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Critter jitters: Lyme disease jumps 52 percent in Morris County racks up most N.J. cases
BY ANDREW NYNKA DAILY RECORD
HANOVER -- Six weeks ago Lee Wuenn saw what looked like a spider bite on her leg.
Wuenn, a 72-year-old hiker, noticed it after she began to come down with flu-like symptoms.
"It was probably several days before I saw this thing,"Wuenn said, referring to the time between when she was bitten and saw the mark.
But it was no spider bite. Wuenn considers herself lucky that she found out relatively early that she had been infected with Lyme disease from a tick bite.
Wuenn isn't alone in falling victim to the disease.
New Jersey had 2,698 reported cases of Lyme disease in 2004, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is the most recent year for which the CDC has figures. Only two states, New York (5,100) and Pennsylvania (3,985), reported more cases in the same year, the CDC reported.
Morris hit hard
Morris County led all New Jersey counties last year in diagnosed Lyme Disease cases with 529, up from 347 in 2004, a 52 percent jump in one year, according to Dr. Dorothy Zufall, the health educator in Hanover.
However, it is still too early to say that there is an epidemic of Lyme disease in the county, doctors say, as the number of diagnosed Lyme disease cases regularly fluctuates from year to year.
In Morris County, the number of cases was 393 in 2002 and 451 in 2003, according to the state's Department of Health and Senior Services.
Although effective remedies do exist, they work best when the disease is found in humans shortly after a person is infected.
"If people don't have symptoms until later then it's much more dangerous," said Wuenn, who is now finishing the last of her six-week antibiotic treatment for Lyme disease. Her doctors have told her that the disease will likely not affect her in the long term, and in that sense she is lucky.
"I should be OK, and it should be gone," Wuenn said.
You're ill when ...
Symptoms of the disease include fatigue, headache and fever, according to the CDC. If not treated quickly, it can cause chronic illness and affect every system in the body, including the cardiac and central nervous systems.
Jennifer Krasinski, 60, is among the unlucky Lyme disease sufferers.
"For seven years I had a spider bite that would not heal,"said Krasinski, who was bitten by a spider in 1987 while gardening outside her Mountain Lakes home.
"I began to think I might have Lupus, I might have other things," said Krasinski, who is writing a memoir of her ordeal. "No one considered Lyme because it wasn't a bull's eye rash."
The subject has generated much debate in the medical and research communities because there is no clear test or diagnosis used to determine whether a person has Lyme disease.
"Those cases reported by the CDC, which by the CDC's own acknowledgement, are probably 10 percent of the total cases of Lyme," Krasinski said. Many of the symptoms of Lyme disease mirror those of other illnesses, she added.
In the past, doctors advised people to look for a distinct rash on the skin, often described as a bull's eye.
However, "fewer than 50 percent of patients with Lyme disease recall a tick bite," according to the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS), and many doctors now instruct their patients to look for a wider range of symptoms.
Clues few, ticks many
"Fewer than 50 percent of patients with Lyme disease recall any rash," ILADS reports on its Web site. It argues that physicians should be looking for a wider range of complaints, including fever, joint pain or arthritis, facial palsy, headaches, dizziness, sudden weight change, fatigue, mood swings, memory loss, depression and disorientation.
"You don't always see that,"said George Van Orden, the Hanover health officer, of the bull's eye rash. "There may be 30 or 40 percent of the people who are infected who don't recall seeing a rash."
As opposed to waiting for a bull's eye rash, Van Orden suggests that people take preventive measures.
"Our main control with Lyme disease is education," Van Orden said. He suggested that people check their skin thoroughly for ticks after they spend time in wooded or grassy areas, and they should regularly mow their lawns, as ticks thrive in tall, wet grass.
Tick checks are important, Van Orden said, because ticks cannot pass along the disease until they have been in contact with the body for a minimum of 17 hours. Finding and removing ticks inside that window of time is a surefire way to avoid Lyme.
Attempts to spray towns with a pesticide to kill ticks, similar to efforts to spray communities to minimize the threat of disease carried by mosquitoes, would not be effective.
"If you were going to do tick control in a town you'd have to do everything," said Kris McMorland, assistant superintendent of the Morris County Mosquito Extermination Commission.
"From a manpower and land perspective, it would be impossible," McMorland said. "Literally, from north to south to east to west, Morris County is a 100 percent tick area. They're all throughout the county."
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5dana8
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Say Yesh
Thanks for posting this article
Really Good to see it is being given some coverage.
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bettyg
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good article & thanks for posting it here. Bettyg
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Ann-OH
Frequent Contributor (5K+ posts)
Member # 2020
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Great article, but where did the guy get this info? Seventeen hours??????
[quote] Tick checks are important, Van Orden said, because ticks cannot pass along the disease until they have been in contact with the body for a minimum of 17 hours. Finding and removing ticks inside that window of time is a surefire way to avoid Lyme.[end quote]
I have never heard this number before. It is so precise! Not 16, not 18, but 17!
It is usually 24 or 48 hours that makes it into articles.
However, I know quite a few people who were infected within a couple of hours, if not immediately.
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