We have assisted you guys in many letter writing campaigns...now we need your help.

A few paragraphs below is a quote off the Canadian Arthritis Societies website.

There were 23,700 cases of lyme confirmed (10 times more than that were not reported) in the US last year NOT the 1500 to 3000 they report as total annual cases.

Their information is terribly out of date and harmful to those with arthritc lyme looking for information.

Canada has had hundreds of confirmed cases and thousands misdiagnosed and NOT 25 cases as they state.

The title of the article is "Lyme Disease: Still Rare in Canada". Lyme is NOT rare in Canada.

We have asked them several times to update their information but they ignore us.

We want everyone to write them to correct this terribly misleading information as this hurts our efforts to change public image of this disease.

Here is their email addy:
[email protected]

BEGIN QUOTE:

'It might be easier to deal with such diagnostic difficulties in Canada, where only about 25 cases of Lyme disease have been known to originate. Canada has only one certain 'hot spot' for ticks - Long Point, Ontario, on the north shore of Lake Erie.

In contrast, the United States has various 'hot spots' - in New England, the midwest and the Pacific Coast. Moreover, some 1500 to 3000 cases have been reported annually in recent years, a number that has been growing. According to Steere, 13,795 cases were reported in the United States between 1980 and 1988.

These statistics lead Steere to conclude that Lyme disease is actually spreading, but part of the apparent increase stems from an extreme heightening of the disease's public profile: 'During the past several years, there has been so much media attention and so much pushing of this as a treatable ailment, it has become an over diagnosed and overtreated infection.'

END OF QUOTE

[This message has been edited by lymeit (edited 16 May 2004).]

[This message has been edited by lymeit (edited 16 May 2004).]