Insights on Lyme Disease

The information that was in your article is accurate according to the Center for Disease Control but is not accurate as far as what the Lyme disease community is reporting.

The CDC’s standard of a positive test only catches about 20 percent of Lyme cases. There are no false positives in the test, but there are plenty of false negatives. The most accurate test these days is not approved by the CDC: It uses a technique called the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) used in molecular biology to amplify a single copy or a few copies of a segment of DNA. It detects the DNA of Lyme disease if present in tissue, blood or urine, while the CDC test just looks for antibodies to the bacteria (some people don’t develop antibodies and therefore are even more sick and test negative). There are no false positives with the PCR-DNA test.

Some statistics say as many as 50 percent of ticks carry Lyme disease and it’s not isolated to the East Coast by any means. Everyone should be concerned about tick bites. Ticks carry more than 100 different infectious diseases and unfortunately they are in the Pacific Northwest.

For more information, go to www.lymedisease.org.

Jennifer Guyler

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