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It is a popular
misconception that Lyme disease was discovered in the late 1970's
in Lyme, Connecticut. However, medical literature is actually
rich with more than a century of writing about the condition,
although most of it has been published only in Europe.
The first
record of a condition associated with Lyme disease dates back
to 1883 in Breslau, Germany, where a physician named Alfred Buchwald
described a degenerative skin disorder now known as acrodermatitis
chronica atrophicans (ACA).
In a 1909
meeting of the Swedish Society of Dermatology, where a physician
named Arvid Afzelius presented research about an expanding, ringlike
lesion he had observed. Afzelius published his work 12 years
later and speculated that the rash came from the bite of an Ixodes
tick.
Throughout
the early twentieth century, associations were being made among
many of the symptoms and signs that constitute Lyme disease.
Some of these associations were: joint involvement in patients
with late disease (1921), the link between the EM rash and neurologic
problems (1922), psychiatric symptoms in patients with the EM
rash (1930), patients with benign lymphocytomas observed to also
have either EM or ACA (1934), and the description of heart involvement
that appeared in patients with both the EM rash and arthritic
symptoms (1934). By mid-century, physicians were experimenting
with still-novel antibiotics and reporting successful results.
In 1970, for
the first time, an incidence of EM known with certainty to have
been acquired in the United States was reported by Rudolph Scrimenti,
who diagnosed and treated a patient who had been bitten by a
tick while hunting grouse in Wisconsin and acquired the disease.
In 1976, the
first US case of clustering of this disease was reported by researchers
at the Naval Submarine Medical in Southwestern Connecticut.
In 1977, physician
Allen Steere et al described the first clustering of the disease
misdiagnosed as juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. They named this
condition 'Lyme arthritis'.
In the early
1980's, an entomologist at the United States Rocky Mountain Laboratories
of the National Institutes of Health by the name of Willy Burgdorfer,
MD, Ph.D., was investigating outbreaks of Rocky Mountain spotted
fever. Research scientists Jorge Benach and Edward Bosler, Ph.D.
collaborated in the dogged and dangerous work of gathering and
testing ticks for disease-causing pathogens. During the course
of the research, attention shifted from dog to black-legged ticks
and in the fall of 1981, one of the batches of ticks yielded
something dramatically new. Burgdorfer noticed an embryonic form
of parasite in the body fluid of two of the ticks. Guided by
his extensive knowledge of the early scientific writings of European
researchers, he undertook a very close inspection of the tick--and
found poorly stained, sluggish spirochetes. Within a year, the
spirochetes had been named Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb),
in his honor, and definitely identified as the causative agent
of Lyme disease. Dr. Burgdorfer was the partner in the successful
effort to culture the spirochete, along with Alan Barbour, MD.
Next came
a period of consolidating and expanding of knowledge. After the
discovery of Bb and the diseases associated with it, researchers
began to learn more about how the infection lodges itself in
the body. In 1985, Paul Duray, a Lyme disease researcher, declared
that the Lyme disease bacterium disseminates itself through the
body early in the course of infection. The prevailing wisdom
at the time was that infection was slow to. Duray's findings
are now the prevailing thought. Also in 1985, Burgdorfer was
able to demonstrate that ticks infected with the Lyme spirochete
could be found across the country.
In 1988, the
LDF was founded and started the major push to bring Lyme disease
in the spotlight. It was the effective partnerships among patients,
government officials, and researchers that enabled volunteers
around the world to bring Lyme disease the attention that has
helped make it a household term. |
