Chris Meloni's Family Members Mistook Early Lyme Disease Signs for This Common Bug
Chris Meloni's family members thought Lyme disease signs were stomach flu symptoms
In a 2024 interview with TODAY.com, Meloni opened up about how his family initially mistook Lyme disease symptoms for a common illness.
"We first thought we were dealing with the stomach flu," Meloni said, explaining that symptoms included brain fog, fatigue, joint pain, migraines, and depression, while antibiotics only briefly helped. "Before you know it, you're dealing with a completely debilitated human being."
In search of answers, Meloni told TODAY.com that his loved one saw a variety of specialists and underwent many tests before they were ultimately diagnosed with Lyme disease, a bacterial infection most commonly transmitted to humans by tick bites, the Mayo Clinic explains.
Signs and symptoms of Lyme disease typically include fever, headache, fatigue, and a skin rash, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lyme disease is "almost always readily cured" with antibiotics early on, according to the American Lyme Disease Foundation, but, without treatment, the infection could potentially spread to the joints and nervous system.
"If Lyme disease is part of your life, your life will literally never be the same," Meloni told TODAY.com.
RELATED: The Most Intense Fights Between Benson & Stabler on Law & Order: SVU
In a 2023 interview with People, Meloni shared that it took his family years to get answers. 'My family was affected by this disease in a very dramatic way," he told the magazine. "And it was a whole big learning curve because it took us two years to get the correct diagnoses. It was pretty heartbreaking."
Once they finally figured out what they were dealing with, Meloni added that he was surprised by the lack of information and awareness there is about the disease. 'It presents itself as any number of things,' Meloni told People. 'In my family's case, we thought we were dealing with a stomach flu and then later it turned into relentless migraines and then we were dealing with arthritis. It's a laundry list of horror show potentialities, and I was surprised how little and poor the information was being given out to the public.'
Chris Meloni is a vocal advocate for Lyme disease awareness and research
Inspired by his family's firsthand experience, Meloni has since become a strong advocate for Lyme disease awareness and research. The actor is an ambassador for the Global Lyme Alliance, he's appeared in PSAs, and has also lobbied Congress with fellow advocates to push for more Lyme disease funding.
RELATED: Chris Meloni Reveals the Key to His 28-Year Marriage with Wife Sherman Williams
In October 2023, Meloni and his wife, Sherman Williams, attended a gala for the Global Lyme Alliance, where he took the stage to deliver an impactful speech. In an Instagram post following the event, which raised over $1.6 million, Meloni commended "all the hard work EVERYONE in this community has done, and the continued commitment everyone has dedicated themselves" to raise awareness.
Solve the daily Crossword
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
25 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Products with opioid-like effects sold at gas stations may be banned as illicit substances
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is recommending banning a compound found in unregulated tablets, gummies and drink mixes sold online and at gas stations and convenience stores, the Trump administration announced this week. The substance, known as 7-OH, will be scheduled as an illicit drug if the Drug Enforcement Administration − a branch of the US Justice Department responsible for classifying drugs as controlled substances − approves the sanction after a review. "Dark innovations in chemistry have exacerbated the addiction crisis in this country," US Department of Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Jim O'Neil told reporters during a Tuesday, July 29, press conference in Washington DC. "Synthetic opioids like carfentanill and the substance we're here to take action on today: 7-Hydroxymitragynine." O'Neil said 7-hydroxymitragynine, 7-OH, is deliberately addictive and a powerful opioid agonist many times more potent than morphine. Calling it "a recipe for public health disaster," O'Neill, said 7-OH products are often sold without warnings or controls. "We've seen a disturbing rise in reports of overdoses, poisonings and emergency room visits linked to products containing 7-OH,' O'Neil said. "These substances are often sold online or in convenience stores with no quality control, no dosage control and no warnings." 'They've killed thousands and thousands' During the press conference, FDA commissioner Martin Makary spoke alongside US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as they announced they planned to send warning letters to companies for illegally marketing products containing 7-OH in an effort to combat the country's opioid addiction problem. 'We have a history in public health of being asleep at the wheel,' Makary said. 'Public health is supposed to prevent disasters, not just clean them up after they've killed thousands and thousands of people.' Which states felt tsunami waves? See list of where it hit after Russia earthquake What is 7-OH? The compound 7-OH is a naturally occurring substance in the kratom plant (Mitragyna speciosa), according to the FDA, but only a minor component comprising less than 2% of the alkaloid content in natural kratom leaves. "However, 7-OH demonstrates substantially greater mu-opioid receptor potency than kratom's primary alkaloid constituent mitragynine, as well as other classical opioids such as morphine," the FDA wrote in its findings. Mu-opioid receptors, found in the brain and spinal cord, are primarily responsible for pain relief and other opioid effects like euphoria and respiratory depression, according to research published on the National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine. Contributing: Adrianna Rodriguez Natalie Neysa Alund is a senior reporter for USA TODAY. Reach her at nalund@ and follow her on X @nataliealund. (This story was updated to include video.) This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What is 7-OH? Opioid-like product may get banned by FDA Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
