Tough month for the Guineas

We apaprently lost two guineas last night and definitely one the night before. There is a fox or coyote in the neighborhood. I've only gotten a fleeting glimpse of it.

I think the problem was that I have not yet released all the guineas. I had them in a portion of the chicken wire enclosure around the hutch. I was keeping a couple in the enclosure so the others would stay nearby. The problem was that at night, the free birds would roost on top of the chicken wire. I think that has been where they've been getting hit. It's getting nearly impossible to get the birds back into the enclosure for the night.

So, it's time to gamble on letting them all out. Hopefully, they will roost further up in the trees out of harm's way. At this point, they should be comfortable enough with us to hang around the property without running off.

Fox, quial and guineas

The neighborhood fox is still coming around. The other night we lost one of the guineas we let out about a half hour before dusk. It appears that the bird was by the door of the guinea enclosure and got attacked. There weren't a lot of feathers around, just a patch on the birds side where it was missing some feathers.

The guineas are starting to get the idea of roosting off the ground. I have an automatic game feeder that I use when we are going to be away. It's a 5 gallon can with an automatic feeder attached. It's perfect for laying down food on a regular basis when we aren't there. Anyway, the birds are piling on that at night. I'm hoping that means that when we finally release them, they will roost in the trees and not on the ground.

I have some work today. The chicken wire on the door to the chicken house is a bit old. I got a 10 gallon air tank which means I can take the air nailer/stapler out to the chicken house. The plan is to replace the chicken wire with new stuff and check the wood framing of the door. It's a lot better to be pre-emptive.

The quail have been doing nicely in their outside hutch. It's a little hutch that is really made for rabbits. I have a heat lamp that is on a GFCI protected extension. I put heavy plastic around three sides and cardboard on the bottom. So far, it's been about 2 weeks and we've only lost 1 out of 20 birds. They seem to like dandelion greens. The little buggers go crazy over them.

New CDC Lyme disease report - Cases doubling!!

There is a new CDC Lyme disease report released June 14, 2007.

Reported cases of Lyme disease have more than doubled since 1991

I'm not sure if the above is good or bad news. The problem is that there has been tremendous under-reporting of Lyme. If cases have been level but reporting is up, then that is good news since the problem is being properly identified. If cases are really going up, then, of course, it is bad news.

The report also said 93 percent of reported cases were concentrated in 10 states.

The bad news for Pennsylvanians is that we are one of those 10 states...

In 1991 fewer than 10,000 cases of Lyme disease were reported.

There has been an increase in awareness of Lyme disease. There is still a lot of work to be done and a lot of the medical community and legislators are in denial or ignorance as to the true extent of the problem.


Below are some notes regarding the actual report

With approximately 20,000 new cases reported each year, Lyme disease is the most
common vector-borne disease in the United States

The question is, how many people have not been adequately diagnosed. The reality is that it is probably impossible to answer that question.

Since Lyme disease became nationally notifiable in 1991, the annual number of
reported cases has more than doubled.

It is good news that the statistics are being kept on a national level for the last 16 years.

According to the report, the number of newly reported Lyme cases are as follows

• 2003 5730


• 2004 3985


• 2005 4287

One of the disturbing pieces of information in the report is the number of cases in children aged 5 through 9 and 10 through 14. A lot of kids are coming down with Lyme.



The CDC Press release can be found at
http://www.cdc.gov/od/oc/media/pressrel/2007/r070614.htm

The Full report link can be found at
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/ in the June 15, 2007 / Vol. 56 / No. 23 issue


The report iteself is at
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5623a1.htm

Wisconsin AG vs. a Lyme Doctor

OK, So it was Lyme Awareness Month in Wisconsin... Great.. However, at the same time, one of the attorneys in the Wisconsin's Attorney General's office starts an attack on a doctor who was successfully treating Lyme patients... The attack on Dr. Hoffman seems fuzzy and suspicious at best.

