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Lyme Disease symptoms vary from person to person. (lymes disease lyme's disease lime disease limes disease)
The data and information presented in this web site are presented in good faith and believed to be accurate regarding Lyme disease (commonly misspelled lymes disease lyme's disease lime disease limes disease) and other related diseases. Any and all liability for the content or any omissions including any inaccuracies, errors, or misstatements in such data or information is expressly disclaimed. The web site is compiled for the sole purpose of informing community members of resources and information pertaining to Lyme Borreliosis Disease and its coinfections. Lyme disease symptoms may vary from person to person.
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Consult a qualified Lyme ( Borreliosis ) Disease literate doctor for medical advice if Lyme Disease is suspect to discuss your Lymes Disease Symptoms.
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Debate over Lyme disease rages among health officials
BY MATTHEW HEINDL
OCTOBER 12, 2007
A story last week in Fort McMurray Today highlighted the debate thundering below the surface of North American medical systems on the prevalence, detection, and treatment of Lyme disease.
Sheila Callan, a local resident, suffered for 18 years with the disease. The Alberta medical system failed her by misdiagnosing her case for nearly two decades.
The Lyme disease bacteria was in the forests of Alberta this summer, though health officials will not concede that anyone has caught it here.
Ten ticks of the species that carry Lyme (ixodes pacificus) were found on dogs by veterinarians in Edmonton in June, and two carried the Lyme disease bacteria. These were the first of the ticks officials found in Alberta.
Public health officials sent letters to doctors throughout the province explaining very basic methods to identify and prevent the disease.
“There’s been more published on Lyme disease in general over the last 10 years, but there hasn’t been any specific education of local officials on Lyme disease other than alerting them, because again we don’t know the implications of finding the ticks here,” said Dr. Gerald Predy, Medical Officer of Health for the Capital Health Region and acting MOH for the Northern Lights Health Region.
Lyme is a reportable illness, so all cases are sent to provincial authorities.
The Alberta Veterinarian’s Association carries out the main physical surveillance for the ticks. Vets send the ticks they find on pets to provincial labs where they are assessed and tested for Lyme. There have been collections in the forests before and another is planned in the near future.
“No further evidence has been found this summer so it could be that those ticks were actually carried in by migrating birds and just dropped,” said John Tuckwell, a spokesman for Alberta Health. “We still have no cases of Lyme disease in human beings reported to the chief medical officer of health. But there are people, particularly in Southern Alberta, who say they became infected in Alberta a long time ago, but the CMOH position based on the evidence is that there are no native cases in Alberta.”
The mounting evidence of ticks dropped randomly by migratory birds questions conventional belief that the cold of the great white north is a barrier to the prevalence of the ticks and Lyme cases in Alberta.
The Lyme rates of countries surrounding and similar to Canada are startling.
The U.S. reported 64,000 Lyme cases between 2003 and 2005, mostly in the Northeast. The CDC says that the cases are both over diagnosed and considerably unreported several fold.
According to Eurosurveillance, a communicable disease watchdog, in 2005 among northern European countries, Finland (pop. 5.2 million) recorded 1236 cases, Norway (pop. 4.6 million) 280, Estonia (pop. 1.3 million) 281, Latvia (pop. 2.3 million) 281.
Though Lyme disease has only recently become a reportable disease, the last figure for Canada (pop. 32 million) was 38 in 2004.
There has been little education in Canadian medical schools on symptoms of the disease, and infectious disease experts in Alberta say that the likelihood of an endemic is still very low.
“Clinically it is not hard to diagnose because the rash is so characteristic,” said Dr. Stephen Shafran, director of the division of infectious disease in the Department of Medicine. “Although possible that the disease could occur in such low frequency it could be missed, it would get to a threshold effect that there would be so many cases it would be hard to miss.”
He said the University Hospital receives very few legitimate cases, and they are always contracted in areas outside of Alberta.
An ever-growing population of Canadians and Americans are saying that this it is not the case, claiming Lyme disease is simply not being diagnosed correctly.
“People for some reason want to be labeled with this diagnosis, with a myriad of symptoms, people that might meet the symptoms for chronic fatigue syndrome ... and they desperately want a diagnosis of Lyme disease,” Shafran said, pointing to laboratories in the U.S. that “will give anyone a positive diagnosis for Lyme disease if you have enough money.”
The University Hospital follows testing guidelines set by the Public Health Agency of Canada, based on recommendations from the Infectious Disease Society of America and the Center for Disease Control.
If Lyme disease is considered a possibility, a prescreening test is done to determine if a person has been in an area where Lyme disease is considered prevalent. Then a blood sample is sent to Calgary for an Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbant Serum Assay (ELISA) test, and only if that test is positive will the government order the more specific Western Blot test is followed up.
Officials from the provincial laboratory in Calgary say they receive Lyme test requests almost weekly and some turn up positive from ELISA tests, but most are proven negative by western blots.
All agree the tests are very poor, particularly the ELISA. It is a popular test because it is automated, therefor cheaper and theoretically more standard, thereby useful for screening. But in many studies the tests yield different results for the same sample and provide equal numbers of false positives and false negatives, according to the College of American Pathologists.
The International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society claims the two-tiered testing systems fail to find Lyme 90 per cent of the time.
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