32 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Transcript: Dr. Mehmet Oz on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan," Aug. 3, 2025
The following is the transcript of an interview with Dr. Mehmet Oz, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Aug. 3, 2025. MARGARET BRENNAN: Change is coming for the country's Medicaid system as part of the enactment of the Big, Beautiful Bill. To help us understand what's ahead, we turn now to the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Dr. Mehmet Oz. Good morning. Welcome to Face The Nation. DR. MEHMET OZ: Thank you. MARGARET BRENNAN: You've got a lot of work ahead. I want to start on drug costs. The president put this 25% tariff on India, big drug producer. The President's trade deal with the EU puts a 15 percent tariff on imported medicines from Europe. How do you stop the drug makers from passing along those costs to people on Medicare and Medicaid? DR. MEHMET OZ: Well, the president's letter on Thursday for most favored nation pricing is a good example of that, and he's been working on this tirelessly since the first administration. And just to put this in context for many of the viewers, about two thirds of bankruptcies in America are caused by health care expenses. About a third of people when they go to the pharmacy, they leave empty handed. They can't afford the medication. So the President has said, Enough global freeloading. We've been covering much of the development costs for new drugs to cure cancer, deal with lots of other illnesses that are life threatening. It is in time for the American public to understand that we should not be paying three times more for the exact same medication in the same box, made in the same factories. The president's saying, equalize it out. Let's use a model that's worked, for example, for external threats, that's what NATO did. Everyone has to pay a little more. We'll pay extra too, but we won't pay a lot more than everybody else, so they actually have to raise their contributions, in this case, to an internal threat, which is illness. We'll pay a little less than America that way more Americans can afford these medications, and it's a fair system for the entire globe. MARGARET BRENNAN: So this was declared in these letters that were sent out to 17 pharmaceutical companies this past week, and it calls for extending that to Medicaid drug prices. Is that intended to offset what will be, you know, cuts to Medicaid? And do you know, you know, if the companies are actually going to follow through on this, like, how do you actually strong arm them into doing it? DR. OZ: Well just get the numbers correct. We're putting 200 billion more dollars into Medicaid. So we're actually investing— MARGARET BRENNAN: —by the time when costs are going up, so. DR. OZ: Costs are going up, but there's been a 50 percent increase in the cost of Medicaid over the last five years. So I'm trying to save this beautiful program, this noble effort, to help folks giving them a hand up. And as you probably gather, if Medicaid isn't able to take care of the people for whom it was designed, the young children, the dawn of their life, those are the twilight of their life, the seniors and those who are disabled living in the shadows, as Hubert Humphrey said, then we're not satisfying the fundamental obligation of a moral government. And this President has said over and over that he believes that it is the wise thing and the noble thing to help those who are vulnerable and every great society does that, we're going to as well. So we're going to invest in Medicaid as is required, but we want an appropriate return on that investment. One thing that Medicaid patients should not face are drug prices they can't afford. MARGARET BRENNAN: Right, how do you enforce this? Pharmaceutical companies— DR. OZ: Well, the pharmaceutical companies, if you sit them down quietly, Margaret, and we've done that, and say you went into this business at some point, because you cared about people. I know there's many out there shaking their heads, but that is actually the truth. People go into health care, whether they're pharmaceutical companies or insurance companies or the PBMs or anybody in the space. Even at the CMS, the most impressive thing to me in my new task, and the President has appointed me to, is the remarkable quality of people within the organization, just unbelievably talented. They went into this job because they care about health care and about people. Somewhere along the lines, people forget. They put numbers ahead of patients. And when that happens, then you start running into problems. We went to the pharmaceutical companies and we said, you appreciate this is not a fair system. We should not be paying more in America, three times more, for your products than you charge in Europe. They get the joke. They understand the reality of this problem. They are engaging with us. We're in the middle of those negotiations. The President has a unique power to convene. We've done it with dealing with prior authorization, this heinous process where patients feel like they're trying to get care from a doctor. Everything's being done except all of a sudden the arm of insurance comes in and stops the whole process for unknown reasons for weeks, sometimes months. The