The link to the initial article is at http://www.publichealthalert.org./text1.htm The actual story is a PDF at http://www.publichealthalert.org./Wisconsin%20Lyme%20Doctor%20Under%20Fire%20During%20Governor.pdf

To sum up the story, it appears that the good old doc is a generous, dedicated doctor. He refused to prescribe narcotics to a patient who then went to the Wisconsin AG's office. The prosecutor is a guy named Arthur Thexton who is well known for prosecuting "alternative medicines" - (more about that later). ... Thexton then started demanding records related to treating Lyme patients.. When his office started getting innundated with out of state calls, he then tried to claim that the treatment of Lyme disease was not the issue.

By the way, there is a legal defense fund for Dr. Hoffman

contributing to Dr. Hoffmann’s legal defense fund, please contact PJ
Langhoff at info@sewill.org

Hey Wisconsin - If this is your idea of how to celebrate "lyme awareness month", why don't you just breed a couple of million infected ticks and release them??


Let's look at this a little more closely... Year after year, legislation that would allow for more aggressive treatment for Lyme dies in the Pennsylvania legislature (they did find time to give themselves and their judge friends a huge illegal pay raise though)... Why would state governments not want to provide the best treatment for people suffering from this disease? Here are a couple of thoughts...

• The insurance companies want to control cash disbursements. Lyme can be expensive to treat, especially the long term, chronic cases
• The insurance companies have lobbyists in the state house and often are substantial contributors to legislator's campaigns.
• Lyme is primarily a suburban and rural issue right now. Those areas don't always have the voting clout of urban areas.
• Those afflicted with Lyme don't yet have the political power associated with advocates for some other diseases such as aids and breast cancer.

If you do a little research into Arthur Thexton, you come up with some other interesting aspects of his career.

• http://alkalizeforhealth.net/Lquackwatch4.htm is a scathing article about the way that Thexton's office handled the case of Stuart Suster. There are some pretty serious allegations there against Thexton backed up by the fact that Suster is now suing Thexton in Federal Court. The tone of that article can be summed up in the following quote.

Health Insurance companies, I’m sure you already know, do not want to pay for
services rendered by health professionals. If they pay at all, they pay a small
percentage of the billing. They especially don’t want to pay for new things –
and, of course, if a New York ad agency (quackbuster management) rails against
it – health insurance companies will eagerly leap into non-payment mode.

The issue is that we need a lot more research into Lyme disease. Research that is not restricted by what the insurance companies would like to see, but rather into what treatments are really effective for those people suffering from this disease. Once there is a solid set of verifiable, established evidence as to what will really work then overzealous prosecutors will not be able to intimidate those trying to provide treatment. The current environment where groups are pushing for minimal treatment for Lyme will simply cause a lot more suffering for those infected.

Did some tick-dragging this weekend.

Tick dragging is the process of taking a piece of cloth. Flannel is often recommended, but denim should work as well as an old bath towel.

The idea is that you drag it over the grass and leaves and then count how many ticks end up on it.

It can be something very simple. I took half of an old bath towel and stapled that to a 1 x 11/2" board. I put an eye bolt in the middle since I had a broom handle with a hook at the end. It was pretty easy to drag. If you are doing your property, you don't need to use a whole square yard. Something smaller will also work.

Our property is 2 1/2 acres. It took about 30 minutes to cover a good sample of it at a slow walk.


I found a dog tick right near the pool filter. I had a deer tick on my leg a week before. Well, that area got scalped when I cut the lawn. (shorter grass makes a less hospitable environment for ticks) I didn't find any in the open, sunny, short grass parts of the property. I found one in the leaves. When I went through the woods I found about a half dozen clinging to it.

With the smaller drag, you can also pass it easily over bushes, shrubs and small trees.


