An Overview of Lyme Disease

Richard Krieger, MD, chairman of the Infection Control Committee at Chilton Medical Center, and infectious disease physician at ID care, provides a brief overview of Lyme disease.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“Lyme disease is something that’s probably been around longer than we realized and it was discovered in Lyme, Connecticut, hence the name, in, believe, the 70’s. They found it was a group of children who were having this unusual arthritis and when they started investigating they found that they had several common factors, like many of them had a particular rash, which we now know is Erythema migrans, and when they investigated they discovered this condition which came to be called Lyme arthritis initially, and then they expanded it to Lyme disease, when they found that it causes other symptoms. It wasn’t until a few years later that they discovered that the organism that caused it was Borrelia burgdorferi and that it can have a lot of different manifestations. Unfortunately there’s a lot of information, but there’s also a lot of misinformation and there’s a lot of abuse in the treatment of Lyme disease out there.”