insurance companies, representing 80 percent of the American public, got together and they said, because we pushed them, we're going to deal with this. We can do the same, I believe, with the pharmaceutical industry, with most favored nation pricing. MARGARET BRENNAN: Let me ask you about the changes that are coming because of this new law to Medicaid, which is jointly administered between the feds and the states. There are major reduction- reductions to federal health care spending here, one of the changes are these work requirements. It's about 20 hours a week, volunteer or work to qualify for health care. What is the guidance you are giving to states on how to implement this? Because in this economy, things are more complicated. Uber driver, independent contractor, how do they show they work their 20 hours a week? DR. OZ: Last weekend, I was at the National Governors Association with Secretary Kennedy, who has been a big advocate of work as well. Every Democratic president and Republican president has said that the foundation of a healthy welfare system of a social system of support is work. MARGARET BRENNAN: Right, but I'm asking how you actually implement that and register it so that people who are working do qualify, and they don't get caught up in paperwork because they didn't file something on time. DR. OZ: As long as we're okay that people should work and would want to work, and it's not just work, it's community engagement. They can go get educated, right? They can take care of family members. They can contribute in other ways, but work is a great way of doing and get you out of poverty if you can find jobs and elevate yourself. There have been efforts to do this in the past, but they haven't been able to achieve what we can achieve, because we have technologies now. And we've invested already, as soon as the bill was signed, began pilots to try to demonstrate that we can actually do this correctly. We have pilots now in Louisiana and in Arizona, in both cases, within seven minutes, you can click on where you're working. You mentioned Uber, you're an Uber driver. You click that button on your phone. It just takes you to your payroll provider. Let's say it's ADP. We then ask your permission, can we connect with this payroll provider to demonstrate what you've actually been able to work and earn over the past month? This also, by the way, confirms your eligibility. But there's a bigger benefit here. Once you do that, you're in, you're done. However, what if we take one step further, Margaret? What if we go beyond just proving that you tried the work to actually say, You know what, you didn't work enough, but we can actually help you by connecting you through an employment office? MARGARET BRENNAN: So you're still figuring out the technology, but isn't there an end-of-December deadline for a lot of these things to be figured out? And how do you make sure that people don't get kicked off? Because in the state of Georgia, which already had work requirements, they have really struggled to make this work. DR. OZ: Well, a couple of things. It's not the end of December, it's end of December a year from now, and Georgia is apples and oranges. Georgia had a program only for people under the poverty level, and for those people, if they wanted, they could elect to come into a system to help them get jobs. There have been 50,000 reduction in head count of uninsured people in the overall program in the last five years. Overall, Georgia, 2 million less uninsured people. So Georgia is using a lot of tactics, and they're going in the right direction. I would argue that if you have confidence in the American people and their desire to take to offer to try to get a job, if we challenge you to that. And remember, if you're an able-bodied person on Medicaid, you're spending 6.1 hours watching television or leisure time, so you don't want that— MARGARET BRENNAN: —Well, KFF Health Policy found 92 percent of adult Medicaid recipients already are working. Or they have the carve out because they have to have caregivers, or they have to do other things. DR. OZ: They're fine. All they have to do is there'll be a simple app. If you've already carved out, that's super simple. If you're supposed to be if you're able-bodied and supposed to be working, we want to help connect you to the job market and get you into work. We have twice as many jobs available in America as people who seem to want them. The foundation of work is not just about fulfilling eligibility. The goal of health care insurance is to catalyze action in the right direction, to get you healthier, to give you agency over your future, so you recognize you matter, and you should have a job, therefore to go out and change the world. MARGARET BRENNAN: So there's a drug addiction problem in this country. How are those changes going to impact people who are on Medicaid in states like Kentucky, in states like West Virginia? DR. OZ: In many instances, there are carve outs for folks who have substance use disorder problems. There are programs-- MARGARET BRENNAN: —How do they prove that? ADMINISTRATOR OZ: Well, they can— MARGARET BRENNAN: Is this in the app? DR. OZ: Yes, it will be in the app. The app, again, this is being developed by the United States Digital Service, led by Amy Gleason, who is a wonderful technologist. She and I were with the President and Secretary Kennedy and the head of the czar for AI in this country on Wednesday, talking about overall how we're going to change the use of health technology in America. We've got to get into 2025 with health technology, as is true in every other sector. If you're watching the show right now, you could also be streaming media. You could take an Uber somewhere, the rideshare. You could do an Airbnb. Technology should make the system more efficient. We should have confidence