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It’s now been fairly well-established that chronic inflammation is an underlying factor in most chronic illnesses. Diseases, such as Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, cardiomyopathy, gastritis, and chronic fatigue, are all turning out to be expressions of chronic infections.

Lyme disease appears to be a major, yet oftentimes hidden, player. This may sound shocking to you, but diagnosing Lyme is very difficult, so the actual number of cases is high relative to reporting.

According to preliminary statistics just released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 300,000 new cases of Lyme disease are diagnosed in the US each year. This is about 10 times higher than the officially reported number of cases, indicating that the disease is being vastly underreported.

The data was presented by CDC officials at the 2013 International Conference on Lyme Borreliosis and Other Tick-Borne Diseases in Boston in the middle of August. As reported in the featured article by Medical News Today:

“This agrees with studies reported in the 1990s that showed the actual number of Lyme diseases cases in the US was likely to be three to twelve times higher than reported… Lyme disease is the most commonly reported tick-borne illness in the US.”

What Is Lyme disease?

Lyme disease was named after the East Coast town of Lyme, Connecticut, where the disease was first identified in 1975. The disease was first referred to as “Lyme arthritis” due to the presentation of atypical arthritic symptoms in children that lived in that city. By 1977, the black-legged tick (Ixodes scapularis, also known as the deer tick) was linked to transmission of the infection.