“Lyme disease is an accident by all accounts.”--Alan G. Barbour, author of Lyme Disease: The Cause, the Cure, the Controversy.

Lyme disease is very rarely fatal, but it can make people very sick and it’s sharply on the rise in certain areas of the United States. It’s a good example of an outbreak that is environmentally related because occurrence and location are so strongly linked. In nature, wild animal populations are reservoirs for the bacteria which cause Lyme disease. Lyme disease is common only where deer are abundant and where humans have encroached on their habitat, which is exactly what’s happening in many suburban areas.

Named after Old Lyme, Connecticut, Lyme disease, a bacterial infection is transmitted by the bite of a tick--though it took many years to figure that out. The infection itself is caused by a spirochete bacterium called Borrelia burgdorferi after its discoverer Dr. Willy Burgdorfer. In the northeastern U.S. in the 1970’s, a particular set of biological and environmental circumstances converged to create the perfect conditions for a Lyme disease outbreak. Current estimates range as high as fifty to sixty thousand cases of Lyme disease per year. “Physicians report thousands of cases each year, in a steadily increasing pattern that promises to continue,” writes Andrew Spielman, Professor of Tropical Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health.