that it will also allow us to do what we all agree is possible. If the whole challenge to a work requirement is that you don't have confidence in our ability to accomplish it, that's a separate question, because I do have confidence in the American people, and we have confidence we can pull this off. Look at the passport system, Margaret. Right now, you can go and get a passport in two weeks without having to go to the post office, send pictures, and all that's gone. It's fixable. Let's use technology. MARGARET BRENNAN: I'm still confused on how someone who is in the throes of substance abuse is going to use an app to say, I'm in the throes of substance abuse every week, to file on online— DR. OZ: —When they go in to get their help for their substance abuse treatment, assuming they're going for help on that, they can also get enrolled in, in those requirements, can be fulfilled. We want to talk to them in as many ways as possible. It's not going to happen just because we put an app out there, you, you have social workers and other folk elements who care a lot about this population, who are coming together, but they have to have some mechanism to report back. That just has not been done well. MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, and this is incredibly detailed, and that's why we wanted to have you on. I have so many more questions for you on rural hospitals and some of the other criticisms. I have to leave it there for now. But thank you, Dr. Oz-- DR. OZ: Can I give you 30 seconds on rural hospitals, because this is important. You have 7 percent of Medicaid money going to rural hospitals. We're putting 50 billion dollars the president wants us to, Congress wants to— MARGARET BRENNAN: There are a lot questions on how you're going to duel that out, and whether you have already made promises. Do you have any specifics for us? DR. OZ: Yes. Wait, wait, it's going to be, they'll get the applications in early September. The money is designed to help you with workforce development, right sizing the system and using technology to provide things like telehealth that can change the world. Imagine if we can change the way we think about the delivery of health and make it more about getting people healthy so they can thrive and flourish and be fully present in their own lives and as Americans. MARGARET BRENNAN: Dr Oz, we'll leave it there. We'll be back in a moment. Black swimmers teach others amid history of aquatic segregation How safe is our Social Security safety net? In Gaza, hunger forces impossible choices as Hamas releases propaganda video of hostage Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
37 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Health officials issue warning after finding dead birds with dangerous virus: 'An early warning sign'
Health officials issue warning after finding dead birds with dangerous virus: 'An early warning sign' Three dead birds in California's Sacramento County have tested positive for West Nile virus. What's happening? The Sacramento Bee summarized an announcement from the Sacramento-Yolo Mosquito and Vector Control District, which said these were the first three birds to be identified with the virus in the county this year. However, a mosquito sample 3.5 weeks ago tested positive for the virus. "Finding the first positive birds is always significant because it serves as an early warning sign for West Nile virus activity," Gary Goodman, the district manager, said in a statement. "It confirms the virus is present in our region, helps us identify areas where infected mosquitoes may be found, and provides insight into where human cases could emerge later in the season." Why is West Nile virus important? Although West Nile virus has been in the United States since at least 1999, when it was discovered in New York, recent reports signal that it's showing up earlier in the season. Such is the case in Massachusetts, which recently discovered its first West Nile-carrying mosquitoes for the year. Many scientists attribute this shift to a warming planet, which enables disease-spreading mosquitoes to stay active for longer periods throughout the year. Plus, these bloodsuckers are beginning to expand their ranges and move into higher altitudes. For instance, Connecticut officials are warning residents that a type of mosquito that can carry chikungunya, Zika, and dengue is expected to spread farther and faster across the state in 2025. Symptoms of West Nile include fever, headache, body aches, vomiting, diarrhea, or rash, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, the virus sometimes turns deadly. In 2024, the CDC reported 164 deaths attributed to West Nile. The Bee reported that a man in the San Joaquin Valley, which borders Sacramento County, died partly because of the virus, making it the first West Nile-related death in the state this year. What's being done about West Nile? According to the Bee, area officials are spraying insecticide to limit the spread of West Nile, and the Sacramento-Yolo Mosquito and Vector Control District is amping up its efforts to monitor and trap mosquitoes. The district also directs citizens to its website, which has updates and mosquito bite prevention tips, including draining standing water that can attract mosquitoes and avoiding spending time outdoors at dawn and dusk. Meanwhile, communities across the globe are looking for ways to reduce their mosquito populations to protect residents from illnesses such as West Nile. For example, one Florida county is using X-rays to kill invasive mosquitoes. And one neighborhood in the Philippines is paying residents to bring in any mosquitoes they can capture, dead or alive. Do you worry about air pollution in your town? All the time Often Only sometimes Never Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the the daily Crossword
