Unbelievable!
A while back we found a website showing the prevalence of tick borne diseases in dogs in various counties/states (great site) and posted/shared it all over the place. We still have it on all of our websites, front page, with the figures for that state posted.
(Link here to the site- https://sites.google.com/site/marylandlyme/reported-cases )
The Colorado CDC's so-called tick borne disease "experts" must have seen the information, panicked, held a quick meeting and said...
OH MY! Dogs can't have Lyme disease in those numbers! We've been preaching that people in OUR own backyard (non-endemic areas) don't have it! How fast can we put out a "study" that disputes that information so we don't look like big toads?
Our question: After getting done belly-laughing at how pitiful these grown men are acting...
Did tax-payers pay for the bus, plane and train tickets for all the dogs in Colorado to make a quick trip out of state to validate their hurried study?
Or, is someone just willy-nilly undiagnosing dogs and the reported dog cases like they did using death certificates of humans in that other sickening study they published?
We would like to see the actual proof/documentation that all those dogs they spoke to for their study traveled out of Colorado, or came to live there from out-of-state.
But WAIT! Here are the stats for their study county in Colorado (Routt) where they supposedly did this study.
ZERO out of ONE dog tested positive in Routt County, Colorado.
BUT WAIT, AGAIN!!!
In Paul Mead's (CDC) previous study the "researchers" said:
Conclusions
"Our results confirm an overall correlation between canine seroprevalence and reported human incidence of Lyme disease as measured through national surveillance.
Canine seroprevalence <1% is associated with extremely low rates of human illness in both state- and county-level analyses. Because human cases are reported according to county of residence rather than county of exposure, infections acquired during travel will occasionally be reported from areas without local transmission....
Conversely, the overall agreement between human and canine data support the conclusion that risk for B. burgdorferi infection is generally low to nonexistent outside the highly Lyme disease–endemic areas of the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, and upper Midwest."
Full article here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3322085/
So WHAT are these flip-flopping geniuses trying to pull?
Vector Borne Zoonotic Dis. 2013 Feb 19. [Epub ahead of print]
Elevated Lyme Disease Seroprevalence Among Dogs in a Nonendemic County: Harbinger or Artifact?
Millen K, Kugeler KJ, Hinckley AF, Lawaczeck EW, Mead PS.
Source
1 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , Fort Collins, Colorado.
Abstract Lyme disease, a tick-borne illness caused by Borrelia burgdorferi, infects humans and other species, including dogs. Canine seroprevalence has been suggested as a sentinel marker of human disease risk. A recent publication reported high canine seroprevalence (>5%) in Routt County, Colorado, an area where Lyme disease is generally considered nonendemic.
We surveyed veterinarians in Routt County and discovered that 11 of 12 seropositive dogs (>90%) had a documented history of travel to or residence in a Lyme disease endemic area.
These findings do not support the presence of an undocumented disease focus and reveal that despite its high sensitivity, there are limitations in the specificity and positive predictive value of elevated canine seroprevalence as a marker of human risk. PMID:
23421882
[PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
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Info about CDC Study on Human Deaths from Lyme
https://sites.google.com/site/virginialyme/press-releases-2011/tick-tock-tick-tock-tick
Abstract, click here
NOTICE THE AUTHORS FOR THE TWO CONFLICTING STUDIES- Paul Mead is on both, as is Kiersten Kugeler
Published February 2013
Elevated Lyme Disease Seroprevalence Among Dogs in a Nonendemic County: Harbinger or Artifact?
Millen K, Kugeler KJ, Hinckley AF, Lawaczeck EW, Mead PS.
Source
1 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , Fort Collins, Colorado.
***
Emerg Infect Dis. 2011 September; 17(9): 1710–1712.
doi: 10.3201/1709.110210
PMCID: PMC3322085
Canine Serology as Adjunct to Human Lyme Disease Surveillance
Paul Mead, Rohan Goel, and Kiersten Kugeler
Looks like they are trying to pull a Paul Awaerter on us! If you'll remember, Auwaerter proved Lyme tests fail to detect Lyme in 75% of the patients in his Hopkins 2005 blood test study.
And yet, his IDSA Lyme guidelines (published in 2006) stated you need to have not ONE, but TWO positive tests to have Lyme disease and the tests are reliable!
Are they telling so many lies they are forgetting what they originally said somewhere? Or, do they think we are all stupid and just won't notice?
Lucy Barnes