Lyme Disease; Underdiagnosed and Underfunded
Imagine being sick for months and months. Each day you discover new symptoms, and the ones you already had are continually getting worse. You go to the doctors because it has reached a point where you have Googled all your symptoms, Web MD says you are dying, The doctor says that your labs came back normal and therefore “it's all in your head”. The eventual diagnosis was Lyme Disease which is a vector-borne illness, that is transmitted by an insect bite, spider bite, and in some cases sexually transmitted. The effects of the disease on a Lyme patient’s body differentiates from person to person due to the fact that Lyme is not the only infection you acquire when you develop Lyme Disease. Lyme bacteria
Nagami also had to deal with the limits of medicine in dealing with her cases. The chapter dealing with AIDS, chicken pox, subacute sclerosing panencephalitis displayed the limits of medicine. In each of these cases the patients involved died even though Dr. Nagami and her colleagues tried to prevent their deaths. In the case of AIDS and the encephalitis advances have been made in treatment of the disease since Dr. Nagami first encountered them. At the time of the cases however there was very little that could be done to save the patients. Some cases like the chickenpox simply overran the body and any treatment that was
On December 15, the patient comes in for his check up. The physician tells the patient his blood test was positive for Lyme and prescribes the patient antibiotics. However the patient now tells the doctor that he is still experiencing the weakness and fatigue even after the doctor’s advice. He also says he is having slight trouble swallowing foods and speech has become slurred and nasally at times. Due to the patients broad range of symptoms, the physician suggests the patient either get an electromyography o...
there may be many more people with the disease than are reported. Lauer’s data is not welcome news for communities. “Imagine you owned that house there”—she pointed out the window to an upscale tract home—“and I took a sample and found the valley-fever fungus.... ...
Lyme disease is one of the seven most common diseases reported in the United States to the CDC annually (www.cdc.gov). The rates have gone from 10,000 cases in 1992 to over 30,000 cases in 2009. 95% of these cases were found in the northeast and Midwest regions of the United States (Committee on Lyme Disease, 2011) . More cases happen in this area of the country due to the close proximity of deer to population. The bite itself isn’t the problem, rather the pathogen being spread in mammals from the bite. Lyme disease occurs when a tick penetrates the skin of mammals and the spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi enters. Borrelia burgdorferi is carried by ticks named the Ixodes dammini, which is the main vector for Lyme disease. These may also be known as I. scapularis, and may be found on deer (Schilling-McCann, 2010). ¬¬¬In addition to Lyme Disease, ticks may also carry Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever or Tularemia (Smeltzer et al, 2010).
The health of the American people lags behind those from other developed countries. Federal public health agencies have a wide range of responsibilities and functions which includes public health research, funding, and oversight of direct healthcare providers. It has been a long time since changes have been made to the way the federal government structures its health care roles and programs outside of Medicare and Medicaid (Trust, 2013). With healthcare reform on the horizon now is the time to invest time and money in prevention, not medicine, making it a top priority to improve health and prevent disease. Funding efforts at all levels of the public health continuum need to focus on developing programs aimed at such leading initiatives as tobacco cessation, improving nutrition, supplying safe workplaces, and increasing physical activity in all ages of the population. People should have equal access to quality preventative medicine and education.
...k two nurses to change the dressing- one to lift the folds of skin and the other to pack the wound. Continuing to mark the date and the margins of the wound, Katie’s nurses and doctors were hoping for a survival. Nutritional support at this point was entered via gastrointestinal tubing and by this time Katie was going through major psychological wounds that needed healing as well. Sadly the doctors were not able to prepare Katie to go home. Despite fasciotomy and the surgery, her infection continued aggressively. Her wound after surgery had a foul-smelling drainage, which increased in amount every day. Local cellulitis developed at the IV site on her arm. Just 10 days after the first surgery she underwent a second infection spreading around her hip area. Despite all efforts by Katie and the hospital staff, she died of septic shock and multisystem organ failure after 30 days in intensive treatment. Although flesh-eating disease is always life threatening and in most cases results in a fatality, it doesn’t have to have an unhappy ending if you use prompt recognition and go to clinical expertise within the first sign of the disease. Don’t let it get you!
Although most people don't realize it, one of the most weakening diseases of the world can often be found crawling around in the shrubs and tall grasses of a person’s backyard .It does not mean that only dirty yards have this disease but it is found in every Americans backyard. The disease is called Lyme disease. Now I will be elaborating on the disease.
All human bodies have an immune system, which is a complex network of cells and organs that protect the body from germs and other foreign substances. A mistake can make the body unable to tell the difference between foreign substances and the body’s own cells. When this happens, the body makes auto-antibodies that attack body cells by mistake. When a foreign substance invades your body (like a cold virus or bacteria on a thorn that pricks your skin) your immune system attacks it. It tries to identify, kill and get rid of the invaders that might harm you. But sometimes problems with your immune system cause it to mistake your body’s own healthy cells as invaders and then repeatedly attack them. This is called an autoimmune disease.
