Texas Warning Ignored, Fallout Devastating

by Dawn Irons, Editor

There’s a storm a brewing and Texas is quickly being caught in the eye of the storm. Fortunately, a warning was sounded in 2003 by Texas A&M University (TAMU) that the torrential weather was coming. Unfortunately, no one with the authority to prepare the public and medical professionals did anything to abate the coming downpour.

In May of 2003, TAMU entomologist Dr. Pete Teel, with the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, shared his concerns of a growing tick problem in an article titled, Officials Warn Texans to Watch Out for Tick-Borne Diseases. Yet his warnings fell on deaf ears. As was foretold, tick-borne illnesses such as Lyme disease, STARI, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Erlichia, Bartonella, and Babesia have been on the steady rise in Texas.

Support groups for Lyme disease have been growing by leaps and bounds throughout The Lone Star State. The Dallas-Fort Worth area support group, led by Donna Reagan, has close to 200 members. The Houston support group, led by Teresa Lucher, was featured in a PBS program about Lyme disease in Texas. A reporter from a newspaper in Victoria also interviewed Houston Lyme patients for a story concerning the growing Lyme disease problem in Texas. The support group in Austin, led by Teresa Jones, has been newly reestablished after the group suffered a devastating blow in losing the only Lyme literate medical provider in their area due to harassment by the Texas Board of Medical Examiners.

Patient stories throughout the state are filled with multitudes telling of the devastation of being misdiagnosed and flatly dismissed with the common medical mantra, “We don’t have Lyme in Texas. That is an east coast disease.” Many more Texas Lyme sufferers tell of insurance companies who deny medical coverage based on the new 2006 treatment and diagnostic guidelines for Lyme disease put out by the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA).

Still other patients share the horror of battling with the social security office over their disability claims and Medicare coverage. Yet, the most tragic stories of all are from the numerous patients who have to leave the state to even get medical care. A large majority of the DFW and Houston Lyme support groups travel to doctors in Louisiana and Missouri. Many in the Austin support group travel to San Francisco to see the nurse practitioner that was run out of Texas by the medical board.

The stories are tragic, sad, and financially devastating for the patients. All the while, we should be asking the question… “Why all the fuss?” TAMU saw this coming in 2003 with verifiable scientific data! We were warned! Yet medical professionals who are concerned about threats against their license simply choose not to treat patients with a diagnosis of Lyme. And why is it that the Texas Board of Medical Examiners has such harsh policies for those who have treated Lyme in the state?

Loretta Pressly, of Corpus Christie, has recently felt the full blow of the prevailing medical position regarding Lyme disease in Texas after she was denied continued coverage on her Workers Compensation disability benefits package. Pressly received a tick bite on the job and shortly after presented with the classic bullseye rash. She was seen by an internist with a specialty in infectious disease. She was diagnosed with Lyme disease based on symptoms, presentation of the bulls-eye rash, and two different laboratory diagnostic tests from separate labs. Workers Comp requested a second opinion and assigned a doctor to review her case. The second opinion doctor also confirmed the diagnosis of Lyme disease.

Pressly has been battling Workers Comp for continued coverage for a while. She recently was given an administrative review of her Workers Comp case to decide if she would remain covered for continued medical care. Pressly requested that a doctor who was experienced in treating and diagnosing Lyme disease review her case history. Workers Comp assigned yet another doctor for a “referee opinion.” The doctor assigned to Pressly’s case readily admitted that he was not experienced with treating or diagnosing Lyme disease. This puts the total score board at 2 doctors confirming a diagnosis and now she awaited the official opinion of the “referee” doctor assigned by Workers Comp.

In declining her claim for medical coverage, the referee opinion doctor wrote in his report, “Although the environment in question, where this insect bite was alleged, is compatible with a potential for exposure to the Lyme spirochete, the reader is reminded that the annual frequency of new cases with Lyme disease in the large state of Texas is only 0.09 to 0.51 cases per annum…. In other words, the risk of contracting Lyme disease is very low in Texas.”

So what’s a Texas Lyme patient to do? Pressly was diagnosed by 2 separate doctors, had 2 separate labs confirm the diagnosis, and she presented with the classic rash and was fully symptomatic for the disease. Then a Workers Comp referee doctor, who has no experience with Lyme treatment and diagnosis, comes along and declines her medical coverage based completely on faulty reporting statistics that even the CDC says are at least 10 times higher than have been officially reported.

This is CRIMINAL.

According to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), when two or more cases of Lyme disease are found in one county, the county is listed as epidemic for that disease. Why is there not one county in the state of Texas that is officially listed as endemic? Since 1990 to present, there have been 1,553 reported cases of Lyme disease in Texas, according to the Texas State Health Department Zoonosis Control Branch.

Therefore, according to the CDC, there are probably 15,530 cases or more of Lyme disease in the State of Texas, not including those cases that may have been misdiagnosed as Lupus, Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue, Multiple Sclerosis, and other autoimmune diseases. Now, add into the equation that TAMU scientifically monitored and verified that a massive increase of tick-borne diseases were on the horizon back in 2003, where does that leave us today?

I still have one nagging question that haunts me. If Texas has had 1,553 verifiable reported cases of Lyme, why has the CDC directives of listing an area as “endemic” with 2 reported cases not been enforced? There are 242 counties in Texas…it does not take a rocket scientist to do the math. (Don’t forget the actually numbers are more in the range of 15,000 cases, according to the CDC.) Texas Lyme patients are suffering needlessly by not being reported and having the endemic areas classified properly, and officially.

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