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from the and-watches-know-you're-getting-old dept.
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Smartwatches know you're getting a cold days before you feel ill
Once we had palm-reading, now we have smartwatches. Wearable tech can now detect when you’re about to fall ill, simply by tracking your vital signs.
Michael Snyder at Stanford University in California experienced this first-hand last year. For over a year he had been wearing seven sensors to test their reliability, when suddenly they began to show abnormal readings. Even though he felt fine, the sensors showed that his heart was beating faster than normal, his skin temperature had risen, and the level of oxygen in his blood had dropped.
“That’s what first alerted me that something wasn’t quite right,” says Snyder. He wondered whether he might have caught Lyme disease from a tick during a recent trip to rural Massachusetts.
A mild fever soon followed, and Snyder asked a doctor for the antibiotic doxycycline, which can be used to treat Lyme disease. His symptoms cleared within a day. Subsequent tests confirmed his self-diagnosis.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 12 2018, @10:32AM (3 children)
Except when it isn't [wikipedia.org]:
(Score: 2) by ledow on Monday November 12 2018, @01:41PM (2 children)
I said very treatable. Not "perfectly cureable".
In a modern developed country, Lyme disease really isn't much of an issue at all.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/common-animal-associated-infections-quarterly-reports-2017 [www.gov.uk]
"The number of cases confirmed by laboratory testing in the UK has risen from 346 in 2003 to about 1700 in 2017."
To put that in perspective, there were 5,102 cases of TB in that year.
And just because you have a reported case, it doesn't mean there were ANY serious consequences whatsoever. That's REPORTED / CONFIRMED CASES.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 12 2018, @07:52PM
Remember though, 20% of cases don't start with the tell-tale rash, and as the symptoms '..fever, chills, headache, fatigue, muscle and joint pain, and swollen lymph nodes' all present like a bout of the flu there's scope for misdiagnoses, especially when the Doctor has no call to suspect Lyme, e.g. Despite staying in a part of Britain regarded as being a High-Medium Lyme risk, I live on the outskirts of an ex-Industrial town, don't spend as much time as I used to wandering around the hills and countryside so I should be relatively safe, if it looks like I've got the flu, then it's probably the flu, but I get Red and Fallow deer in the garden all the time looking for food..so an early misdiagnoses of flu at this point isn't a good thing.
Of course, the fun really starts when late disseminated Lyme kicks in, and that can be years after the bite, from a trawl of medical literature on this¹ I saw they're trying to get samples from people who suffer Bell’s palsy to see if there's a lot of undiagnosed Lyme disease going on.
Aye, and the link between the increase in cases of TB (especially the drug-resistant strains) and the rise in immigrant numbers and the failure of the government to screen people from known drug-resistant TB hotspots is, as they say, a matter for another day.
From one of the documents [service.gov.uk] you pointed to
'..A total of 359 cases of laboratory confirmed Lyme disease were reported during the fourth quarter of 2017, compared with 267 cases reported in the same quarter of 2016. Of the 2017 cases, 243 were acute (including 17 with neuroborreliosis) and 116 were longstanding.'
Note: 359 Diagnosed cases, 243 acute, of those 17 are seriously acute..
The total figures for 2017 were 1534 cases of Lyme Disease, 1175 of them classed as acute, that's 76.6%.
Taking your 1700 figure quoted of reported cases, that gives us 90% of reported infections confirmed, 69% of reported infections confirmed acute, from the last quarterly figures, assuming that the seriously acute percentage is more or less the same for the year (4.7% of the confirmed cases), that gives a figure of about 4.3% of reported infections being seriously acute.
A clearer way of looking at it, of your 1700 reported cases, 166 were clean, 359 infected but easily treatable, 1093 classed as acute, 82 (extrapolated figure based on last quarter) seriously acute.
¹Current personal interest, my sister suddenly developed a number of the symptoms associated with late disseminated Lyme, Lyme was never a factor in any of the initial diagnoses of her condition (they've already ruled out the two initial suspected causes) but as there was ample opportunity for her to be bitten while in the garden or taking the dog for a walk, and as they say up to 50% of the people infected never remember a tick bite or rash, this is all still recent and ongoing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 13 2018, @02:42AM
> In a modern developed country, Lyme disease really isn't much of an issue at all.
It's an issue in modern, undeveloped countries. Lyme disease is now found in all 50 US states [mercola.com]. The density is worse in some states but it is there in all of them. In some areas if you get a tick you are very likely to get borreliosis. When left untreated the disease will rot your organs.
There are also new, disease-ridden tics [cdc.gov] spreading like wildfire in just under a dozen states and growing.