Addie Rerecich was an eleven and a half year of girl who was just as normal as any other kid her age. She played sports and was very social. All that changed one night when she woke up complaining of some pain in her hip. Her mother thought it was just a simple softball injury, so she gave her some ibuprofen and sent her back to bed. When the pain didn’t subside, she was taken to the hospital. Initially the doctors said she had symptoms of a virus. The next day she could breath well and they said she now had pneumonia. When at the hospital the disease specialist said Addie had “community-aquired” resistant staphylococcus MRSA from picking her scabs. This infection caused damage in her lungs and was so bad she was then put on ECMO, total life
In the documentary, Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria, reporter David Hoffman investigates this new untreatable infection along two individuals and a bacterial virus within a hospital. The first individual Hoffman investigates is Addie Rerecich of Arizona, she was treated for a staph infection with antibiotics, but other complications arise. Addie had a lung transplant, she was given several different antibiotics, but her body became pan-bacteria, non-resistance to the bacteria. Addie’s life was on the edge, she had to be on life support, and finally she received new lungs. The transplant helped Addie but it would take years before could go back to normal before the infection. The second individual is David Ricci; he had his leg amputated in India after a train accident. The antibiotic treatment he received became toxic to his body increasing problems. While in India, he underwent surgery almost every day because of infections he was developing. Back in Seattle, doctors found the NDM-1 resistance gene in his body; NDM-1 gene is resistance to almost all antib...
Symptoms of the disease begin to occur shortly after being bitten. A chancre forms around where the person has been bitten and soon the parasite enters the lymphatic system. The immune response it triggers in the immune system causes the lymph nodes to swell especially on the necks. The severe swelling of the lymph nodes on the dorsal side of the neck is known as Winterbottom’s sign, and is a tell-tale sign of sleeping sickness. The parasite soon finds its way into the blood stream after invading the lymphatic system. From the bloodstream, the parasite is free to travel and harm any organ and cause damage all throughout the body. The parasite targets smooth and skeletal muscle and is often fatal because of the damage it causes to cardiac muscle. The disease begins to wreak havoc on the nervous system when the parasite enters the brain which constitutes stage II trypanosomiasis. The person’s sleep cycles are disrupted, and fatigue, insomnia, and confusion...
Infection control is very important in the health care profession. Health care professionals, who do not practice proper infection control, allow themselves to become susceptible to a number of infections. Among the most dreaded of these infections are: hepatitis B (HBV), hepatitis C (HCV), and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Another infection which has more recently increased in prevalence is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). These infections are all treated differently. Each infection has its own symptoms, classifications, and incubation periods. These infections are transmitted in very similar fashions, but they do not all target the same population.
Resources have always been inadequate for food, economics and healthcare and all scarce resources are rationed in one way or another. Healthcare resources can be in the forms of medicine, machinery, expensive treatment and organ transplantation. For decades, allocation of healthcare resources in an equitable manner has always been the subject of debate, concern and analysis, yet the issue has persistently resisted resolution. Scarcity of resources for healthcare and issue of allocation is permanent and inescapable (Harris, “Deciding between Patients”). Scarcity can be defined in general, in emergency and in crises as well as shortage of certain kind of treatment, medicine or organs. As a result of scarcity of resources, and some people may be left untreated or die when certain patients are prioritized and intention of is that everyone will ultimately be treated (Harris, 2009: 335). Allocation of limited resources is an ethical issue since it is vital to address the question of justice and making fair decisions. Ethical judgments and concerns are part of daily choice in allocation of health resources and also to ensure these resources are allocated in a fair and just way. This paper will explore how QALYs, ageism and responsibility in particular influence the allocation of healthcare resources in general through the lens of justice, equity, social worth, fairness, and deservingness.
In the 1960s, doctors in the United States predicted that infectious diseases were in decline. US surgeon Dr. William H. Stewart told the nation that it had already seen most of the frontiers in the field of contagious disease. Epidemiology seemed destined to become a scientific backwater (Karlen 1995, 3). Although people thought that this particular field was gradually dying, it wasn’t. A lot more of it was destined to come. By the late 1980s, it became clear that people’s initial belief of infectious diseases declining needed to be qualified, as a host of new diseases emerged to infect human beings (Smallman & Brown, 2011).With the current trends, the epidemics and pandemics we have faced have created a very chaotic and unreliable future for mankind. As of today, it has really been difficult to prevent global epidemics and pandemics. Although the cases may be different from one state to another, the challenges we all face are all interconnected in this globalized world.
... the case of autoimmunity, allergies, rheumatoid arthritis are but a few that the immune system failed to operate. When the immune system doesn’t work then modern medicine has to step in to help our body’s heel.