Thoughts

• I have a little CO2 duster that uses the cartridges for an air gun. I've heard that ticks are attracted to CO2 so I'll try spraying the cloth before starting out next time.
• I have to read the labels on permethrin. I'm wondering if it is OK/legal to spray the cloth with permethrin. The guineas and chickens hardly ever go into the woods. I'm thinking about making up a cloth that I can tow behind the tractor and go throught the woods (about an acre) once a month or so. I just have to make sure that it is in compliance with the federal labelling. The thought is that you can get the ticks to cling to the cloth where they get a fatal dose of permethrin, but the residual that goes onto the ground should be minute.
• Our tick control is working to a degree. We were down to one guinea this year. We now have 8 adolescent guineas roaming (4 on any given day) and 4 chickens. We also use the tick tubes and have tried to keep the deer out as much as possible. There hardly seems to be any squirrels this year, but the fox does look fat. Anyway, the tick dragging, when done in a consistent manner, can provide a baseline tick cencus for you.
• It will be interesting to try this at a neighbor's house who does not have birds.

Tips

• Be careful. Ticks are heat seekers. If you are touching the cloth or wood, there is a good chance of getting ticks on you. Use plenty of repellant and keep checking yourself, especially your hands.
• Deer ticks are, of course, tiny, You have to look closely as they tend to start burrowing into the cloth very quickly
• Don't bring the cloth back into your home or shop since it may have ticks you missed.

Fox attack!!!

Well, we almost lost a couple of our birds this morning. I let the birds out at about 7:30.. All four chickens and 4 of the 8 guineas. I was having some breakfast on the patio when I heard a commotion. The old one-eyed guinea was running for his life with something right behind him. At first, I thought it was one of the groundhogs, but a second later I realized it was the fox. Old one-eyed did a maximum effort climb, circled around and landed in a dead tree about 15' up.

The chickens went for the bushes which would be a good idea if it were a hawk attacking, but I'm not sure what it would do as far as a fox. The 4 guineas are still pretty green. They huddled up by the henhouse which would have made them an easy meal. Hopefully, they'll learn from this that Mr. Fox is not their friend and immediate evasive action is a must.

I took a little walk through the woods which hopefully made the fox move off, at least for now.


By the way, a couple of mornings ago I got up right around dawn. The fox was sitting right outside the henhouse, about 10' away, just looking at the birds.

Picked up some quail today

We picked up 20 quail today from Davis Feedmill in Richland (bucks county). There were $1.95 each. They are about the size of your thumb when you get them.

I have them in the hutch with a heatlamp. I can see that changing the feed and water will be a challenge. The little guys think they are minature roadrunners. I had three jump out just putting them in.

The plan is to keep them in the hutch until they are fully feathered out and then release them. Hopefully they will stay nearby. Quail are natural predators of ticks.

The great Lyme debate...

(read the disclaimer at the bottom of the blog - Nothing here is intended as medical advice )


There is a newsday story at
http://www.newsday.com/search/ny-hscov5223177may22,0,4347013.story?page=1
about the two schools of thought regarding Lyme disease. On one hand, there are those who believe that Lyme is not being adequately diagnosed and that Doctors are not free enough to proscribe adequate courses of antibiotics. On the other hand, there are those who believe that people are being diagnosed with Lyme when they have other diseases and that too many antibiotics are being used. Which is correct?

She doesn't remember an actual tick bite or classic bull's-eye rash, but
her doctors found evidence that the common Borrelia bacteria have been in her
body.

There are some people who believe that the lack of the bullseye rash is because the person's defenses didn't work properly. Therefore the people without the rash are more susceptible to lyme. Also, if I get a rash in the middle of my lower back, the chances of me spotting it are almost zero unless I do the exorcist head thing..

"There are a lot of people who think they have Lyme disease but don't," said Dr.
Raymond Dattwyler, an infectious disease expert

Yes, and there are a lot of doctors who diagnose Lyme as other diseases. When we first encountered Lyme, a neurologist claimed my wife had MS even though her symptoms were not consistent with MS. He scoffed when we asked about Lyme disease. Later DNA testing for Lyme showed that she did in fact have Lyme.

