John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the our guests. I apologise for not being here for their presentations as I was a little over-booked for parts of the morning.

Lyme disease is a very real and potentially very serious condition. I am not an expert in this area but having lived for many years in New York I was well aware of the people who had it. I had the tragic experience of seeing my closest professional colleague and mentor from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center when we were both speaking at a meeting develop heart block and become extremely unwell. I do not want to bore everyone here who is not used to looking at cardiac tracing, but I saw longer and longer gaps emerging between his cardiac complexes and he had reached the stage technically of cardiac arrest and had to have a pacemaker put in. The diagnosis of Lyme disease was only made thereafter but that is what it was. I am under no illusions about what a terrible illness this can be.

I would like to amplify what my colleague, Deputy Healy, said by throwing in more question, which I have already put to other groups this morning and which I will put to our guests here. We are in general extraordinarily understaffed in every medical specialty in Ireland by international standards. I understand we have people here who do this analysis through a microbiology background and through an infectious disease background and I ask them what is the number of consultants per head of population here in this respect compared to those in the UK, to continental Europe and to North America?

A specific issue in regard to Lyme disease arose with respect to our previous hearings. Evidence was presented by another doctor who came here that there was an entity of chronic Lyme inflection which could occur wholly in the absence of any blood test evidence of Lyme infection. In other words, everything could be negative but the diagnosis could still be Lyme disease. As a result a certain number of substantive suggestions were made as to how patients who presented with this clinical syndrome should be dealt with and a clear suggestion was made that they were not being dealt with appropriately in Ireland because of our failure to recognise this entity. I thought for the sake of balance it was important that it we would have people in before the committee who could tell us exactly where the evidence stacks up on that. If there is no doubt there is Lyme disease, I am sure there is chronic Lyme disease, but is there a chronic Lyme disease which occurs wholly in absence of any blood test evidence of Lyme infection?