Vitality Magazine May 2017

OPINION
Lyme Disease Update
As Infection Spreads Across the Country,
Health Authorities Fail to Protect the Public
BY HELKE FERRIE
MP Elizabeth May’s Bill C-442, the
Federal Framework on Lyme Disease
Act, legally requires internationally
recognized diagnostic tests and
treatment protocols, the development
of proper medical surveillance
to track Lyme Disease incidence and
costs, and education and awareness
to make Canadian doctors more
Lyme-literate. Yet the federal Public
Health Agency’s newly minted
“Draft Framework” on Lyme, is in
direct contravention of Bill C-442.
“A Lyme diagnosis is a clinical diagnosis when you make
it, and then it becomes a political statement. It is the 300-
pound gorilla in the waiting room.” – Bob Giguere, of the
U.S.-based IGeneX laboratories, at the Lyme Out Loud
Kids Canada conference, April 21, 2017
The recently released government document entitled
“Lyme Disease in Canada – A Draft Federal
Framework,” is an insult to all of us Canadians who’ve paid
for it with our tax dollars.
Crafted by the Public Health Agency of Canada, the document,
released in February 2017, proposes a framework
for the diagnosis and treatment of Canadians infected by
Lyme Disease (LD). In order to create a framework that
draws from the best available scientific research, the Public
Health Agency had hosted a public conference on Lyme
Disease from May 15 to 17, 2016. Problem is, the insights
that were gained from global experts who lectured at the
conference did not find their way into the draft federal
framework released in February. In fact, the proposed
“Draft Framework” is so peculiar and out of touch with the
facts that one can only conclude that the Public Health
Agency had already drafted the document before the conference
even took place.
More specifically, the framework contains two total
affronts to those in the LD community:
1It claims that Canada follows the guidelines of the
IDSA (Infectious Disease Society of America) – however,
the IDSA is currently still developing their recommendations,
as all medical guidelines must now meet the
standards of the World Health
Organization (WHO) and Institute of
Medicine (IOM). The IDSA’s previous
guidelines led to a 2006 antitrust investigation
by the Connecticut Attorney General
because they were written to benefit the
insurance industry and did not reflect current
science or patient needs. The authors
of these ‘guidelines’ themselves were
shown to be owners of vaccine patents (no
human vaccines exist to date), receiving
million-dollar consultation fees from
insurance companies in return for recommendations
that would make LD difficult
or impossible to be covered. Some of these
authors have even been sued by Lyme
patients for neglect and injury. The patents
and payments are listed in the April 2001
report put out by Lyme Disease
Association, Inc., which spans no less than
42 pages. (For a full legal analysis of the
conflicts of interest in the IDSA’s nowdefunct
guidelines, read J. Ferguson’s brilliant
Cure Unwanted?)
By contrast, the International Lyme and Associated
Diseases Society (ILADS) has comprehensive diagnostic
and treatment guidelines in place, and their latest version
already meets the standard established by the WHO and
IOM. They are, in fact, the only guidelines available today.
Nonetheless, neither the Health Canada nor Public Health
website even mentions ILADS, but both assert they follow
the IDSA guidelines.
2
The
proposed Public Health framework for Lyme
Disease concludes by stating that the issue will be
revisited in five years. Thus, the roughly 35,000 Canadians
who are newly infected every year, as estimated by the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control, are left with nowhere to turn.
Lyme is an infection that can become chronic (as more than
700 peer-reviewed mainstream publications agree) and is
known to lead to Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, inflammatory
bowel disease, some forms of schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis,
and ALS – all of which are very expensive to treat
with the outdated protocols used by Canada’s Medicare system.
Yet in some cases, these conditions have been shown
to be curable by antibiotic treatments as per the protocols of
ILADS for treating Lyme Disease. For ILADS, all of these
conditions are expected to be part of a differential diagnosis
– that is, physicians must first rule out Lyme infection
before proceeding with any other treatment.
Canada’s Public Health Agency allowed for less than a
month of public comment about their document, yet more
than 9,000 furiously protesting Lyme patients wrote within
the first couple of days of the framework’s publication, and
6 VITALITY MAGAZINE – MAY 2017 www.vitalitymagazine.com