If you follow Lyme disease at all, you know that there’s no question that the official prevalence figures fail to capture the true extent of the toll those nasty little disease-spreading deer ticks take. The only question is just how far the official figures fall short of reality.
WBUR’s Lyme Disease series last summer cited these official figures for Massachusetts: 2-4,000 confirmed cases each year. But everyone knows those numbers are laughably low. Dr. Catherine Brown of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health said a more realistic figure might be the 12-14,000 positive lab tests for Lyme disease reported statewide each year. But that’s clearly still low. A leading tick expert estimated that in much of Massachusetts, about 1 percent of the population contracts Lyme each year.
Now, at a major conference on Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses under way in Boston, federal health authorities have just released their own more realistic estimate, and it’s about ten-fold their old one. From the CDC press release...
http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2013/08/lyme-disease-300000-americans