The conference brought together patients and scientists and medical professionals. At the end of the conference, there was a conference summary. If you go to the online version of the framework it's hyperlinked there. The summary couldn't capture all of those testimonials, but key reoccurring points were picked out. If you check those reoccurring points, few to none of them show up in the document, and others have just been put in. I presented in the surveillance section because I do ticks. One example I gave was that everyone agreed that showing surveillance maps with a dot saying there would be ticks here is not meaningful because ticks are moved around by wildlife such as deer and birds and mice, and there are not a lot of places in Canada where there are no deer, birds, and mice.
We all agreed that the way to do it is to show broader sections of Canada as being high risk or low risk, but there is actually no area that is zero risk. That didn't show up. That's one very small example, but in many ways the conference summary should have been the framework. It did a phenomenal job of capturing not only the patient voice, which is critical, but also the current science. There was current science presented on the fact that the bacteria actually survived the standard short-term antibiotic treatment, which is clinically critical, because if you under-treat the disease, then you're asking for antibiotic resistance, and this disease is bad enough as it is. The prospect of having an antibiotic-resistant Lyme disease is horrifying.