If all goes well,  a springtime shot to prevent Lyme disease could enter testing soon.  Tufts Lyme Disease Initiative researchers work with Massbiologics to help develop a new method for preventing Lyme disease  

Deer are killing forests on a massive scale leaving zombie forests that are stripped of natural plants and flowers.  Tufts Professor Dr. Allen Rutberg discusses the use of contraception to help control deer populations.  

NBC News: Why some people recover from Lyme disease, while others experience months, years or even decades of chronic symptoms has long puzzled doctors. New research from Dr. Klemen Strle offers some clues to an immune system marker in the blood that is elevated among people with lingering Lyme disease symptoms, even after they’d received antibiotics.

After four decades, it’s time to get our summers back.  This time of year in New England should mean beach days, ice cream, hikes in the mountains. Instead, for thousands of residents, year in and year out, it means a debilitating bout of Lyme disease, the often-painful tick-borne bacterial illness that arrived with day-glo in the ’80s — but then, unlike leg warmers, never left.  

In the New Yorker:  There used to be a Lyme vaccine—and then, in a rare occurrence in modern medicine, it disappeared. LYMErix was a three-dose regimen for humans brought to market about twenty years ago by SmithKline Beecham, the precursor to the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. It prompted the making of bacteria-neutralizing antibodies in a person’s blood, so that when a tick bit, the Lyme pathogens it was harboring would be killed before they could cause an infection. It was a novel approach: essentially, the vaccine acted inside the tick, not its human host.

As the threat of Lyme disease grows and fears surrounding it spread faster than the ticks that carry the infection, researchers are developing two vaccine or vaccine-like approaches to prevent this increasingly problematic disease. But don’t expect to get one soon. They are at least three to five years away from clinical use, according to their developers. As the threat of Lyme disease grows and fears surrounding it spread faster than the ticks that carry the infection, researchers are developing two vaccine or vaccine-like approaches to prevent this increasingly problematic disease. But don’t expect to get one soon. They are at least three to five years away from clinical use, according to their developers.