Your article on Lyme disease (”Professor lands grant for tick and Lyme disease research,” Times-Standard, Sept. 1, Page A1) implies that there were only five cases in the last five years in Humboldt County. That is a misleading statement. The County Health Department only reports Lyme cases that meet the Centers for Disease Control criteria for surveillance. This relies on very insensitive tests that miss more than 50 percent of those who are truly infected. There are far better tests available now that can be used to confirm what is a clinical diagnosis. Go to lymedisease.org for more on this. I personally have met over 60 people with Lyme disease and only two of them were CDC positive. Hence, all the rest of us are not reported to the Health Department. They can't know how many cases there are until they start counting all of us. Also, by saying that there are only a few cases, doctors don't consider it as a diagnosis and the public doesn't take the threat seriously. When you count everyone who has been diagnosed, it shows that Lyme disease is a huge problem here.
In the late 1980s, I had my first Lyme screening test at the County Health Department. They did say that it was an inaccurate test. It came out negative and it was wrong. I spent the next 20 years with declining health. It started with arthritis that moved around, gastrointestinal problems, debilitating fatigue, depression and anxiety with lots of reoccurring stomach flu. It slowly evolved into severe neurological problems that included: Slurred/garbled speech, loss of balance, weakness, dizziness, nausea, Bell's palsy, trouble swallowing, light and sound sensitivity, stiff/frozen neck and shoulders, heart palpitations, insomnia, migraines, shortness of breath, blurred vision, twitching eyes, intense muscle spasms and skin sensations that go from numb to crawling, prickly, cold , burning or intense pain.
I was finally diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2007 and have been treating it and several co-infections on and off since then. When I go off of antibiotics, I start to relapse after three weeks. There are many animal studies showing the persistence of the organism after antibiotic treatment. I don't find the treatment to be too harsh and it has enabled me to get a whole lot better.
At the same time, it is very disheartening to continue to see such ignorance about Lyme in the medical comm

unity. Peoples' lives are being destroyed by this neglect. We desperately need our primary care doctors to become more Lyme literate, especially those who treat the poor. It's a terrible thing to let so many people become so sick and disabled when we could do something about it.
The problem is not the ticks or even the bacteria, it is the ignorance.

Janis Taylor resides in Fieldbrook.