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LDA President’s Blog – Why Patients Need Government Investigation into Lyme’s Origins & Any Biowarfare Experiments

HISTORY-Forty-six years after a mother alerted public health about an unknown disease affecting her Connecticut neighborhood, patients still await answers about Lyme disease and help from the federal government− little has been forthcoming. It’s been 37 years since I first saw Lyme as a board of education member and 29 years since I first contacted Congressman Chris Smith for help regarding Lyme disease.  

I approached him because my district had many seriously ill students and staff members who could find little medical help and no assistance for disrupted educations. Congressman Smith set up a DC meeting for me with CDC and NIH officials to present a report on 9 Monmouth/Ocean NJ school districts in the same situation, yet no public health authorities were involved to help the district. Officials were shocked and could not believe the devastation I described to them. They subsequently came to NJ and did their own study of 5 of the school districts which confirmed the effects on the districts and these children. Congressman Smith held a Congressional meeting In Wall Township which overflowed the room and CDC presented their study, and I spoke at this meeting as did my daughter who was then suffering seizures from Lyme.  The CDC refused to publish its school study, continuing to tell me they would, so the LDA asked Lyme Times, a lay journal, to publish it a few years ago for all to read, as it had been presented publicly by CDC.  

Patients and advocates have been benefitting from Mr. Smith’s efforts to help us change that situation. Working with Congressman Smith, the Lyme Disease Association has been able to get bills introduced and passed over decades; educate federal & state legislators; set up a HHS Working Group on tick-borne disease; help parents threatened with Munchausen by Proxy (making child sick) whose children were going to be removed because of long-term treatment with antibiotics; and help doctors whose licenses were threatened for treating with antibiotics. Sadly, some still have had their children removed and physicians continue to be harassed.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS-Uncomprehendingly, we are left with many asked but unanswered questions. There continues to be government resistance to solving even the most basic issues such as the continued use of tests discussed during a 1994 meeting where dissenting researchers were refused the right to present a minority report—tests which studies have shown are less than 50% accurate, whereby a person can test negative and still have the disease. Scientists have come forth over time with tests to be examined, but CDC has appeared to have neither considered them nor recommended them for further study to our knowledge.

Why do CDC and NIH continue to rely on one set of treatment guidelines for Lyme disease which recommend (read: allow) only a few weeks of doxycycline for a complex organism such as Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria that causes Lyme disease, when there is another set of guidelines that permit doctor discretion? Why are patients still told, it’s in your head; you need a psychiatrist;  you’re cured, you had two weeks; you have to learn to live with it; don’t use alternative therapies; it’s not Lyme (what is it you ask,  a shrug)? Why are some patients being misdiagnosed with MS, ALS, CFS, FM, lupus, ADD, RA, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s which turn out to be Lyme and other tick-borne diseases apparently causing these symptoms in a number of cases? Why are doctors helping patients get better with long-term and combinations of antibiotics still called quacks, unable to be a part of insurance plans, and subject to medical board actions? Why is research being privately funded in prestigious institutions investigating antibiotic treatment options and government says research is done, long-term antibiotics don’t work and can be harmful?  

CHRONIC LYME DENIAL-Many doctors, scientists, patients, and advocates have known for decades it’s “chronic Lyme”—persisting symptoms after short-term treatment which occurs in 20% or more of Lyme patients−often combined with other tick-borne diseases (TBD), almost 20 of which are now found in the US, and can be acquired singly or in combinations. Those suffering or helping these patients have been ridiculed in media over the decades, with Lyme called a housewife’s disease, a yuppie disease, mass hysteria, conspiracy theory, hoax perpetrated by those anti science.  In 2021, the “long haulers” of COVID 19 have thankfully not been scorned or shamed, why are “chronic Lyme” sufferers singled out for this abuse?

WHY INVESTIGATE ANY BIOWARFARE ORIGINS-The origins of COVID19 have already been investigated and linked  with the NIH having been shown to have funded “gain of function” research—modifying a biological agent to confer new or enhanced activity to that agent. Why is it then a conspiracy theory to investigate the murky origins of Lyme?

Biowarfare has been out there for hundreds of years. “Man has used poisons for assassination purposes ever since the dawn of civilization, not only against individual enemies but also occasionally against armies. However, the foundation of microbiology by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch offered new prospects for those interested in biological weapons because it allowed agents to be chosen and designed on a rational basis.”  (F. Frischnecht, Pasteur Institute: 2003, EMBO, “The History of Biological Warfare”-see NIH website)

It’s time for government transparency.  Provide whatever the truth is about tick releases and other TBD experiments that some US scientists have come forth with and that government documents appear to support. 476,000 people are diagnosed and treated annually in the US according to CDC. They and the general public deserve to know what happened in the past to aid in the search for prevention and cure of Lyme and other TBD.

__________________________________________________________________________ Update: 12.29.21   Two and a half months after I wrote this letter to reply to an opinion piece in the NJ Manchester Times on the House Lyme Biowarfare Amendment, and after the Senate rejected including the House amendment into the bill, the paper wrote to say they would publish my letter on Christmas Day , 12.25.21 edition. Link below. See p.8 https://www.jerseyshoreonline.com/themanchestertimes/