A lot of legislation has been happening at the state level in the United States, and there is a current bill before the U.S. Congress as well. Because Lyme disease was first spotted, as everyone knows, in Lyme, Connecticut, the legislation in Connecticut is quite advanced. In 1999 they passed a limited Lyme disease insurance bill where insurers must pay. Now, of course, they have a for-profit health care system that involves getting the insurance companies to agree to the treatments. So they passed a bill to ensure that insurers must pay for 30 days of IV antibiotic treatment or 60 days of oral antibiotics.
They also passed legislation in 2009 to protect the medical community. It permits licensed physicians, who have determined the presence in patients of signs compatible with acute infection, or of what they call late-stage, which deals with this dividing line between calling it chronic and calling it post-Lyme disease, whatever they call it, to also treat people who've been basically afflicted with something quite persistent with long-term antibiotic therapy. They are protected by law. It is extraordinary that we have legislators passing laws to say that doctors are protected if they choose to do this.
Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and California have laws, and the U.S. piece of legislation I mentioned that's currently before the Congress there is the Lyme and Tick-borne Disease Prevention, Education, and Research Act of 2007. So that's still before their Congress.
As to the matter of what the medical community does, there's been quite a lot more progress, again, because it was more prevalent earlier in the U.S. We're catching up now, so I'm not casting blame on anyone in the Canadian medical community. But the U.S. has had a longer experience with it, so they have much more advanced prevention programs.
You approach a U.S. park, and it's just the same way as in Canada for UV awareness, and put on your sunscreen. We now have regular broadcasts on the UV index. Put on your sunscreen; it's a high UV day. When I was growing up, we never heard of such a thing, because we didn't have the same worry. The ozone layer hadn't been attacked when I was growing up. So we catch up with these things.
In the U.S. they have much better prevention signals as you go to hike in an area. Tick awareness: think about it, be careful, and check yourself after. Check your dogs after too, because that's another problem. A dog can come in the house and carry a tick in with him. So it might not even be that you've gone for a long hike; your dog might bring the tick to you.
So there's a lot more awareness programming in the U.S., and the medical community is more aware, and they do have better diagnostics in terms of the lab work that can be done. Since I'm not an expert in that field, I'm very nervous to go too far into explaining what the medical community in the States does. But they have more familiarity with it, so they've developed additional testing.