Ticks with a twist of lyme disease

Over the summer I found out that our new house, being so close to the woods, is crawling with ticks. At one point we found between 5 and 10 a night in our bed. It's a terrible feeling to have a tick bite you while you're dreaming. Needless to say, one of those ticks was carrying a pathogen. While I can't be sure it was lyme disease, since I didn't get it tested, I do know that it was something in the same category because I had all the signs. I got treated with antibiotics and I'm fine.  However, it made me start thinking about the disease.

A few weeks after I got treated for lyme disease, we went to Africa. Turns out, one of the preventions for malaria is the antibiotic, doxycycline, which is exactly what I had been on for lyme treatment. I basically continued treatment for another couple weeks there. In the meantime, we bumped into a researcher, Brian Allan, who studies ticks and lyme disease. Because of those two chance occurrences, we decided to make this short update:



If you're still interested in reading up on the ecology of this disease, we did a short writeup here: http://www.untamedscience.com/biodiversity/article/lime-disease