David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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130. To ask the Minister for Health further to Parliamentary Question No. 653 of 17 June 2014, if the Health Protection Surveillance Centre has established a lyme borreliosis sub-committee; the details of the membership of same; if not, when this sub-committee will be established; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [40568/14]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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The Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) of the HSE is responsible for the surveillance of notifiable infectious diseases such as Lyme Disease. The HPSC is presently involved in establishing a Lyme Borreliosis Sub-Committee with the primary aim of examining best practice in prevention and surveillance of Lyme Disease and to develop strategies to undertake primary prevention in order to minimise harm caused by Lyme Borreliosis in Ireland. A major focus of the Committee’s work will be on raising awareness of Lyme Disease among both clinicians and the general public.

With a view to this, in preparing for the establishment of the Committee, the HPSC has extended the information available on its website to ensure that diagnosticians remain increasingly aware of the issue of Lyme Disease. Each year, as part of its ongoing awareness raising about Lyme disease and methods of preventing or minimising potential exposure through tick bites, HPSC holds a "Lyme Disease Awareness Week", in which media releases are sent out with the intention that media outlets would take up the important Lyme prevention messages. This year, "Lyme Disease Awareness Week" took place in late May.

As part of the Lyme Disease Awareness Week a supply of information was made available to the public and attention was drawn to a “Tickborne Disease Toolkit”, developed by the European Centre for Disease Control, which is available on the ECDC website. In addition, this toolkit was modified for use in Ireland and posted on the HPSC website. The ECDC has noted that Ireland is the first European Member State to make such extensive use of this material. Following the Awareness Week a 100% increase of web traffic to the various Lyme Disease sections of the HPSC website was noted.

Preparatory work in drawing this group together began before the summer and relevant experts and officials were identified and invited to participate. The Unit within HPSC responsible for surveillance and provision of expert advice in relation to Lyme borreliosis is the Gastrozoonotic and Vectorborne (GZV) Unit. This work will be advanced over the next few months.