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Singer Justin Bieber revealed this week that he had Lyme disease, making him the latest celebrity to raise awareness of the tick-borne illness that impacts hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. every year.
“While a lot of people kept saying justin Bieber looks like s—, on meth etc. they failed to realize I’ve been recently diagnosed with Lyme disease, not only that but had a serious case of chronic mono which affected my, skin, brain function, energy, and overall health,” Bieber, 25, wrote Wednesday FB, +1.37% Instagram, captioning a screenshot of a TMZ report about his diagnosis.
The singer said he would reveal further details in a forthcoming YouTube GOOG, +1.23% docuseries. TMZ’s sources said the documentary would reveal that Bieber’s symptoms had remained undiagnosed for much of 2019, and that he experienced depression as a result.
“You can learn all that I’ve been battling and OVERCOMING!!” he wrote. “It’s been a rough couple years, but getting the right treatment that will help treat this so far incurable disease and I will be back and better than ever.”
A representative for Scooter Braun, Bieber’s longtime manager, did not immediately return a MarketWatch request for further comment.
Celebrities including singer Avril Lavigne, actor Alec Baldwin and reality TV personality Yolanda Hadid have spoken publicly about their struggles with Lyme disease.
An estimated 300,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with Lyme disease annually, according to studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But a mere fraction of cases get reported: State health departments and the District of Columbia report some 30,000 Lyme disease cases to the CDC annually.
Lyme disease in the U.S. is spread most often through a bite from blacklegged ticks (also known as deer ticks) infected with the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, though scientists in 2013 discovered that the Lyme disease-causing bacterium Borrelia mayonii had also been found in blacklegged ticks in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Residents of the Northeast, mid-Atlantic and upper-Midwest U.S. have the greatest risk of being bitten by blacklegged ticks; western blacklegged ticks on the West Coast also transmit the disease. The bloodsucking arachnids wait for their host humans in grassy areas, the CDC says — “resting on the tips of grasses and shrubs in a position known as ‘questing.’”
Typically, the tick must be attached for 36 to 48 hours for a human to get Lyme disease, according to the CDC. (The probability of getting the disease is “extremely small” if the tick is attached less than 24 hours, the agency adds.) A small, mosquito-bite-like red bump might show up after a person is bitten by a tick or removes one, according to the Mayo Clinic, and get better in days.
But in the case of an infection, a gradually expanding bullseye-patterned rash can show up about three days to a month after a bite from an infected tick, according to the Mayo Clinic. Additional symptoms include fatigue, aches, fever, chills and swollen lymph nodes.
An untreated infection can result in longer-term symptoms over coming weeks and months, the Mayo Clinic adds, including swelling and severe joint pain; neurological issues like temporary facial paralysis, impaired muscle movement and meningitis; and the bullseye rash on other parts of the body.
Though a two- to four-week oral antibiotics regimen cures most Lyme disease cases, some patients find their symptoms persist more than six months after treatment ends, according to the CDC. There’s no proven treatment for this “post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome,” the agency says, adding that “patients with PTLDS usually get better over time, but it can take many months to feel completely well.”
A 2015 study of the costs related to prolonged Lyme disease-related symptoms — sometimes also termed “chronic Lyme disease” — found that the disease costs the United States’ health-care system an annual $712 million to $1.3 billion, translating to an average of $2,968 per patient. The study, funded by a Lyme Disease Research Foundation grant, was published in the journal PLOS One.
“Our data show that many people who have been diagnosed with Lyme disease are in fact going back to the doctor complaining of persistent symptoms, getting multiple tests and being retreated,” lead study author Emily Adrion, then a Ph.D candidate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said in a statement.
The potential costs of Lyme disease aren’t just health-related: A separate 2017 study published in the journal Environmental and Resource Economics found that perceived Lyme disease risk prompted people in the Northeast to skip an average of eight 73-minute trips outdoors — forgone trips that each cost $2.75 to $5 — every year. In the aggregate, the study estimated, those lost opportunities amount to a $2.8 billion to $5 billion annual “welfare loss.”
“People are giving up trips, and it’s not just hiking and camping in the woods,” lead study author Kevin Berry, a former postdoctoral scholar at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, said in a statement. “It’s trips to the park, soccer games, or walks and bike rides in places where there are stands of trees and tall grasses … a wide variety of activities pretty much anywhere in this part of the Northeast that’s outdoors.”
