VLA15, a multivalent protein subunit vaccine from Pfizer-Valneva.
Yeah, looks like it's this one: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05477524
Corresponding Phase 2 trial here: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03769194
The number of people commenting on how common lyme disease is based on local anecdotes without acknowledging it's an insect borne disease and going to vary wildly by geography is silly.
Here we go again… yes I want my debilitating arthritis to come from the vaccine instead of the actual infection like what happened with Lymerix. Eye roll
The story of Lymerix is a sad one. People want vaccines to have zero side effects, zero risks, and be applicable to the entire population.
With Lymerix, the upsides of the vaccine vastly outweighed the downsides for people who live in areas with Lyme-carrying ticks, (especially those who spend significant time outdoors), but for most of the population it was pure downsides.
It's a damn shame that antivaxers were about to get it taken off the market entirely because it would have helped a lot of people.
The same “antivaxers” that elected to take the Lymerix vaccine, were injured and then fought to stop others from also being injured?
The profoundly idiotic weaponized use of the word antivaxer will be an embarrassment for decades to come.
“Damn antivaxers!”
“But they have all their recommended vaccinations and only were injured with myocarditis on their second COVID Booster”.
“…damn antivaxers!”
2 replies →
Does it do anything against Babesia, Anaplasma, Bartonella, Erlichia, Epstein Barr Virus, HHV-6, Mycoplasma Fermentans, Mycoplasma pneumoniae, Chlamidia trachomatis, Yersinia enterocolitica or any of the other known Lyme coinfections?
I was pretty nervous about Lyme Disease a couple of years ago after there was a lot of publicity about it. Now I feel like it's all a bit overblown. I come from a family that's worked in dairy farming for generations on both sides. People who've worked in hay meadows and silage fields all their lives and there's no history at all of Lyme disease that I know of. It seems to be towns' people who occasionally visit the country side that are overwhelmingly get struck down with this which sounds to me like there's an element of hysteria about the whole thing, not least because of the number of cases where testing has proven inconclusive.
It depnends on the country I suppose. Here on Poland the problem is real . I personally know two persons (my father and my cousin) who were affected by it. My father had to go to early retirement and stop being a laywer beause lyme destoyed his nervous system and he could not read longer texts anymore. My cousin almost got thrown from medical university (he could not keep up after the symptoms kicked in).
Both of them did not even noticed when the tick bitten them and got through quite a long period of no symptoms.
After this events I am seriously afraid of lyme - as a knowledge worker this is like a death sentence.
Nice anecdata to share from Poland! I did not know that Lyme disease also exists in Europe. Related: Does Poland vaccinate for TCE (tick-borne encephalitis)?
5 replies →
the only person i've heard that were affected by lyme also were living in Poland, in the woods.. They were badly taken care of for years until they couldn't even move from their bed.
Seems like poland really is a danger zone..
1 reply →
Lyme disease is one of those silent diseases. You don't see or hear that much about it because it's so debilitating that those who suffer from it are effectively removed from society. To put it in perspective, a lot of people that suffer from ALS hope that they have Lyme disease, since you might get better with time, but the symptoms are quite similar.
From what I understand, both tick populations and Lyme disease cases are increasing. However, Lyme disease horror stories seem to be from people who had undiagnosed Lyme disease. My partner is currently going through medical school (M4) and believes that we are far better at detecting it today than we used to be (and she is not one to trust the medical system overall.) Of course, this is all anecdotal.
If it can be isolated and observed, it's not hysteria. Difficulty in testing and effects of the disease are not indicative of non existence.
I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I know it does, it's more that it is maybe not as serious a public health issue than the coverage of it would suggest.
Strangely, i know someone from lithuania that told me her whole family got vaccinated against lyme.
Does a working vaccine already exists ?
Probably got the tick encephalitis vaccine, which is common in Northern Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick-borne_encephalitis_vaccin...
I know plenty of people have gotten their dogs vaccinated against lyme disease, but to my knowledge it's not been approved for use on humans.
