TOUCHED BY LYME: No Lyme in Arkansas? Baloney!
Three sisters from an Arkansas family returned from a Girl Scout trip last May with 20 attached ticks among them. The girls all fell ill, with fevers, flu-like symptoms, joint pain and bull’s-eye rashes.
They went to the doctor and two of them tested positive for Lyme disease. (You know, with that CDC-approved two-tier testing which has such a bad record of detecting Lyme. Two of them were positive even on that crummy test.)
Known tick bites? Recognizable Lyme symptoms? Positive lab tests? Sounds like a slam dunk, doesn’t it? Time to break out the antibiotics.
Not so fast! This is Arkansas, a place that has no Lyme disease, according to state health officials and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Therefore, these “experts” say, those positive Lyme tests must be false positives. As a result, a local pediatric clinic refused to treat the girls.
Their mother, Alarie Bowerman, scoured the countryside looking for somebody willing to help her sick children, as their health continued to decline. Finally, she found a Lyme-literate practitioner in Kansas, who verified that all three girls have Lyme and started them on medication. But that didn’t happen until August, so the precious window for early treatment was squandered.
What does the Arkansas Department of Health have to say about this? Dr. Naveen Patil told TV station KNWA, of Fayetteville: “We don’t have Lyme disease in Arkansas. We have the ticks that transmit Lyme disease but we don’t have any recorded cases of Lyme disease.”
Could that possibly be because when people have known tick bites, well-known Lyme symptoms, and positive lab tests, health officials deny that it’s Lyme? Ya think?
IDEXX, a big corporation that makes veterinary products and services, tells a different story. According to its website, dogsandticks.com, there have been 282 cases of canine Lyme disease in Arkansas.
So Lyme-infected ticks can somehow transmit the pathogen to dogs—but not to humans? Where’s the scientific evidence for that highly dubious theory?
Here’s another slant on the picture: Of the 5500+ people who have registered for MyLymeData, 29 say they were infected in Arkansas. I’m sure there are more of you out there. If you are in Arkansas and have Lyme disease, I encourage you to sign up for MyLymeData today.
It’s one way to help counter the absurdities being put forth by the so-called “scientists” who deny what’s right in front of their faces.
Click here to watch the news story on KNWA.
TOUCHED BY LYME is written by Dorothy Kupcha Leland, LymeDisease.org’s VP for Education and Outreach. She is co-author of When Your Child Has Lyme Disease: A Parent’s Survival Guide. Contact her at dleland@lymedisease.org.
I was re-infected with Lyme in the late 1990s via flea bites in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
I hope you’ll enroll in MyLymeData. That’s the best way to capture this information. –DKL
Thanks for the invitation, Dorothy. I’ve been enrolled for some time now. I think it’s terribly important that anyone with Lyme and/or the coinfections be a part of documenting what’s happening with Lyme disease, and where it’s being contracted and what’s working to aleviate, if not cure it. I have found the most help learning what other patients on this site are finding is of benefit in their quest for healing. Following information that I first heard about on “Touched by Lyme”, I am feeling better than I have in at least a decade. Also, thank you, thank you, thank you for all of your hard work and sharing of your expertise on this valuable site!! I feel so fortunate to have found “Touched by Lyme”. Keep up the great work. Jane Ann
I’d like to hear an official CDC response on this. I’d like them to explain how Lyme carrying ticks can be in the environment, and yet a bulls eye rash, fever, flu-like symptoms, and positive Lyme tests do NOT indicate a Lyme Disease infection.
Shame on the medical people. Lyme needs antibiotics quickly.
I only hope the CDC will update their antiquated Lyme values before putting any more humans at risk. Educating physicians with the right information is the beginning, in order to prevent the borrielios bacteria going into the late stages of chronic Lyme.
Ticks are in every state and where there are ticks there will be Lyme and co-infections.
I live in the state of Florida where the public health dept laughed in the phone at me when I told them my daughter was just diagnosed with Lyme Disease. She told me my daughter must have gotten it out of state?
By the time my daughter was diagnosed she was in a wheelchair in bed 24/7, had heart, eyes, muscle, joint, liver problems, lost all her teen years.
This disease not only affected her but it affected me when the bacteria went into her brain and she started yelling and screaming night and day, almost burnt the house, flooded 3 rooms and finally at 2 in the morning pushed me across a concrete floor where I damaged my knee and hip, later to have surgery.
13 yrs later she is better now and doesn’t remember anything but in our educated society why did this have to happen?
Maybe we need to stop calling it Lyme Disease and start calling it Syphllis2, you would be treated faster with antibiotics!
My wife’s uncle was diagnosed with Lyme some 25 years ago in Fayetteville, Arkansas !!!
I live in Arkansas. My symptoms are those of Lyme disease. But can’t get a doctor to run more test other than the two tier test. Where can I go to get further testing, from doctors whom don’t have a closed mind too this?
What is this precious window for treatment? I contracted Lyme in 2008 in PA. I had a bull’s-eye rash, a headache, and a fever one morning and immediately went to urgent care, and since it is endemic there, I was treated with antibiotics immediately. I progressed rapidly to neurological symptoms later that night, which stuck with me for almost a year, to the point where I had to stop working, even while I was on antibiotics. As far as my experience is concerned, there is no special window of treatment where you can “cure” Lyme. This is some sort of myth.