First U.S. Center to Study Lyme Disease Launched at Johns Hopkins Medicine

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The Johns Hopkins University, The Johns Hopkins Hospital, and Johns Hopkins Health System.:

Increasingly common illness has high toll: 300,000 stricken, $1.3 billion in treatment costs per year

Release Date: May 13, 2015

Fundamental research into the causes and cures of post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome now has its first home base at a major U.S. medical research center with the launch of the Johns Hopkins Lyme Disease Clinical Research Center. Inaugurated on May 12, 2015, with a major gift from the Lyme Disease Research Foundation, the center plans an ambitious research program targeting this increasingly common disease, which costs the U.S. economy up to $1.3 billion per year in treatment costs alone.
First discovered in Lyme, Connecticut, 40 years ago, Lyme disease has spread rapidly throughout the East Coast and Midwest. It now afflicts more than 300,000 people per year, becoming the sixth most common reportable infectious disease in the U.S.
“If you live anywhere from Maine to Virginia, it’s almost impossible for Lyme disease not to affect someone you know, someone in your family or yourself,” says center founder and director John Aucott, M.D., a Johns Hopkins internist. Aucott, an assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins, has spent more than a decade studying the disease’s potentially crippling effects...Continue reading...