Home » Plants & Animals » Weeds & Wild Plants » LYME DISEASE - prevention

LYME DISEASE - prevention

© Barbara Hall

For all of us who love to spend time outdoors and who relish being a part of the wonderful cycles of Nature, there is a nagging fear that being part of a certain life-cycle can be seriously hazardous to our health. And let me start right off by assuring you that I know from whence I speak, having had SIX CASES of Lyme Disease over a 10 year period. For someone like me who just thrives on being outdoors with the plants, nothing could have been more heartbreaking than losing my ability to garden at all, along with the unfairness of feeling that my beloved woods and meadows harbored such danger. For years, what was once my joy seemed so hostile. But I speak in past tense! Am I not the Head Gardener at a 225 acre farm and conference center ? Am I not once again out in the sun and in with the plants! So my story with Lyme has a happy ending. Not everyone is so lucky.

Ask Alta Vista about Lyme Disease and you'll come up with a mere 22,003 documents to snuffle through. That's why I'm here. However, one in particular seemed to just about have it all.

Where does someone GET Lyme disease? There's a false sense of security figuring it's only on the East Coast, or only in the US for that matter! You folks in Europe and the UK..... zip over here for some specifics for you. Lyme can happen anywhere there are infected ticks. And don't think it's only in the TALL GRASS.......good night. When I lived in Garrison, NY (where I came down with three separate cases) we could just walk out on the wooden deck and look down and see tiny deer ticks crawling over our feet without ever setting foot in the grass. One of my favorite stories is of a woman in Manhattan who went to her doctor with classic Lyme symptoms. When he advised her that she did indeed have Lyme, she insisted that was IMPOSSIBLE as she hadn't set foot out of the city in months! He asked if she'd been in an elevator. She said yes...... He said "So have the dogs who went up to the country for the weekend!" Oh ho!

And so HOW does one contract Lyme disease? You have to be bitten by an INFECTED deer tick. How did the tick

The copyright of the article LYME DISEASE - prevention in Weeds & Wild Plants is owned by . Permission to republish LYME DISEASE - prevention in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.