Dear Members of the List,
As noted, I do not suffer fools gladly. I submit hereiwth a letter that I am sending to a reporter at the State newspaper as a part of my attempt to interest the powers that be in a newspapter article on the subject of our friends Boris and Myrtle Burgdorferi and their neighbors. It is a meek, milquetoast of a letter. I have had to pour cold water on my fire and brimestone and restrain myself. You, my faithful readers know how dearly I just love to get out the old claymore and let the bastards have it. But here finesse and boredome are required. These newsreporters are a mass of quivering neurosis. They just cannot dare do anything that would offend the powers or the editors that be. So I am now attempting to seduce this reporter into doing something. As you can see, I am not the seductive type, Oh well, Cheers. Thomas Parkman. Be patient, the last paragraph may justify your reading it.
November 28, 2004
Dear Mr. LeBlanc:
I enclose herewith the list of six names of persons who have consented to be interviewed by you or some other reporter from the STATE on the subject of Lyme Disease in South Carolina. All the persons listed are currently suffering from it.
Without wishing to overwhelm you with material I have enclosed four reports or articles which may contain information you might find useful. I would note that the report that I gave you earlier citing the policy for testing promulgated by the CDC in 1996 is the latest document dealing with the subject. It is the standard, defective and outdated though it is, that is still in force.
The first document is a weekly report from the CDC for May of this year. In it the statistics of cases reported to the CDC are given. I refer you to the last two paragraphs on page two of the report. They clearly support my contention that the reports and position of the CDC are gibberish and do not make any sense at all.
As I said in my letter the extent of lyme disease is unknown. Or as the report says: ``Studies from the early 1990's suggested that LD cases were underreported by six to 12-fold in some areas where LD is endemic''... This makes no sense. In other words the actual number of cases may well range, say in 1996, from 98,670 to 197,340, instead of 16, 445. The figures given are useless and tell us nothing.
``Again, the current degree of underreporting for national data is unknown.'' How can anybody say there is no lyme disease in South Carolina on the basis of information put out by an agency which makes such a statement as this. As I have said, nobody knows how extensive the disease is here or anywhere. That is appalling.
Further, as was stated in the testing guidelines promulgated in 1996 and restated here, ``Clinicians are reminded that the LD case definition was developed for surveillance purposes and might not be appropriate for clinical management of individual patients.'' Since the current numbers really tell us nothing about the true extent of lyme disease and the case definition is not really appropriate for management of individual patients what use is it for anything? The whole business is nonsense.
In the year 2002 there was a forty percent increase in the number of reported cases. Nobody has any idea, by the CDC's own admission, of how many cases there actually are! Something serious is going on and nobody in the CDC or DHED has a clue as to how serious it is or, more to the point, how serious it is going to get. The second article-``The Epidemiology of Lyme Disease in South Carolina''- supports this general premise. ``Unfortunately, our data may greatly under-estimate the true incidence of cases.'' (p. 300e)
The third article-``The Complexities of Lyme Disease''- is by Thomas Grier, a microbiologist who also suffers from Lyme Disease. I would urge you to at least look over the bibliography. The positions that I took in my letter to you and taken by Mr. Grier in his book, from which this article is taken, as you can see from that bibliography as well as other sources, are based on thorough research and grounded in a rigorous scientific method. He clearly presents the current understanding of Lyme Disease. Among other things he clearly explains all the problems involved with the current (defective) tests for the disease. This understanding is clearly light years away from the received dogma of bureaucrats in the state and federal agencies. They are, as I have stated, ten to twenty years out of date in their comprehension of this disease.
Finally there is the ILADS treatment guide which provides much useful information about this disease, its diagnosis, treatment and care from those doctors on the front line in the real war against this disease. These are the doctors who are not in denial and have not buried their heads in the sand in the face of the immense human suffering caused by this terrible disease.
So, I submit, if you really want to do a report on a real medical scandal instead of focusing on the failings of one fallen soul of a doctor you might want to do an investigation into the miserable failure of both state and federal agencies with regard to Lyme Disease in South Carolina. Now there is corruption, bureaucratic arrogance and a scandal that stinks to high heaven indeed.
Sincerely,
Thomas M. Parkman
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