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Ticks and Lyme Disease Posted by on Jul 31, 2009 in Culture, Vocabulary

It’s summer in Sweden. And that means, among many other, much more pleasant things, also this – ticks. Yes, ticks. Fästingar, as they’re called in Swedish.

Those nasty little creatures and the diseases they cause are no laughing matter. And if you are spending your summers in Sweden, sooner or later you, or your pets will be faced with a tick issue. And trust me, it’s not a small issue.

Every summer you will see people coming to their vårdcentraler with a bullseye rash pattern asking for treatment. And you’d be surprised that many of these people have no clue that this rash is a result of a tick bite. People know that tick bites are dangerous, and that Lyme disease (borrelia in Swedish), and Tick-borne encephalitis (TBE or fästingburen encefalit) are serious problems, yet at the same time, many people don’t take tick protection seriously.

A friend of mine just contracted Lyme disease. She went for a walk with her dog and came back with a tick. She was always very concerned with protecting her dog from ticks and when a day later she found a tick on her body, she simply asked her sambo to remove it and didn’t think anything of it. A few days later when she saw the rash, she still didn’t think anything of it. When her sambo finally dragged her to the clinic, the diagnosis took less than 1 second – Borrelia. Yep. Lyme disease.

She was prescribed antibiotics and told not to be so stupid next time. When you suspect a tick bite, you should seek help as soon as possible. The consequences of delaying it can be very serious.

Here is a webpage, written in very simple Swedish, about Borrelia, its symptoms and treatment.

And as it says on that page:

Om man har fått en större hudförändring på platsen efter ett tidigare fästingbett, eller misstänker att man har fått borrelia, ska man kontakta en vårdcentral.

So please, when you are out and about in the beautiful Swedish countryside, enjoying the beautiful Swedish nature, be sure to protect yourself and your pets from tick bites!

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Comments:

  1. Michael:

    Thank you for the web page reference. It is useful and good reading practice.

  2. Serena:

    Hello Anna, I’m Serena and I write the Italian blog. Reading your blog about ticks, which in Italian we call zecche, I thought you might like to read my article: https://blogs.transparent.com/italian/insetti/ which I posted recently. It seems that there are a lot of ticks about this year, but luckily for us Lyme desease is very rare in Italy!
    Buon proseguimento, Serena

  3. Evie von Reis:

    Can a person who was undiagnosed for Lyme for 4 years, has now had antibiotic treatment for two years ever be cured?
    He is young, was diagnosed with anxiety, depression, chronically tired syndrome until
    a naturalpathic Dr had his blood tested.
    His stomach is so upset all the time, freq trips to
    restroom. Could this be from the antibiotics and their rotation over the years?

  4. Martin Flower:

    “be sure to protect yourself and your pets from tick bites!”

    Maybe you could expand this ? I was thinking that tick bites would be inevitable, like mosquitos, or other biting insects.

  5. staircases:

    interesting and informative post thanks a lot for sharing it

  6. Dolores Claesson:

    Hello I am so glad you posted this info on Sweden and ticks. My daughter who was 15 years old at the time went to tennis camp in NJ and then we flew to see her grandparents and the rest of the family in Sweden. After, a few weeks we developed a pneumonia like illness and then Sofia became very ill with sore throat, crushing fatigue, 104 F fever, dizziness and was mis-diagnosed with mononucleosis. Months later when tested she was positive for Borrelia and Ehrlichia Chaffeensis, then we kept testing and she is positive for Parvo virus B-19, Herpes simplex virus one which caused the Bells Palsy, Papillomaviruses which caused the mosaic wart (sign of weakened immune function), Babesia duncani, Bartonella, and finally Brucella. She has had to drop out of the International Baccalaureate program and has been very ill for three years. There are many people disabled with this complex, multi-factorial illness and quite a few have lost their life as a result. Ticks can inject over 100 viruses, many kinds of bacteria, such as Typhus, Brucella, Tularemia (very prevalent in Sweden), Coxiella burnetti or Q fever, all kinds of Bartonella, Ehrlichias or Rickettsias (one is Rickettsia Helvetica in Sweden and we have Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever in the US. Rickettsia Helvetica is a spotted fever rickettsiosis prevalent in Europe. We have been infected with multiple kinds of Borrelia and in Sweden there is Borrelia burgdorgeri, and Borrelia afzelli and garinii and most likely miyamotoi and many others. Each one of these Borrelias are susceptible to different antibiotics as well as the other co-infections. Anaplasma phagocytophilum is another rickettsia. Parasites such as nematodes and toxocariasis (larvae of roundworms) and tapeworms and strongyloides are being injected through that tick bite. Sweden is ignoring this world wide epidemic and following the useless guidelines of the infectious disease society of America. The Swedish health system seems to treat children under the age of 9 years with intervenous rocephin for neuroborreliosis but for those older they may not want to pay for the costly treatment and usually do not. Swedes are running to other countries to be treated with antibiotics to get the needed treatment that is unavailable within their health system and spending huge sums of money to pay for their own medical treatment. This a disgrace and a world wide disaster. Most of the medical personnel in Sweden do not know the signs of lyme disease and when my father in law went to his local clinic the nurse told him his huge bulls eye rash or erythema migrans rash was not from the tick bite. She also told him that his symptoms were not from the tick bite either and gave him some penicillin. I wrote to the clinic and the physician did not understand lyme disease or Borreliosis either. Education is key in the ability to gain timely treatment for this complicated illness. My daughter was not diagnosed in a timely fashion and has been suffering for over three years. The whole family has lyme and we are trying to figure out how to eradicate the pathogens. Dr. Christian Ehrenborg at Uppsala Universitet wrote his thesis on how 300 Swedish orienteers died after a tick bite and that the culprit was Bartonella. Bartonella as well as Coxsackie viruses can affect the heart. Swedish newspapers need to alert the unsuspecting public to the real truth of lyme disease. I have an article about a 15 yr old Swedish boy who recently died of the disease. Many people who have been diagnosed with lupus, ALS, MS, Chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, RDS, autoimmune diseases, all have underlying infections with the pathogens of lyme disease. We know that rickettsia is one of the causes of Waldenstrom’s Macroglobulinemia and are seeing other cancers as a result of untreated or improperly treated lyme disease as well as alzheimers. Please work hard to get the Swedish government to undertake much needed research on these pathogens. Karolinska Institute should be trying to figure this out so that no other child will have Sofia’s history. She needs to be cured to finish gymnsasium and go onto Universtity so that she can become a researcher helping to figure out these devastating diseases.

  7. Karen Scribner:

    Tick-borne illness is endemic in everyone in the world. You do not have to have a tick bite to acquire any of these diseases. They are passed around just like a respiratory infection. See Dr Garth Nicolson’s writing on mycoplasmas which are related. http://www.acimconnect.com has referrals by state in the US for doctors who know how to test and treat Lyme disease syndrome. Dr Klinghardt is in Germany and Washington state.