The Global Search for Education: Ticks – Research We Need

Commentary: Cathy Rubin will be joining me in Oslo next week for the International Norvect conference on Lyme and associated tick-borne disorders. In this article in the Huffington Post, she interviews me and other speakers at the conference as to how we should be prioritizing tick-borne research. I discuss the need for more accurate and earlier detection methods with better treatment strategies, since Lyme and associated co-infections are often implicated in persistent illness. We also need to broaden research to look at the multifactorial causes of chronic disease. Chronic disease accounts for at least 75% of our health care costs and 70% of the deaths in the United States. The MSIDS model that I use in my practice has been clinically useful in finding and treating multiple sources of inflammation in chronically ill individuals, helping them improve their health.

The vaccination strategies that I discuss (and didn’t have room to include in the article) relates to vaccination of mice against different tick-borne pathogens to help prevent the cycle of transmission to humans and pets, as well as looking into a “tick-spit” vaccine where antibodies would prevent tick attachment and the subsequent ability to transmit multiple pathogens with one tick bite (i.e., bacteria, viruses and parasites like Babesia that are often responsible for chronic illness).

The Global Search for Education: Ticks – Research We Need, by C.M. Rubin, HuffPost