Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is fair to say there is greater and growing awareness among clinicians and doctors about Lyme disease. One of the difficulties is that there is not full consensus. I cannot speak for the medical profession; I am only here as Minister for Health and not as somebody speaking for the medical profession. However, I would like to refer from the National Institutes of Health in America, one of the international bodies which is expert on infectious disease. It states that physicians sometimes ascribe patients who have non-specific symptoms, like fatigue, pain, joint and muscle aches after the treatment of Lyme disease as having post-treatment of Lyme disease syndrome, or post-Lyme disease syndrome. The term "chronic Lyme disease" has been used to describe people with different illnesses. While the symptoms are sometimes used to describe illnesses in patients with Lyme disease, on many occasions it has been used to describe symptoms in people who have no evidence of a current or past infection with borrelia burgdorferi, according to the Infectious Disease Clinics Journal of North America. In view of confusion on how the term "chronic Lyme disease" is employed, experts in this field do not support its use, according to The New England Journal of Medicine.

Carefully designed placebo-controlled studies have failed to demonstrate that prolonged antibiotic therapy is beneficial. Although isolated success stories are always good to hear, such reports alone do not create sufficient ground to support a therapeutic approach. A positive response to prolonged antibiotic therapy may be due to the placebo effect, which is reported as high as 40% in some studies.

It is important to make a distinction between acute Lyme disease where somebody gets a tick bite, a rash and an illness thereafter, which everyone accepts happens all the time and of which people need to be more aware in terms of prevention and treating it, and the separate issue around the concept of chronic Lyme disease, which is a long-term condition. Currently, there is no medical consensus. The published evidence in the journals does not support the idea that long-term treatment with antibiotics for this condition is a treatment. There is much controversy around this and it is not my job as Minister for Health to adjudicate on medical controversies or to decide whether a minority opinion in medicine is correct over the majority opinion.

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