Fallon, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia, said that
in the study the antibiotics worked initially on reducing pain, fatigue and
mental fog, but six months later patients were no better than those who did not
receive long-term therapy.

That, in a nutshell is one of the problems with Lyme. Many people who get it, never seem to be able to shake all of the symptoms. One theory I've heard is that the disease gets deep into the fatty tissue and some areas where blood supply is thinner. If you aren't getting blood, is it possible that the antibiotics aren't reaching the disease and reservoirs exist? Supposedly aerobic exercise helps kill the disease, perhaps because more blood is reaching more parts of the body.

. . .infectious disease doctors worry that people with all sorts of unexplained symptoms are being routed to Lyme doctors who will treat
with long-term antibiotics - despite studies that suggest those treatments don't
work. (Stony Brook neurologist Dr. Lauren Krupp and her colleagues also did a
monthlong study and found no difference between those receiving antibiotics and
those getting a placebo. The results of the study were published in
2003.)

If the study was only a month, I'd have questions about that. Again, I'm not a doctor, but I know it took a couple of months before my symptoms started to get under control. Also, our doctor was alternating antibiotics, mostly oral, but some injections (Still hurts thinking about those BIG needles). Another issue with the article is that it does not address other tick borne disease that might be present such as erlichosis and Babesis. If the latter is present, it requires a whole different course of treatment.

"The potential for harm is enormous," Boston University's Klempner
said. "Patients have died, and others have had infections" because of the
intravenous lines

IV treatment can be scary. Fortunately, as I noted earlier, our treatment was oral and injections in the posterior.

The infection doesn't take hold right away, and experts say removing the
tick soon after it is discovered is the best prevention.

That is a LOT easier said than done.. First off, the nymphs are smaller than the periods in these sentences. The tick itself is about the size of a lower case o depending on your screen. How many of us have someone check every inch of our body looking for one of these critters? Are we all doing the Yul Brynner routine and shaving our heads and other parts of our body? What about all those age spots? What about people with darker complexions? The problem here is that one bite in a place where you don't notice it can really mess up your life.

By the way, there are a number of products that allow you to remove a tick without squishing it which would inject the disease into you. That's a topic for another post.

The Lyme bacterium can also travel into the central nervous system if not
treated immediately. And this can trigger Lyme meningitis (stiff neck and
pounding headaches) and Bell's palsy (temporary paralysis of the facial
muscles).

Make no mistake, Lyme is serious stuff. We really need a lot more research to understand exactly what is happening with Lyme and other tick related diseases. We need to properly understand it and educate people as to how to prevent it.

If you have symptoms that are indicative of Lyme, you will need to make a decision as to which of the two schools of thought you believe will help cure you. That might be one of the most important decisions of your life. The problem is, there is no one right answer.....

Reduce Lyme by reducing Deer

Solebury is going to pay to have the Department of Agriculture thin out the deer herd. The main reason for the herd thinning appears to be the damage to crops.

However, deer are one of the key factors in the spread of deer ticks and Lyme Disease (and other tick born diseases). If you can reduce the deer population, you should be also reducing the prevelance of Lyme.

Solebury is far enough from Philadelphia that they probably won't have a large problem with people complaining about the hunt. It's about 45 minutes from the city and is more of a rural community.

We live much closer to the city but the deer herd is very large. Last evening we were eating dinner and a large deer wandered through the yard about 75 feet from us. We've fenced in the entire 2 1/2 acres in an attempt to keep the deer out and thereby reduce the ticks. There are a couple of places that need patching. I see up to 5 or 6 deer at a time just outside the fence. Keep in mind that we are only 10 minutes outside the city.

We need to control the herd in our township. The problem is that, the closer you are to the city, the less people understand the need for deer control. Meanwhile the Lyme Disease epidemic continues to rage.

