Subcommittee co-chairs selected for federal TBD Working Group
The federal Tick-Borne Disease Working Group, which held its first meetings in December, is moving forward with setting up subcommittees.
Each subcommittee will take a deep look at a different subject matter area and present reports to the Working Group for its public deliberation.
The subcommittees and their co-chairs are as follows:
1. Disease Vectors, Surveillance and Prevention (includes epidemiology of tick-borne diseases). (Pat Smith/Ben Beard)
2. Pathogenesis, Transmission, and Treatment (Wendy Adams/Estelle Jones)
3.Testing & Diagnostics (includes lab-based diagnoses & clinical-diagnoses) (Lise Nigrovic/Vanila Singh/Designee)
4. Access to Care Services and Support to Patients (Karen Vanderhoof Forschner/Scott Cooper)
5. Vaccine and Therapeutics (Dennis Dixon/ New WG Member TBA)
6. Other Tick-Borne Diseases and Co-infections (Richard Horowitz/Allen Richards)
Subject matter experts and Lyme patient representatives were invited to apply to serve on subcommittees. The application deadline passed at midnight last night. Now, co-chairs will look through the applications and jointly decide on members for their subcommittees. It is expected that each subcommittee will have 8-10 members.
No word yet on who will replace Dr. Gary Wormser on the Tick-Borne Working Group. Wormser withdrew from the panel after widespread public outcry about his financial conflicts of interest with companies who stood to profit from the group’s recommendations.
The testing and diagnostic panel looks dismal.
Nigrovic’s study against using clinical borreliosis diagnosis based on 2tier test and bullseye
-poor science.
If Singh has the typical pain management approach, aka-fibromyalgia, ptlds-same old stuff.
presto chango, no disease, no solutions, just symptoms and syndromes.
This panel needs a dozen patients on the subcommittee to balance out the bias.
This panel needs to include the cdc spinal tap culture results from Vicki Logan, and her heart culture from nih in their report, so we are clear that both seronegative borreliosis and persistent borreliosis have been proven by CDC and NIH.
Otherwise, we are mired in poor disease definitions with snowballing assumptions and tunnel vision.
I agree with you. We will need to keep a sharp eye on those subcommittees and react accordingly. Another one that is a problem potentially is the vaccine/therapeutics composition. We need someone to counteract Dixon, and that position is the one still open, replacing Wormser.