TIL the reason you don’t find much Lyme’s Disease in California is not because we don’t have Ticks, or Lyme Disease Vectors; but rather: because the Western Fence Lizard (if you live anywhere in California this is your regular Garden Variety Lizard) has adapted a passive immune response that makes their blood lethal to Lyme Disease Bacteria. Any Tick that feeds on one gets its gut cleansed of Lyme Disease as a side effect.
Fucking neat.
There is a new vaccine going into Phase 3 trials from Valneva and Pfizer as well as a monoclonal antibody-based prophylactic treatment being researched at UMass!
"the only cure for this weird disease is the special lizard blood" is a Star Trek TOS plot that escaped into the real world
this TOS plot is actually surprisingly common in medicine and one of the many reasons why the us government killing all those research grants was so fucking stupid





