Sharpshooters
hired to target deer (phillyBurbs.com) Intelligencer:

"Solebury has inked a more than $250,000 contract to winnow its deer
population with sharpshooters.
The no-bid contract calls on the U.S. Department of Agriculture to kill whitetail deer, mostly at night, through the use of “suppressed rifles with high expansive ammunition, along with the aid of stands, vehicles, artificial light, night vision equipment and forward-looking infrared.”

The goal is to reduce crop and other property damage, as well as
the risk of disease from today's large deer population. "

Medical Community takes years to diagnose teen.

You see these stories all the time. A person becomes ill and their quality of life deteriorates until their life is a shambles.

Quite often the symptoms are there but the diagnosis is not made.

"There were so many children coming in with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis,"
Jones said during a telephone interview. He later determined that while symptoms
were similar, often they stemmed from Lyme disease. "I developed a knack for
treating and understanding the disease."

The article does a pretty good job of outlining the problem and the current situation. Bucks County, our home county, is in the top three counties as far as Lyme cases.


York Dispatch - York teen suffers for years before Lyme disease diagnosed:

"No one believed her. They figured she was making it up for one reason
or another. She wanted attention. She wanted to skip school. She was lazy.
But those things weren't true. Nicole Lecrone wanted help. She wanted the pain to subside, the muscle aches, the sharp stabbing pains in her stomach."

Meanwhile, our illustrious representative in Harrisburg are sitting on legislation that could help those who are suffering from Lyme and other Tick Borne diseases. The article outlines some of the bills. Note that similar bills have been brought forward year after year to die in committee. You can help by reading up on the bills and contacting your state rep and senator. Ask them to support legislation to help those suffering from Lyme Disease.

There were bills that would protect doctors who are aggressivly treating Lyme. Currently these doctors live in fear of prosecution or losing their medical licenses.

Legislation: Three proposals addressing Lyme disease treatments and
education remain in state House and Senate committees. House Bill 798 and Senate
Bill 722 would establish a task force to study Lyme disease and related
maladies. The task force would comprise representatives of the state departments
of health, conservation and natural resources, and the Pennsylvania Game
Commission. The task force would monitor antibiotic therapies and misconduct
proceedings.

HB798 was referred March 19 to the Committee on Health and
Human Services; SB722 was referred April 2 to Banking and Insurance. A third
bill, Senate Bill 573, would provide Lyme disease education, prevention and
treatment.

Check out this proposed legislation and its status online at
www.legis.state.pa.us.

Guineas and chickens for 2007

We are raising a new flock of Guineas and chickens for 2007. All we have left at this point is one old one-eyed guinea. He's a real survivor and pretty good natured. However, there is no way he can control the ticks on 2 1/2 acres. All three of us have had deer and dog ticks on us.


We purchased a mixed bunch of 4 Rhode Island Reds, 2 leghorns and a White Rock. Unfortunately we didn't get out early enough and something got a leghorn and the white rock. A couple of days later, I heard a commotion at dusk and there was a fox trying to force the birds out of the henhouse. I found one of the Rhodies on her back in shock. She didn't look like she had a lot of injury so I put her back in the henhouse. for the next day or so, I kept finding her on her back in what looked like shock. I'd put her back on her feet near the water or food. After two days she totally recovered.


We started out with 12 guinea keets. When I moved them outside, I put them in a portion of the chicken yard. Unfortunately, the wire was a bit week from rust and we lost 4 of them. One morning I saw a fox or coyote sitting there staring at the hens and guineas at about 5:30 in the morning. I had to double up on the chicken wire all around.


Anyway, the 4 chickens are now roaming the property pretty well. I'm letting out about 4 guineas each day. They will stay pretty close to the others that are still caged. The old one-eyed guy is working pretty well with them. I had some company over and they walked out to take a look at the birds. Old one eye herded the keets that were outside away from us.. I guess he was telling them that our friends were strangers.



chris