Has Holland Pioneered a New Test for Lyme Disease?

One of the biggest problems facing Lyme disease advocates in the United States is the stubborn refusal of the medical community to acknowledge the flaws of the current blood test for Lyme disease.

Despite the test giving a false negative in as many as 30% of cases, doctors and physicians will still often refused to start a program of antibiotics for Lyme disease if a patient tests negative – even if they display all the other symptoms of infection.

This has led many to suggest that current Lyme disease statistics – which already show Lyme disease to be one of the fastest growing infectious diseases in America – is wildly underreported. This means potentially thousands of Americans are living – and suffering – in ignorance of the fact that they’re carrying the borrelia burgdorferi bacterium in their bloodstream.

Fortunately, that could be changing. Dutch company Boulder Diagnostics Inc. and the Department of Internal Medicine of Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in Holland have recently announced a collaboration to bring an innovative new form of blood test for Lyme disease to the marketplace.

Mihai Netea, Professor of Experimental Medicine at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, told us: “This assay holds the potential to significantly reduce the frequent misdiagnosis of chronic borrelia infection.” It could have a significant impact on our understanding of the impact and frequency of Lyme disease in the United States; potentially challenging everything we think we know about this bacterial infection.

But it’s likely to be years before the test makes it to the American market, so for the time being the best way to treat Lyme disease remains to prevent it. This is best achieved by preventing tick bites; which spread the borrelia burgdorferi bacterium that causes Lyme disease.

Over 70% of tick bites occur near the home, so a good way to dramatically reduce your risk of infection is to get rid of ticks from your garden or back yard. You can do this with a yard spray for ticks, or tick spray treatment performed by one of the tick control specialists from Aspenn Environmental Services.

While we remain in the absence of an effective and accurate test for Lyme disease, these preventative measures seem to make a lot more sense than gambling with our currently flawed understanding of how to diagnose and treat Lyme disease.