York Conference June 2004 - DR David Owen

I’m Dr David Owen. I have had an interest in Lyme disease for 2 years and have spent some time in the United States studying it.

What I’m going to do first of all is present an overview of Lyme Disease.

Definition

Lyme Disease is an infection caused by Borrelia species spirochaetes carried by ticks of the Ixodes genus. Now there are over a hundred species of Borrelia described already and certainly there are an enormous number of ticks as well.

How common is Lyme Disease? Borreliosis is the most common tick-borne disease.

Britain relies on zoology and figures are known to be unreliable. In the USA there were 17730 cases reported to The Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in 2000, and there were 23763 cases recorded in 2002. The CDC acknowledges “considerable under-reporting” of Lyme Disease and I think that is really an understatement.

But the fact is that we don’t know how common it is and many of us in the field have a feeling that it may be much more common than people think.

Going into distribution, this is a map which shows the distribution of ticks which are known to carry Borrelia . This is from the CDC website actually and I’ve noticed how the whole of Europe is covered and is essentially endemic for Lyme Disease.

Absent it is interesting to note is Australia and New Zealand. Now there was a study sponsored by the Australian government, several studies I think during the 90s, carried out by someone called Russell, and they concluded after extensive investigation that Lyme Disease didn’t occur in Australia. Now since then I think there have been several reported cases and I have a feeling that this map is far from complete and that distribution may be much wider, although that already shows an extensive distribution.

Tick bites

Diagnosis

Laboratory aids to diagnosis:

How is Lyme Disease treated?

Why isn’t Lyme disease taken seriously in the UK?

Education