When pediatrician Aaron Bernstein, MD, sees young patients with Lyme disease at Children's Hospital Boston, in Massachusetts, his advice to parents often goes beyond the obvious of protecting their children against infectious ticks with insect repellant, long pants, and long sleeves on trips to the woods.
“I explain to them that really, Lyme disease is a disease of ecology,” says Bernstein. “We tend to think that we get infectious diseases from other people, but it turns out that the majority of infectious diseases are diseases that we share with other species.”