Today, the word “Lyme disease” causes an unpleasant shiver in every mother whose child goes to the forest on a summer day. But few people know that we owe the discovery of this disease to two wise, inquisitive American mothers.
The town of Lyme in southern Connecticut looks like a clearing on satellite photos among vast forests stretching all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Some of the inhabitants live in the center, in this clearing, but the houses of the rest are scattered around the surrounding woods, away from other residences.
Something strange began to happen in this quiet town in the 70s.
Swollen knees
It all started with Polly Murray, mother of four, whom the local doctors must have treated as a slightly indolent hypochondriac. Polly was sick, but no one could figure out what for. The changing symptoms were an additional problem for the doctors. Once a woman felt so weak that she was unable to walk from house to road. Another time she had a terrible headache. Or the belly. Or – for a change – eyes. Sometimes nothing hurt, but Mrs. Murray was losing her voice. But the worst days were reportedly when her knees swelled like watermelons on steroids, making it almost impossible to move.
As long as it was all about her, Polly might have assumed that she was to be sick. Especially that triple hospitalization and thorough examinations did not reveal any causes of malaise. But the woman did not resign from solving the mystery, and in addition she had the valuable ability to associate facts. First, when her knees swelled again one day, she pointed out that she was not the only person in town hobbling on crutches. Well, there were times when you couldn’t rent such equipment in all of Lyme!
And then came more “coincidences”. In 1974, one of Polly’s children began to complain of similar symptoms. Not even a year had passed, and another son’s knees had swollen. The twelve-year-old mentioned something about a bug bite. Polly Gilles’s husband also associated his joint problems with a bite, although he himself suspected a spider.
The Lyme Doctors were content with this explanation in the case of Mr. Murray. One of the sons of the couple told them that he was suffering from rheumatism. It was a convenient translation, but Polly was not enough. Especially when, thanks to conversations with neighbors, she realized that many other inhabitants of the town are complaining about problems with the knee joints. Many of them, often children and adolescents, have been diagnosed with rheumatism. Is it possible that this disease is contagious ?!
Mom calls!
Mrs. Murray played a scientist, picked up the phone, and started calling all her friends in the area. After a few days of such research, there were as many as 35 cases of juvenile rheumatism. A bit too much for accidental illnesses, thought Polly. Though a hunch told her something was up, the woman was just an artist and housewife, a person with no medical knowledge. The Lyme disease mystery was still unsolved. And then there was the first series of positive coincidences in history.
At the time Polly Murray was on the phone, there was someone else in Lyme who was haunted by the number of rheumatism sufferers. No, it wasn’t a doctor, but another mom named Judy Mensch. She also counted friends with bad knees – apart from her eight-year-old daughter Anne, there were 11 other cases. Judy, who was also unable to ask for help from the local health service, decided to seek support from higher levels of government. She called Hartford, Connecticut, to speak to someone from the Department of Public Health.
And here’s the first hit – that someone was Dr. David Snydman, a specialist after an epidemiological course at the Center for Disease Control, the American equivalent of the Polish Sanitary and Epidemiological Station. Hit two – Polly Murray called the department at the same time. Hit the third – she was also connected to Snydman.
The expert couldn’t ignore the identical signal from two different women in the same town. He called everyone on the lists Polly and Judy had given him. Close to half a hundred patients reported all sorts of symptoms, but nearly all mentioned arthritis. Snydman commissioned his colleague Dr. Allen C. Steere. Steere was primarily an expert on rheumatic diseases, but – like Snydman – he also had epidemiological training.
Mean nymph
One conversation between Steere and Mrs. Murray and Mrs. Mensch was enough, and the two women were relieved that they had finally found the right man in the right place. The expert quickly pointed out three facts. First, they all lived in the wooded suburbs of Lyme. Second, most of the disease started with a strange round reddening of the skin, and many, like Polly’s son and husband, also remembered being bitten by an insect. Third, the disease most often broke out between June and October.
For Steere it was a clear sign that some vermin was responsible for spreading a new, unknown disease. But he did not know what, nor did he know the causative agent of it. Subsequent tests ruled out the perpetration of arboviruses (they are responsible, among others, for yellow fever), rickettsia bacteria (the one from typhus) and several other viruses.
Almost a year passed before there was a real breakthrough in Dr. Steere. A new patient came to see him, with an erythema similar to those of the other patients. As the doctor examined the flushed skin, he saw a tiny dot in the center of the blush, no bigger than a mole. After examining the dot under the magnifying glass, Steere noticed that it was an abdomen with even more microscopic legs, and the creature’s head was under the skin. It was a tick. An arachnologist called from Yale University quickly determined that it was the nymph Ixodes scapularis, an immature (and smaller than adult, almost imperceptible) form of the deer tick.
Steere already had his culprit, although it took almost six more years before Willy Burgdorfer in Montana detected the real villain – the Borrelia bacterium. Its carriers are ticks all over the world, only Antarctica is free from them. And it is from this bacterium that the Polish name of this mysterious disease comes from: Lyme disease, although it is diagnosed in Poland only since the late 80s, and even today (due to the multitude of symptoms), doctors sometimes have problems diagnosing it. But in English to this day, Lyme disease is called Lyme disease. In honor of two American moms who turned out to be smarter than all the local doctors.
Text: Wojciech Mikoliński
Also read: An innocent bite?