Hi, A lot has been said about supporting Dr. Jones. I personally think that, by subjecting himself to these hearings, he is the one who has been supporting and defending us and so, each individual has to think about our own need for continuing LLMD protocol. That being said, here is another reason to be at the Connecticut LOB on Dec 18, if you can. (Thanks, from Eva) Dr. Jones final hearing and a Lyme Disease Prevention Informational Forum BOTH December 18th
AT THE LOB, from 10 - 12 AM Matthew Carter, Durland Fish
& other "Lyme prevention experts" will speak!!!!!
No Lyme patient advocacy representatives have been invited.
But there will be an Animal Rights activist speaking on the rights of deer
IT IS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
PLEASE SEE BELOW FOR AN AUGUST 24, 2007 HARTFORD COURANT ARTICLE ABOUT DURLAND FISH, WITH SECOND AND THIRD PARAGRAPHS IN BRACKETS {{{{ }}}}.
HARTFORD COURNAT By MICHAEL REGAN | Courant Staff Writer August 24, 2007 NEW HAVEN - Durland Fish, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology, leading authority on disease-carrying insects, is sitting in his paper-strewn office at the Yale School of Public Health. {{{{{{{He is ticking down a list of physicians who disagree with him on the matter of chronic Lyme disease.
"This guy ..." Fish begins. "He cheated. He fabricated an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. He provided false results. The paper had to be retracted. He was banned from [National Institutes of Health] funding for a period of time. The guy used to be the director of some penile enlargement clinic out on the West Coast. I mean, this guy ... There's some problems with him."
He proceeds down the list, name by name: "Totally bogus." "He killed one of his patients." "They tried to shut him down." Words like "crackpot," "wacko," "buffoon" and "fraud" pepper his discourse. A little later, he stops to ponder a question. "I don't know, he says after a moment's thought. "I don't know why they hate me so much."}}}}}}} "Hate" may be too strong a word, but many in the chronic Lyme community return Fish's evident antipathy. With varying degrees of vehemence, he is accused of being part of - even a leader of - what they view as a conspiracy to deny chronic Lyme sufferers the care they need for reasons of pride and profit.
It is a resurgence of a long and heated dispute over the nature and treatment of Lyme disease. On one side are mainstream physicians and researchers, including Fish, who believe Lyme is a relatively straightforward infection that can be treated in almost all cases with no more than four weeks of antibiotics, although some effects of the infection, such as fatigue or joint pain, can persist.
On the other is a small but extremely vociferous group of doctors and patients who say it is much more serious and requires much longer treatment - years of intravenous antibiotics in some cases.
Now Fish is fighting a subpoena from state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who says Fish and 13 other experts may have improperly excluded scientific evidence of chronic Lyme when they issued guidelines last year for treating the disease.
How did a guy with no formal training in medicine find himself in the middle of what is perhaps the most virulent medical debate going on right now? One might say that it started with his being a bad restaurant inspector.
Fantastic Mosquitoes
The United States was in the process of doubling its force in Vietnam, to about 400,000 troops, when Fish graduated from Albright College in Redding, Pa., in 1966. He had a degree in biology and wanted to do graduate work on mammals. But with the draft looming, he opted instead for an occupational deferment.
"I went to work for the state health department, totally bored out of my mind inspecting restaurants. A terrible job, and I wasn't very good at it," Fish said. He hated imposing regulations on eateries just scraping by in the poor county where he was assigned. "I'm not a very good cop. ... I used to coach them on how to get by - how to cheat."
"I was on my way out," Fish said, when he was transferred to the regional office in Redding and given a job nobody wanted: tromping around the woods and swamps checking the stations set up to monitor mosquitoes and disease-bearing animals - in scientific parlance, vectors. He loved it.
"I thought, `You're going to pay me to do that?'" said Fish, who had grown up surrounded by woods in rural Berwick, Pa. "That got me interested in mosquitoes. I didn't know anything about mosquitoes - I thought they were fantastic."
Fish went back to school in 1970, but not to study mammals. He earned a master's degree in entomology from the University of Massachusetts and a doctorate from the University of Florida, and did postdoctoral work at the University of Notre Dame. He then set out to look for a job doing research on mosquitoes. It was a struggle.
"It wasn't a fundable area. Nobody cared," he said. "You couldn't get any grants on it. Nobody cared about the ecology of vectors."
So in 1980, Fish went to work teaching general biology, ecology and medical entomology at Fordham University. Its campus was in the Bronx, N.Y., but Fish got to live at the university's research station in Westchester County. It was there he discovered the insect that came to dominate his professional life: the deer tick.
"I was doing some field work on mosquitoes there and these little brown ticks started showing up. Nobody knew anything about these ticks," he said. "I'd never seen them before. They weren't there in '80, maybe we just started seeing them in '81, a rare one. By '82 they were pretty easy to find."
The tiny deer tick had already infested southeastern Connecticut by the time Fish started finding them in New York, and had already been associated with what was beginning to be called Lyme disease. But no one was sure just how the disease was transmitted from tick to human.
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Posted by Aligondo Bruce (Member # 6219) on :
Durland Fish sucks. I am exceedingly well informed on his tactics and scientific hypocrisies. If I whip up a list of questions, is anyone in CT area willing to go to him and fire away? make sure you bring a video camera or tape recorder.