To the Editor:
Re “My Son Got Lyme Disease. He’s Totally Fine” (Well, nytimes.com, June 27):
It took five years from my first Lyme-related emergency room visit to diagnosis, during which time the disease spread to my brain, heart, lungs, central nervous system and nearly every tissue in my body.
By 2016, I was sleeping 18 to 20 hours a day, had lost feeling in my hands and feet, and was so cognitively impaired that I had trouble reading a dinner menu or speaking in complete sentences.
I was an engineering student at Dartmouth who could no longer figure out the difference between an inch, a centimeter and a millimeter.
Lyme is a complex, multisystemic infectious disease, and to take one person’s experience as fact is a vast oversimplification. If you knew one person who had a melanoma removed, would you publish an article saying that all cancer is “easily treated and cured”?
While I respect The Times’s right to publish personal opinion pieces, sharing this particular article was dangerous.
It not only ignores research from top medical institutions like Johns Hopkins about the persistence of Lyme disease, but also invalidates the experience of thousands struggling with Lyme and actively works against legislation being enacted to fight this disease.
Sarah Young
New York
To the Editor:
Apoorva Mandavilli celebrates her son’s recovery from Lyme disease. But while the vast majority of those diagnosed with Lyme and other tick-borne diseases are cured with antibiotics, up to 20 percent of more than 427,000 newly diagnosed Americans go on each year to suffer devastating long-term chronic effects — even if they are treated early, like her son.
These patients can become afflicted with neurocognitive disorders, disabling fatigue, extreme joint pain, heart problems and so on. Sadly, with their lives severely disrupted if not destroyed, too many commit suicide. A recent study published by the journal BMC Public Health predicts the number of people suffering post-treatment Lyme could increase to almost two million by 2020.
Rather than minimizing the risks of Lyme disease by stating it is easy to diagnose and easy to cure — which is not the case — and lulling the public into a false sense of security, let’s pull together to address the great public health risk that irrefutably exists.
Robert Kobre
Scott Santarella
Stamford, Conn.
The writers are, respectively, chairman and chief executive of the Global Lyme Alliance.
Source: Read Full Article
Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | Don’t Minimize the Health Risks of Lyme Disease
Opinion | Don’t Minimize the Health Risks of Lyme Disease
To the Editor:
Re “My Son Got Lyme Disease. He’s Totally Fine” (Well, nytimes.com, June 27):
It took five years from my first Lyme-related emergency room visit to diagnosis, during which time the disease spread to my brain, heart, lungs, central nervous system and nearly every tissue in my body.
By 2016, I was sleeping 18 to 20 hours a day, had lost feeling in my hands and feet, and was so cognitively impaired that I had trouble reading a dinner menu or speaking in complete sentences.
I was an engineering student at Dartmouth who could no longer figure out the difference between an inch, a centimeter and a millimeter.
Lyme is a complex, multisystemic infectious disease, and to take one person’s experience as fact is a vast oversimplification. If you knew one person who had a melanoma removed, would you publish an article saying that all cancer is “easily treated and cured”?
While I respect The Times’s right to publish personal opinion pieces, sharing this particular article was dangerous.
It not only ignores research from top medical institutions like Johns Hopkins about the persistence of Lyme disease, but also invalidates the experience of thousands struggling with Lyme and actively works against legislation being enacted to fight this disease.
Sarah Young
New York
To the Editor:
Apoorva Mandavilli celebrates her son’s recovery from Lyme disease. But while the vast majority of those diagnosed with Lyme and other tick-borne diseases are cured with antibiotics, up to 20 percent of more than 427,000 newly diagnosed Americans go on each year to suffer devastating long-term chronic effects — even if they are treated early, like her son.
These patients can become afflicted with neurocognitive disorders, disabling fatigue, extreme joint pain, heart problems and so on. Sadly, with their lives severely disrupted if not destroyed, too many commit suicide. A recent study published by the journal BMC Public Health predicts the number of people suffering post-treatment Lyme could increase to almost two million by 2020.
Rather than minimizing the risks of Lyme disease by stating it is easy to diagnose and easy to cure — which is not the case — and lulling the public into a false sense of security, let’s pull together to address the great public health risk that irrefutably exists.
Robert Kobre
Scott Santarella
Stamford, Conn.
The writers are, respectively, chairman and chief executive of the Global Lyme Alliance.
Source: Read Full Article