I WAS glad to see the article about Lyme disease on the front page of last Sunday’s Globe (“Drawing the lines in the Lyme disease battle,” June 2).
The so-called fanatics I’ve met, including my sister and a friend, weren’t fanatics at the start of their illnesses. When nobody listened to them, few believed them, and many misdiagnosed them, their unrelenting and despairing cries for help were described as “fanaticism.” Baloney. Both eventually were successfully treated, recovered, and are now well. And they are still not fanatics.
Public health ethics teaches us to listen to patients carefully and apply basic scientific methods to the issue at hand. Why Lyme is still so underdiagnosed and mostly untracked is mind-boggling, given the energy and resources invested in tracking, diagnosing, and treating a host of other infectious diseases, including other vector-borne illnesses such as West Nile virus.
Why there is even a controversy over diagnosing and treating a bacterial infection similar to syphilis is incomprehensible in 2013.
Linda J. Smith
Dayton, Ohio
The writer is an adjunct instructor in public health at Boonshoft School of Medicine at Wright State University.