Singer Avril Lavigne Speaks Out About Her Battle With Lyme Disease

For anyone who has ever suffered from Lyme disease, you know how debilitating the condition can be. Now, singer Avril Lavigne is speaking out about her battle against the disease. And her experience is hardly unique.

"I woke up and had night sweats and felt like I had the flu," Miss Lavigne told Good Morning America as she described the early stages of her disease. "I was seeing every specialist and every doctor. They'd say 'chronic fatigue syndrome?' or 'are you depressed?'"

The singer is believed to have contracted the disease while on tour last year. And as in many cases of Lyme disease, it took months for her doctors to make a proper diagnosis.

Lyme disease is caused by a bacterium (Borrelia burgdorferi) and is transmitted to humans through the bite of infected blacklegged ticks. It begins with flu-like symptoms: fever, headache, and fatigue, and produces a characteristic skin rash that mimics a bullseye.

The vagueness of symptoms and their confusion with other conditions can make diagnosis problematic. Most patients treated with antibiotics usually recover rapidly and completely. But in approximately 10-20% of patients, particularly those who experienced a delay in diagnosis, symptoms can persist for months, a condition now known as Post-Treatment Lyme Disease (PTLDS).

The best way to avoid Lyme disease is to prevent tick bites in the first place. Ticks are common in wooded areas, especially during warm, summer months. The CDC provides guidelines for protecting yourself, which include avoiding wooded or bushy areas and sticking to the center of trails; using insect repellent that contains between 20-30% DEET and applying it liberally to skin and clothing; and treating your clothes with 0.5% permethrin, to ward off the pesky bugs.

The CDC also recommends washing thoroughly when returning from the woods, to remove the ticks from your body. Conduct a full-body inspection on yourself and your significant others, and be sure to visualize those hard-to-reach areas that ticks love to inhabit, such as inside the belly button, behind the knees, and especially in hair.

If you find a tick on your person, use tweezers to remove it. Do not twist or jerk the tick; this can cause mouth-parts to break off and remain in the skin. If this happens and you are unable to remove the embedded parts with clean tweezers, the CDC recommends leaving it alone and allowing the skin to heal.

As for Miss Lavigne's prognosis, she is now on the mend.

"I'm halfway through my treatment and I'm doing a lot better and am expected to make a 100 percent recovery," she told Good Morning America. "There is hope," she added in a message to other sufferers. "Lyme disease does exist and you can get better."