When tick season is at its height here in Eastern Canada my friends and I joke that we should try to bribe a vet into giving us the shot...
Properly a misunderstand. There are other tickborne viruses, and some of them have vaccines. Lithuania is one of the countries with the highest rate of TBE.
There is none. There are other diseases you can get from ticks, such as encephalitis, and there is a vaccine for it, so maybe the friend mixed the two up.
Or they got the Lyme vaccine a couple decades ago.
> In 1998, the FDA approved a new recombinant Lyme vaccine, LYMErix™, which reduced new infections in vaccinated adults by nearly 80%. Just 3 years later, the manufacturer voluntarily withdrew its product from the market amidst media coverage, fears of vaccine side-effects, and declining sales.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/
4 replies →
Fingers crossed
Stop spreading anti-vax lies.
The last lyme vaccine was safe, effective, and is still FDA approved.
It certainly didn't give anyone Lyme disease.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/7/17314716/lym...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1468-0009...
2 replies →
It does not appear to be the case that the previous 1998-2001 Lyme vaccine had the problem you claim:
> By 2001, with over 1·4 million Lyme vaccine doses distributed in the United States the VAERS database included 905 reports of mild self-limited reactions and 59 reports of arthritis associated with vaccination.
> The arthritis incidence in the patients receiving Lyme vaccine occurred at the same rate as the background in unvaccinated individuals. In addition, the data did not show a temporal spike in arthritis diagnoses after the second and third vaccine dose expected for an immune-mediated phenomenon.
> The FDA found no suggestion that the Lyme vaccine caused harm to its recipients.
Can you cite a specific incident of it giving someome Lyme disease?
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/
1 reply →
> Most viral vaccines actually infect you with the virus.
It is definitely not true that most vaccines infect you with the virus. Most vaccines do not use live viruses at all, and the ones that do are specifically modified to be extremely weak.
This particular Lyme vaccine, VLA15, is a recombinant protein vaccine. IIUC it is basically just a particular protein that your immune system can learn to recognize and attack.
1 reply →
Scheduled my call with them in a week! Long overdue, but I wonder if the protein subunit still makes sense in an age where mRNA is an option. Obviously too much sunk cost to change the platform even if it was better though.
My doctor friend tells me that it’s so uncommon that it’s not worth getting that shot.
Incidence rates widely vary based on where you live and what you do.
That's true. Here in Scandinavia it's quite common. In fact, it was only yesterday an acquaintance shared with me they are being treated for a current infection. They were in good spirits though, and health.
It's so common where I live that my doctor gave me prophylactic doxycycline to take whenever I have a tick bite. I took some last week.
2 replies →
While I am sure what you said is true, it really depends on the person. In our family we get a lot of ticks because we are outside a lot. A vaccine against Lyme disease I would get in a heartbeat. If your life is based on going from home to work, bar, restaurant, theater, movies etc. then this is really mostly irrelevant.
I don't know about how common it is, but my understanding is that tests for Lyme are fairly unreliable, leading to many people self-diagnosing themselves with Lyme, kind of like we're seeing now with 'long covid'.
The test detects antibodies. There's only so much to tell from that. What symptoms you'll have, when you'll have them, if you had it a long time ago, if you are infected but haven't produced the antibodies yet... these are things we can't tell just from the presence/absence of antibodies.
That's what he said also
In The Netherlands ticks have become very invasive in the past few years, even in cities. I've gotten Lyme, and it certainly wasn't fun. I am happy this vaccine is on the way.
If you have basically any species of deer or elk plus anything green growing it's not that uncommon.
Your doctor friend might have been referring to "chronic Lyme" which is a very divisive issue. There are quack docs who will tell you you have it when you don't, there are docs who will angrily tell you there's no such thing, and then there are docs who wince a little a mutter about how there are things we don't know enough about.
I know a few people who got it. I guess my friends are pretty uncommon ;-)
Well my mother got it, so I thought what my doctor friend said was interesting...