We’ve run many stories at Forbes parsing the reasons for JPMorgan’s multibillion-dollar trading loss this month. As the days tick past, analysts and journalists continue to struggle to comprehend and explain the complex hedging strategy that did so much damage at the venerable bank.

But on Sunday, The New York Times had a front-page piece that brought the huge loss down to a level anyone could understand. A central reason a bank known for its mastery of risk management could make such a huge mistake: One of its top executives, chief investment officer Ina Drew, 55, succumbed to the most human of problems: She got sick, apparently with Lyme Disease and, starting in 2010, missed out on chunks of time in the office, where she had been managing clashing personalities and internal rivalries and making sure that no one took on too much risk.

Read more: http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2012/05/22/jpmorgans-6-billion-case-of-lyme-disease/

Health professionals are looking into a rare case of a little girl who was paralyzed after being bitten by an American dog tick.

The 2-year-old was unable to eat or drink — immobilized by a potentially fatal illness — when she was brought to Albany Medical Center this month. Jenna Tomlins woke up May 4 feeling tired and lethargic.

“She couldn’t stand up, she couldn’t really move,” said her mother, Rachel Tomlins, 25, of Hopewell Junction. “I just thought maybe she was tired. She was up late the night before.”

Her mother recalled the girl having trouble drinking.

“That’s when I called the pediatrician,” she said.

The doctor suggested the girl, who had no rash or fever, get some fresh air. When she appeared weaker, she was brought to a local emergency care center.

“The doctor was completely baffled, so we took her to Vassar,” Tomlins said. “She had X-rays, CAT scans, urine analysis, blood tests and a spinal tap. They thought maybe she had botulism.”

But the tests came back negative. By then, the child’s tongue had swelled.

For more:  http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20120518/NEWS01/305180030/-Tick-paralysis-strikes-girl-2?gcheck=1&nclick_check=1

Patients prescribed the antibiotic azithromycin are more likely to die than those prescribed a different antibiotic, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday. These results were especially pronounced for those who died from heart attacks, strokes, sudden cardiac death and other cardiovascular causes.

Last year, doctors wrote 55.3 million prescriptions for Azithromycin, commonly known by the trade name Z-Pak,  according to IMS Health. Like the popular antibiotic amoxicillin, azithromycin is commonly prescribed to help fight off bacterial infections. But while they are often prescribed for similar conditions, the two drugs work differently from each other.

Wayne Ray, professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tenn., and lead author of the study, says he thinks many doctors prescribe azithromycin instead of amoxicillin because of its easier regimen; patients on azithromycin take fewer pills over fewer days, which means they are more likely to finish their entire course of medicine. Finishing the entire course not only leads to more effective treatment, but it also lessens the risk of the patient developing a drug-resistant bug.

But, Ray says of azithromycin, “the risk of death may outweigh convenience and compliance, at least for high-risk patients.”

For more: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/05/16/z-pak-antibiotic-raises-death-risk-for-some-says-study/

The federal Centers for Disease Control has clinical criteria for Lyme disease that are narrowly defined in order to ensure accuracy when tracking the disease.

These criteria are mainly useful for the early stages of Lyme when patients present with more obvious symptoms, such as a rash in the shape of a bull’s-eye and arthritis-like problems.

The CDC criteria are not very helpful for clinicians attempting to detect late-stage neurologic Lyme.

For example, the most common manifestation of late neurologic Lyme is cognitive dysfunction, often referred to as encephalopathy.

A patient who presents with new onset encephalopathy and a positive blood test for Lyme would not be considered by the CDC to be a case of Lyme disease.

Although the CDC recognizes that Lyme encephalopathy exists, encephalopathy is not part of the “surveillance case definition.”

Hence, physicians who rely on the narrow surveillance case criteria of the CDC for clinical diagnosis will fail to diagnose some patients who have Lyme disease.

In these cases, the patient’s treatment will either not occur or be delayed.

Such delay in treatment could result in an acute, treatable illness becoming a chronic, less-treatable one.

More: http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=386212

In the summer of 1997, while working at a camp in Maine after my freshman year of college, I found a blotchy red rash on my right arm. The camp nurse shrugged. “Maybe it’s from your sleeping bag. Let’s give it a few days and see what happens.”

A few days later I collapsed in the dining hall. When I came to, the camp nurse told me I’d had a low blood sugar reaction, something that had never happened to me before. She didn’t think to connect the incident with my mysterious rash, which by then had faded. She didn’t think to test me for Lyme disease, known for its tell-tale rashes. She didn’t think to test me for babesia, ehrlichia or bartonella, tick-borne parasites that consume oxygen in the red blood cells, which can first manifest as hypoglycemia. She didn’t think to do any of these tests, because she didn’t know the serious health threat that ticks pose in wooded areas.

I don’t blame the camp nurse for my misdiagnosis, but I do blame the lack of awareness surrounding tick-borne illness that led to her ignorance. It took eight years for a doctor to connect the dots of my burgeoning constellation of symptoms. By then the bacteria had spread to every system of my body, crossed the blood-brain barrier and invaded my central nervous system, and was replicating at a rate that evaded the strongest antibiotic treatment.

