The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
More awareness of tick-borne illnesses needed
Patients who contract Lyme Disease are being failed, say activists
Campaigners are pressing the Scottish Parliament to improve testing, treatment and awareness of potentially deadly Lyme Disease and other tick-borne illnesses.
The petition to the Parliament comes from Montrose woman Lorraine Murray and Janey Cringean, from Dumfries, on behalf of Tick-borne Illness Campaign Scotland.
It calls on the Scottish Parliament “to urge the Scottish Government to improve testing and treatment for Lyme Disease and associated tick-borne diseases by ensuring that medical professionals in Scotland are fully equipped to deal with the complexity of tick-borne infections, addressing the lack of reliability of tests, the full variety of species in Scotland, the presence of ‘persister’ bacteria which are difficult to eradicate, and the complexities caused by the presence of possibly multiple coinfections, and to complement this with a public awareness campaign.”
The petition, which has already been signed by more than 1,000 people, argues that many patients in Scotland are being failed by current medical practice regarding Lyme Disease and other tick-borne co-infections.
Lorraine contracted Lyme disease in August 2014 after being bitten by a tick while walking her dog.
The former fitness instructor has since been for treatment in the USA, having spent thousands of pounds looking for a cure.
If the disease is identified early, patients recover with standard treatment, but 10-20% of patients go on to develop a debilitating chronic condition.
The number of cases of Lyme Disease in humans has increased in the last decade with, on average, 5% of ticks in Scotland infected with the bacteria borrelia.
In 1996 there were fewer than 30 new cases in Scotland but in 2015 there were around 220. However, GPs estimate that only 20-40% of cases are referred, so numbers are likely to be much higher.
There are numerous issues with testing and diagnosis and tests currently used are held to be unreliable. Currently there are no tests which cover all tickborne infections found in Scotland.
The current guidelines used for treatment in Scotland were developed in 2006 by the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) but are now considered in America to be out of date.
Recent research has shown that the bacterium which causes Lyme Disease forms dormant ‘persister’ cells, which are known to evade antibiotics. Borrelia has been described as “one of the most complex bacteria known to man”. Treatment protocols need to be modified to address the complexity of infection.