Thank you.
First, I know that I should be formal and call you Ms. Davies, but Libby, I'm so grateful that one of the first letters of support was from your party, with full support for the bill. It's a long slog when you're a private member putting in a bill, hoping that it's non-partisan and that everybody will jump on board, but we all know how rare that is.
I want to say again—to the Conservative Party, to the Liberal Party, to the New Democratic Party—that I am so grateful. Thank you.
In terms of diagnostics, I'm not going to try to be a doctor about it, but there is a study that I referenced in the preamble to the bill, the Schmidt report, that was prepared at the request of the British Columbia government and published by the Provincial Health Services Authority. It talks about some of the diagnostic problems.
Part of the problem, as the letter form the Canadian Medical Association mentions, is that it looks like other things. It's quite often misdiagnosed as multiple sclerosis. This is entirely by inference, but some people have looked at the stats and said it's interesting that Canada has such a higher incidence of multiple sclerosis as compared with the U.S. We have relatively more MS than the U.S. and a lot less Lyme. The U.S. has relatively more Lyme and a lot less MS. I'm not suggesting that this is more than an interesting observation that the medical community itself should analyze, but is it possible that we've been misdiagnosing a lot of Lyme as multiple sclerosis?
For a lot of doctors, number one, when they went through medical school, Lyme was not as prevalent as it is now. They sometimes think, okay, if you don't have that classic bull's-eye rash, you don't have Lyme. Well, it turns out that, no, you can actually have been exposed to Lyme disease and never get the classic bull's-eye rash.
Some of the serological testing, the blood testing, will come back negative when in fact it's a positive. That's a problem. Even if a doctor suspects Lyme and sends the blood work away, it can come back negative and the patient can still have Lyme.
One thing I've heard is that one of the best ways to know if there is any risk that you've gotten Lyme disease is to save the tick and stuff it in a little plastic Baggie with some moist tissue so that the particular specimen is preserved. The surest way to know if you've been bitten by a tick that had the bacteria present is to have the actual tick that bit you, because they do hang on, and to get it tested. But I've talked to patients who went into doctors' office and were told “Yes: okay” before the doctors—again, because we haven't had this program of sharing best ideas—would throw it in the trash and then continue.
So your best diagnostic is often to get the tick itself analyzed. There are individual doctors who.... One of the pleas I've heard from doctors is that this is a disease where, in terms of the ability of a doctor to diagnose it in the office, sometimes the best blood work and the best additional testing will miss it. But when the patient is sitting in front of you, and you go through the checklist of symptoms, and you analyze what happened and so on, at that point you as a doctor should feel secure to say, based on the sharing of best practices, that, you know, that doctor made a diagnosis...and order a course of antibiotics.
Deciding not to do it at an early stage can lead to permanent debilitating conditions, and really, at this point, it's very, very hard to know how people are helped if it's gone to....
I should tell you that there's a fault line between the medical community and some of the Lyme disease activists. There is a community out there who could be described as Lyme disease activists. I'm not taking a position on that fault line. As I've said, I'm not a doctor. But the doctors will say “That's post-Lyme disease syndrome”, and the people who are suffering with it will say “I have chronic Lyme”. It's a very hotly contested question of what you call it at that point.
I'm not going to call it one or the other. I'm going to say that some people who have Lyme disease end up in wheelchairs for years. Whatever we call it, it would be wonderful to train some of the sharing of best practices around what to do. There are basically three different kinds of action: avoiding it through prevention; quick diagnosis when someone has first been bitten; and then that longer-term question, if somebody has been a wheelchair for years, of how you diagnose it—as Lyme or something else. That's a very hard one to diagnose.
Sorry. Did I use up all your time?