(11/5/03)
Here's a diatribe that still contains lots of pertinent info. It's not mine; I copied it from somewhere. But its right on the money, from every bit of evidence I've ever seen.
Here it is:)

(Please read and further circulate this message:)

Dear friends in the Lyme community,
Many of you, or your loved ones, have suffered because of difficulties in getting correct diagnosis and treatment for Lyme and other tick-borne diseases. We are now asking all of you who have personal stories, or other evidence of suffering caused by the corruption of the individual doctors, researchers, politicians, institutions and corporations listed below, to come forward with your stories publicly and also submit them to the US Department of Justice.

If you do not feel ready to take this step, but are still willing to share your story or evidence with others, you may submit your text anonymously to be included with the others on an internet website set up for this purpose. We also ask you all to further circulate this message throughout the Lyme community.

All of the individuals and organizations listed at the end of this message have been named in an official complaint filed with the US Department of Justice. They stand accused of complicity in a gigantic medical fraud, affecting patients both in the USA and abroad, and of deliberate violation of our human rights for personal and financial gain.

Specifically, they are all charged with promoting one or more myths which, while enriching vaccine manufacturers, biotech and insurance companies, have simultaneously caused suffering on an unimaginable scale.

Re-writing the definition of Lyme disease, its diagnosis and treatment to suit the profit needs of industry has meant that severely and chronically disabled people are denied help; labelled "hysterical", malingerers, and even mentally ill; given misdiagnoses which entail inappropriate treatment causing an exacerbation of their illness or even death. All have suffered pain, many have lost their livelihoods and seen the destruction of their marriages, family relationships and friendships; children who could have been saved have lost their physical and mental abilities; parents have suffered harassment and even removal of their children through social services' ignorance of the disease. Patients have been driven to despair by this situation and some to suicide.

The myths would have us believe that Lyme disease is overdiagnosed and that it does not occur outside certain very limited geographical areas. By using serological methods which are known to be unreliable and which even at their best can only detect a small fraction of the known strains of disease-causing borrelia bacteria, statistics are artificially kept low. A lack of accurate public health information and intense, industry-led pressure on local physicians not to diagnose Lyme means that many cases won't even reach the stage of a blood test. Finally, artificial "case definitions" of Lyme disease restrict the debate to a very narrow and specific band of patients, when in fact a more honest approach would be to state that an epidemic of chronic borrelioses, resistant to antibiotics, often devastating in their effects, and persisting in the eye and brain tissue, has hit three continents.

Travel of people and pets will obviously spread the disease. Despite misleading claims to the contrary, Lyme can be transmitted across the womb, causing miscarriage, neonatal death, birth defects or chronic illness in the child.

Claims that the illness is easily resolved after four weeks of antibiotics, and any residual symptoms indicate either an untreatable auto-immune "post-Lyme syndrome" or that the patient is lying, or crazy, were designed to suit the needs of insurance companies. Many physicians have found that prolonged antibiotic treatment is necessary, with relapse if stopped too early. Patients are not stupid. They know they are not imagining or pretending their symptoms, and the notion of a post-Lyme "auto-immune disorder" in the absence of continuing infection has never been proved.

Though the US Center for Disease Control acknowledges that Lyme is a clinical diagnosis, nevertheless physicians are constantly urged to rely on a faulty two-step blood testing procedure, despite the mountain of evidence indicating that the so-called "screening test" is not sensitive enough. Finally, the way in which the confirmatory Western Blot is performed and interpreted in most labs has become corrupted. The Dressler-Steere criteria falsely narrows detectability of the disease, and was devised mainly to allow the marketing of commercial vaccines. Further, known antigenic components of the bacteria are simply not tested for.

Other known detection methods are either played down, falsely discredited, or covered up altogether. Moreover, the highly-funded Lyme researchers deny the reality of co-infections in Lyme patients, which can be as chronic and disabling as the borrelial infection itself.

The "experts" behind these myths also assured the American public of the safety of the LymeRix vaccine, yet it had to be withdrawn from the market due to a torrent of adverse reactions, including activation of latent Lyme, miscarriages and tumors.

Honest clinicians and lab researchers have been hounded by the commercial lobby, who use their political influence on regulating bodies and medical journals to strip them of their funding, their credibility, their licences.Practitioners have been forced to shut down and the pressure has even led to some suicides.

THE ACCUSED:

The following have all been named by scientist and veteran Lyme campaigner Kathleen Dickson in a complaint filed with the US Dept.of Justice. These individuals and institutions are named as being responsible for causing mass suffering, by propagating one or more of the myths already described:

COMPANIES:
Aventis (incorporating the former Pasteur Merieux Connaught)
Castle-Connolly Medical Ltd.
Corixa
Glaxo SmithKline Beecham
Imugen
Kaiser-Permanente
L2 Diagnostics
Lifespan
Quest Diagnostics Inc.
Trinity Biotech (now incorporates MarDx)
Yale Corporation

ACADEMIC INSITUTIONS:
New York Medical College
Yale University

GOVERNMENT AGENCIES:
NY OPMC
NY Department of Health
EUCALB

OTHER ORGANIZATIONS:
ALDF
Mayo Clinic
NY Business Group on Health
Robert Woods Johnson Foundation


INDIVIDUALS:
Barbour, Alan
Bergstrom, Sven
Connolly, John
Dattwyler, Raymond
Dennis, David
Fauci, Anthony
Fish, Durland
Gray, Jeremy
Johnson, Barbara
Kantor, Fred
Klempner, Mark
McSweegan, Ed
Molloy, Phillip
Nadelman, Robert
Nowakowski, John
O'Connell, Susan
Persing, David
Schoen, Robert
Shapiro, Eugene
Sigal, Leonard
Steere, Allen
Weinstein, Arthur
Wormser, Gary
--------------
If you feel that you or someone close to you has suffered because of the myths described above, or if you wish to submit other evidence to contradict those myths, please submit your material to us to be forwarded to the US Dept of Justice en masse, as well as published on a website. (Please indicate if you would prefer to post your story anonymously only.)

Published evidence which blasts the myths, (some of it written by the accused themselves, in the years before the rise of the vaccines) will be presented on the website alongside your material.

Please send your replies to lisam01502@aol.com

Finally, we draw your attention to the fact that the original author of the complaint to the US Department of Justice, Kathleen Dickson, is the target of a vicious campaign to discredit her and has been threatened with jail. If you would like to get involved in the campaign to defend Kathleen , or in Lyme-RAFT, the new campaign being set up to help parents and children facing difficulties from social services or other state agencies due to their ignorance of tick- borne disease, please email lisam01502@aol.com Further information on tick-borne disease may be found on the following websites:
www.ilads.org www.lymetruth.org www.lymediseaseassociation.org
www.lyme.org www.actionlyme.com
www.lymenet.org
www.wildernetwork.org/index.html
www.lymesucks.org
, and, of course, http://dave.clarityconnect.com/LymeDiseaseSUCKS.html

Thanking you,
With best wishes,
Lisa Masterson
Lyme-RAFT
Rights and Action for Families with Tick-Borne Disease

This document may be freely distributed and copied as long as it is not abridged or modified in any way.

Let's Protest the rampant malpractice going on in this country AS LONG AS IT'S HAPPENING TO ANYONE!