This is from Wikipedia...I haven't read the referenced article. Another arcane quarrel from the science boys. Curiousity is a wonderful thing, I think.
"The West Coast, although originally identified by A.C.Steere as a focus of Lyme disease, has traditionally been viewed as having minimal tick infection rates. In the past, it was believed that the role of the Western Fence Lizard in the California tick life cycle produced adult tick infection rates of only 2-3%. However, a landmark study in 2003 published in The Journal of Medical Entomology by the San Jose State Entomology Department found that the minimum infection rates of the microbe Borrelia burgdorferi in the tick Ixodes pacifica were much higher in Santa Cruz County, up to 17.8% in The Forest of Nisene Marks State Park. This completely transformed traditionally held views of Lyme disease in California as a minimal risk and instead raised the specter of rampant misdiagnosis as the reason for the lower case numbers. Rick Vetter of UC Riverside has shown in published work that tick-induced Lyme disease rashes in California are often misidentified as brown recluse spider bites, when, in fact, brown recluse spiders have never been documented in California.[7]"
