If last month鈥檚 has you panicking鈥攐r feeling vindicated鈥攄on鈥檛. Though there鈥檚 plenty of controversy around the disease and its treatment, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the possibility of sexual transmission and of this abstract in particular.
The Rise of the Tick
With incisor-like claws that can tunnel beneath your skin in seconds, ticks are rapidly becoming the world鈥檚 scariest purveyors of deadly pathogens.听
Published in the January issue of The Journal of Investigative Medicine, the abstract reported that vaginal secretions of all women in the study with Lyme disease tested positive for the bacterium that causes the disease, while the semen of about half of the men with Lyme disease tested positive. A married couple in the study also had identical strains of the disease in their secretions.
The authors claimed that this data suggests the disease could in fact be sexually transmitted.
But there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical about the science, according to Paul Lantos, a faculty member at Duke University Hospital in pediatric infectious diseases, and the lead author of a panel that reviewed the Infectious Diseases Society of America鈥檚 Lyme disease treatment guidelines. 听
鈥淎 lot of basic things we would expect to see in a sexually transmitted disease have not been observed,鈥 he says. 鈥淢aybe it really is retrievable from semen and vaginal secretions. I don鈥檛 have a problem with that idea. The question is can you actually acquire if you come into contact with the organism in that form?鈥
If the disease could be transmitted sexually, Lantos says, there should be a huge occurrence among those most likely to contract STDs鈥攁dolescents and young adults. Instead, Lyme disease is most common among children and the middle aged.
The areas where the disease occurs should also have more overlap with other STDs like herpes and gonorrhea. But instead of a high occurrence in urban centers and in the South, Lyme disease is most common in the Northeast and rural areas.
STDs like HIV are also pretty easy to trace back to an infected partner. 鈥淲hy don鈥檛 we see couples passing it to one another,鈥 he says. 鈥淲hy don鈥檛 we see a clear pattern where sexual partners are diagnosed with Lyme disease?鈥
What鈥檚 more, the abstract itself is just that鈥攁n abstract. It hasn鈥檛 been peer-reviewed, and without information about how many patients were involved, who they are, and whether they had been treated for the disease, it鈥檚 hard to take a critical look.