PREAMBLE: Lyme borreliosis is described in the United States as a distinct disease entity 37 years ago. Due to a highly diverse clinical picture of the disease, arouses a great interest of specialists from many fields of medicine. The research results obtained so far suggest that the disease is becoming a significant health problem due to an increasing number of illness and catching ticks infected with Borrelia burgdorferi. No possibility of a kind of vaccination to prevent the problem of Lyme disease is extremely important for society and worthy of monitoring.
The aim: To present the incidence of borreliosis of Lyme together with a detailed analysis of symptoms which occurred in patients registered in patients in individual districts of Kuyavian-Pomeranian voivodship in 2000-2005.
Materials and methods: The epidemiological documentation of cases of Lyme borreliosis reported in nineteen regional Sanitary and Epidemiological Stations ofKuyavian-Pomeranian voivodship in 2000-2005 was subjected to the detailed analysis.
Results: In the studied area, a constant increase in the incidence of Lyme borreliosis is observed. The most cases (45%) of this disease were recorded in the district of Bydgoszcz. Erythema migrans was observed in 84.8% of patients. Of other signs attributed to borreliosis, symptoms from the osteoarticular system, and the circulatory system, as well as neurological ones have been reported. Apart from that, also non-characteristic general symptoms were observed in the course of disease, the most frequent of them being fever or subfebrile body temperatures, peripheral lymphadenopathy, influenza-like symptoms, and many others.
Applications: No case of contact with a tick and no alarming symptoms which may indicate infection with spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi should be ignored. To determine the exposure to bites of ticks-vectors of Lyme borreliosis is of the utmost importance, since the characteristic erythema does not occur in all the patients, and early borreliosis may transform imperceptibly into the next stage of the disease.