This has been apparent to astute clinicians for some time, and cutting-edge direct antigen detection assays are making this clear in black and white. This reinforces the denial of Lyme disease in individuals who may actually have it, by those who discount the importance or reality of patients' subjective experience of their illness. Exclusion from study of seronegative subjects with symptoms compatible with Lyme disease in the past may represent a serious conceptual and methodological error. Resources of government are already stretched thin by AIDS, multiply resistant tuberculosis, and health sequelae of drug addiction and other societal problems. Fosters a casual attitude towards deer-tick attachments.
Ill individuals are likely to be denied disability.
Inadequate allocation of funding by government to deal with the scope and potential seriousness of the problem, as indicated above. Latent infection of un-prophylaxed individuals will result in avoidable chronic persisting infection in some, with all of its unfavorable sequelae. Also, denial of chronic persistent infection will lead to non-treatment of those who actually have chronic persisting infection. This will prove costlier in the long run in terms of then having to deal with more complicated and perhaps irreversible illness, loss of individual economic productivity as well the incalculable toll of human suffering. In view of early dissemination of Bb to the central nervous system, the inadequacy of commonly prescribed regimens for Erythema Migrans to treat the CNS, and the reality of chronic persisting infection, it is to be expected that of patients treated for early disease, increasing numbers developing late CNS sequelae will accumulate over time.