Another Strike against the CDC - Lyme Disease

If you've ever gone through my blogroll you should have come upon Squeeky.  AKA Bonnie.  She has been fighting a chronic condition that too over 11 years to properly diagnose and at least 2 years before she could get proper treatment for it.

I'll do a brief excerpt, but you really need to RTWT at her blog.

"a friend of mine with Lyme says, “You…need to ask your doctor about this.” He then proceeded to tell me that I shouldn’t get the CDC test, because even if it shows positive bands (they’re all assigned to different parts of the Lyme bacteria – it’s basically the Lyme’s trash that the test sees, since there aren’t antibodies to it), you’re not considered actually sick unless you show something like 7 bands, which almost never happens. This, incidentally, is why the CDC only had 30,000 new cases of Lyme per year until 2013.

I asked my doctor, first (I’d gotten a new one, I liked her, I trusted her to not be a dick about it), and got the CDC test to see if I needed to pursue anything further. I showed positive on the band that indicates that Lyme flagella are floating around. That’s trash that’s small enough that were it left over, my body would have gotten rid of it within a week. Basically, it meant I was still infected.

I found an LLMD in my area (lucky, honestly – there aren’t too many, and I’ll go into that in a bit), showed him the test, and he was like “…yeeeah, I’m going to do an examination, ask you some questions, and we’ll go from there.”

I was clinically diagnosed with Lyme disease in March 2011. This means that upon examination of symptoms, a thorough interview, and a physical examination, a doctor learned in Lyme and other tick-borne diseases has made the judgment that I have the disease and should be treated for it as soon as possible.

You know who hates clinical diagnoses? The CDC. They want to see the bullseye rash, they want the over-kill on the positive test, they don’t want anything but disaster-level illness, because that’s the kind that’s most likely to be curable."

So for 16 years, she has been suffering from a sickness, that COULD have been treated much earlier.  IF the CDC didn't try to hide the facts.

I don't know about you, but this makes me angry and more than a little nervous about the current Ebola threat and how the CDC is handling it.  Especially considering the CDC's past history.