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

The Deputy is quite right to say that people can get Lyme disease in Ireland. Indeed people can get tick bites in our national parks and contract Lyme disease as a result. There is now a Lyme disease awareness week. That started in 2013 and is led by the Health Protection Surveillance Centre, HPSC. That is designed to draw public and media attention to Lyme disease, how to prevent infection, how to recognise it and how to be treated. The most recent Lyme disease awareness week happened in May.

Chronic Lyme disease, as opposed to Lyme disease, is a controversial diagnosis. There is a lot of dispute among the medical profession in respect of it. Lyme disease is diagnosed by medical history and physical examination and the infection is confirmed by blood tests which look for antibodies produced in an infected person's body in response to an infection. The testing involves a two-stage process which uses ELISA as an initial screening step. Screening enzyme immunoassays, EIAs, can give false positive reactions in the presence of other viral infections, so the second stage involves an immunoblot test, the western blot, which greatly increases specificity. Using this two-stage approach we are given a greater degree of certainty about the diagnosis of Lyme disease.

All clinical laboratories in Ireland must undergo continuous quality assurance to ensure that the quality of the diagnostics they provide is maintained at the highest international level. Some laboratories in Germany, the United States and elsewhere use other types of tests. These tests are not currently recommended by international groups, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, in the United States, on the basis that they are not sufficiently specific for Lyme disease and can give rise to over-diagnosis and false diagnosis. As the Deputy knows, Lyme disease can be treated very successfully using common antibiotics.

See this speech in context