New Tick-Borne Illness Could Be Causing ME/CFS-Like Illnesses in Eastern United States

Cort

Founder of Health Rising and Phoenix Rising
Staff member
Suzanne Vernon posted this link on her Facebook site. I asked her once about ME/CFS - she said she always thought pathogens were the key to the disease. She worked in the pathogen field before she came to ME/CFS. She wrote:

Yet another vector-borne disease that causes flu-like symptoms similar to those experienced by patients with ME - this one caused by the Heartland virus - a recently discovered virus that can be transmitted by the lone star tick.
These ticks are something else!

"These findings should encourage clinicians and public health officials to consider [Heartland virus] as a potential source of illness throughout the eastern United States"
The first known human cases of the Heartland virus were two farmers in northwestern Missouri. Both became very sick in 2009, with symptoms including fever, fatigue, headache, lack of appetite, nausea, and diarrhea. Both had also recently been bitten by ticks, but tests for the usual tick-borne suspects—such as several Ehrlichia species, a group of intracellular bacteria—came back negative. Both patients recovered, although one of them kept suffering from fatigue and headaches.

[bimg=no-lightbox]http://news.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/sn-virusEMBED.jpg[/bimg]

It wasn't until 3 years later, in 2012, that scientists reported that the patients had most likely been infected by a hitherto unknown agent. The virus, named after the Heartland Regional Medical Center in St. Joseph, Missouri, where the farmers had been treated, is a species of the genus Phlebovirus. That group also includes the mosquito-borne Rift Valley fever virus and several other agents linked to human disease.

Check out the entire blog here: http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2015/09/heartland-virus-may-occur-across-eastern-u-s

The Simmaron Research Foundation is beginning a large study to examine the prevalence of insect-borne illnesses in ME/CFS. The researcher, Konstance Knox is confident she will find higher rates of illness than anyone suspects. Most people are never tested for these bugs. Some may have a treatable illness..
 

Strike me lucky

Well-Known Member
It seems KDM is finding high rates of lyme and bacterial coinfections in many of his cfs patients.

it seems we are a soup of many different infections . If infections are the cause or the effects of a dysfunctional immune system, treating all these infections has to help??

Even the current autoimmune theory doesn't really discount infections. Its possible a subset have an autoinflammatory affect from chronic activated infections that the immune system just cant shake. Maybe over time and or a different subset could be immune exhaustion and immune deficiencies ? ???

Also another group could becfrom the hit and run effect that has left the immune system on causing autoinflammatory disease.
 

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