LYME DISEASE - PATHWAY- PUBLIC HEALTH ENGLAND. TESTING PROBLEMS - PROF PERRONNE

PUBLIC HEALTH ENGLAND - intend reviewing their Guidance on Lyme disease as discussed at a meeting in October an earlier post here 

PHE have made a start by publishing a -

Suggested referral pathway for patients with symptoms related to Lyme disease 
http://www.hpa.org.uk/webc/HPAwebFile/HPAweb_C/1317141297288

Some useful progress has been made provided doctors follow this guidance.

PHE have worked with charity Lyme Disease Action in producing this pathway and LDA discuss this here 

This may be helpful for patients outside the UK too.

The Norvect Conference sounds to have been very successful a number of slides were posted on Twitter so for Twitter users #Norvect will find the tweets. My understanding is that videos of the conference will be available. 

Prof. Christian Perronne who presented at Norvect just recently published a paper 

Lyme and associated tick-borne diseases: global challenges in the context of a public health threat. Running title: Global challenges of Lyme disease

This is an excellent paper discussing various problems with testing here 

May was Worldwide Lyme Disease Awareness month UK website here 

Alongside these Worldwide protest was a Protest outside the IDSA headquarters in US -this was reported on by Jessica Bernstein Truth out here

Irate Lyme Disease Patients Storm "Dinner Party" at IDSA Headquarters

An excellent well written article but also some rather interesting and informative comments on that article.

We really need the media to do so much more to bring this disease into the forefront although it was good to see The Daily Mail picked up on this - here 

The bacteria that has been around longer than humans: Lyme disease discovered in 15 million year old ticks

sometimes the devil is in the detail and often overlooked - Poinar said -

'They can carry bacteria that cause a wide range of diseases, affect many different animal species, and often are not even understood or recognized by doctors.

'It’s likely that many ailments in human history for which doctors had no explanation have been caused by tick-borne disease.'

Dr Horowitz was in an recent radio program with Andy Abrahams-Wilson Documentary film maker of  Under our Skin  this is the link to the program here during the interview the CDC figures for Lyme Disease were discussed - this year CDC upped their figures to 300000 a year but recently Yale  released further information and Dr Horowitz says this could mean that between 2 and 3 million people could actually be infected with Lyme Disease a year. Not really a surprise as a couple of years ago Germany reported 1 million cases for Lyme Disease a year here .

Also this month - 

LYME DISEASE A SILENT EPIDEMIC PRODUCED BY FRANCE 5 PUBLIC NETWORK AND GRAND ANGLE DIRECTED BY CHANTAL PERRIN

from Chantal Perrin 

This is an excellent Film which needs to be seen on UK National Television ( English version) -  link to the vimeo is here  It was only released a week ago and had 6400 views.

I will let the reader draw their own conclusions from all the above, which are only a few of the many interesting things I read about related to Lyme Disease, to read more follow me on Facebook which is proving to be a useful place to hear about emerging developments.