TOUCHED BY LYME: No Lyme in Arkansas? Baloney!

Three sisters from an Arkansas family returned from a Girl Scout trip last May with 20 attached ticks among them. The girls all fell ill, with fevers, flu-like symptoms, joint pain and bull’s-eye rashes.

They went to the doctor and two of them tested positive for Lyme disease. (You know, with that CDC-approved two-tier testing which has such a bad record of detecting Lyme. Two of them were positive even on that crummy test.)

Known tick bites? Recognizable Lyme symptoms? Positive lab tests? Sounds like a slam dunk, doesn’t it? Time to break out the antibiotics.

Not so fast! This is Arkansas, a place that has no Lyme disease, according to state health officials and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  Therefore, these “experts” say, those positive Lyme tests must be false positives. As a result, a local pediatric clinic refused to treat the girls.

Their mother, Alarie Bowerman, scoured the countryside looking for somebody willing to help her sick children, as their health continued to decline.  Finally, she found a Lyme-literate practitioner in Kansas, who verified that all three girls have Lyme and started them on medication.  But that didn’t happen until August, so the precious window for early treatment was squandered.

What does the Arkansas Department of Health have to say about this? Dr. Naveen Patil told TV station KNWA, of Fayetteville: “We don’t have Lyme disease in Arkansas. We have the ticks that transmit Lyme disease but we don’t have any recorded cases of Lyme disease.”

Could that possibly be because when people have known tick bites, well-known Lyme symptoms, and positive lab tests, health officials deny that it’s Lyme? Ya think?

IDEXX, a big corporation that makes veterinary products and services, tells a different story. According to its website, dogsandticks.com, there have been 282 cases of canine Lyme disease in Arkansas.

So Lyme-infected ticks can somehow transmit the pathogen to dogs—but not to humans? Where’s the scientific evidence for that highly dubious theory?

Here’s another slant on the picture: Of the 5500+ people who have registered for MyLymeData, 29 say they were infected in Arkansas. I’m sure there are more of you out there. If you are in Arkansas and have Lyme disease, I encourage you to sign up for MyLymeData today.

It’s one way to help counter the absurdities being put forth by the so-called “scientists” who deny what’s right in front of their faces.

Click here to watch the news story on KNWA.

TOUCHED BY LYME is written by Dorothy Kupcha Leland, LymeDisease.org’s VP for Education and Outreach. She is co-author of When Your Child Has Lyme Disease: A Parent’s Survival Guide. Contact her at dleland@lymedisease.org.