I was left bedridden, hooked up to an IV, for two years. The co-infections of babesia, ehrlichia and bartonella caused nightsweats, fevers, and neurological symptoms that demanded intense anti-malarial treatment.

This is the fate that awaits anyone who does not receive a proper diagnosis of tick-borne illness right away.

Our best defense against this health threat is Lyme literacy, not just amongst the general population but amongst doctors, too.

Read more: http://www.boston.com/Boston/dailydose/2012/05/misdiagnosed-lyme-disease-one-reader-horrific-experience/ULt7ITNpRotIyRlfGCMYQO/story.html

On February 18, 2012 the unthinkable happened in Houston, Texas as the University of Delaware baseball team began its season facing off against the University of Houston at Cougar Field. But to one person this wasn’t just a baseball game, it was a milestone.

Flash back to October 2008 and imagine a 16-year-old teenage boy getting blood drawn in hopes he would find the answer to why he was feeling abnormally lethargic. The results came back as Lyme disease, which Joe Giacchino was thrilled to hear because that meant the doctors could start treatment and return him to his normal life, which included playing baseball at Malvern Prep in Malvern, Pa.

However, the old adage, “Mother knows best,” fits perfectly in this story.

Joe Giacchino, a West Chester, Pa. native, has played baseball his entire life. Whether it was playing catch with his brothers Dan and Brian or traveling across the nation with his parents Lynn and Larry to play in various AAU tournaments, Joe, or “Jeezy” as his friends call him, has dreamed of playing college baseball since eighth grade. So when the outfielder had trouble fielding fly balls, he knew something was wrong:

I went to a showcase at Villanova, an event that would showcase my skills to college coaches in hopes that I would get recruited. I could not catch a fly ball. It was the most embarrassing moment of my entire life. Catching a fly ball is something that I have been able to do since the age of five. Now all of a sudden, I wasn’t able to do it. It was because the baseball, when in flight, would appear to bounce around almost like a knuckle ball would, and I misjudged just about every one.

But catching a fly ball was the least of Giacchino’s problems. It got the point where even getting out of bed required more than normal strength.

“I was having some serious trouble getting out of bed in the morning to get to school,” Giacchino said. “Some days it would take me close to an hour, and those were the days where my mom would yell up to me from the kitchen to get up, and I just physically could not muster enough strength to get my body up and going.”

Read more:  http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1162278-delaware-baseball-joe-giacchino-stars-after-being-diagnosed-with-brain-tumor

Infected cattle from other parts of the country are apparently bringing a dangerous disease to the Tri-State, and peak season for blood sucking insects could spread it to humans. The disease is called anaplasmosis …and it can be a killer.

While relatively new, it is shown up more and more in cattle across the Tri-State spread by ticks and biting flies, among other things. Thanks to our warm winter this could be a banner year for such bugs. As Local 12′s Rich Jaffe reports, that could mean problems for people as well.

The bacterial blood disease is spread from infected cattle ticks, horseflies or inoculation needles that aren’t sterilized and used from cow to cow. Many farmers lose cattle due to the disease and never realize it. “When you find them a lot of times they’re like a drunk, they can’t stand, the back end’s really wobbly. A lot of times it happens very quickly, one case I know 8 o’clock on a Thursday morning, cow had a calf by her side, 8 days old, that night she was acting weird, the next morning she was dead.”

Read more: http://www.local12.com/mostpopular/story/Infected-Cattle-In-Tri-State-Could-Spread-Disease/YkyXCQxbyEu7VcThgrf9Hw.cspx

On his 82nd birthday, Dr. Charles Ray Jones sat in his New Haven office at 111 Park St., surrounded by patient files and wearing a blue tracksuit.

Though it has been a long while since Jones could last run — in fact, he now uses a cane to get around — Jones finds himself in a number of races: a medical one with a debilitating disease, a legal one with the Connecticut Medical Board, and even an academic one with Yale.

Over the past four decades, Jones has treated roughly 10,000 children with severe chronic Lyme disease. Parents from all over the world bring their children to Jones, and many said they consider him their final hope. But despite his popularity with his patients, many in the medical field strongly disagree with his practices, which, they say, treat a form of Lyme disease that does not exist.

Most doctors believe that Lyme disease, a tick-borne illness, almost always presents with a rash, fever or arthritic pain. But Jones says that Lyme disease can have a much wider array of symptoms, such as mental impairment, that can last for years.

Jones has already been brought before the medical board twice, both times receiving fines of $10,000 for procedural violations, which he claims threatens his ability to practice. Jones claims the high fines he received were due to the controversial length of his treatments, rather than because they caused any harm to his patients through his violations. Jones has never been sued for medical malpractice.

“I’m not being disciplined, I’m being harassed,” Jones told the News.

Read more: http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/apr/05/amid-medical-controversy-children-saved/