Lyme Disease and Long Term Symptoms with Abigail Dumes

Abigail Dumes (University of Michigan) sits down to talk to Merle and Lee about her anthropological work on Lyme Disease and how it has shaped ideas about long term disease effects on people. After defining Lyme Disease and why its numbers have increased over the last few decades, she turns to the debate over clinical diagnosis of the disease and those who have experienced long term symptoms. Dumes traces out the significant implications of this debate and how it might change disease diagnoses and responses in the future. Finally, she discusses how her work on Lyme Disease can have implications for “long” Covid sufferers, which could reshape ideas about disease in the future.