Please read and further circulate this message.
Dear friends,
Many of you, or your loved ones, have suffered because of difficulties in getting correct diagnosis
and treatment for Lyme and other tick-borne diseases. We are now asking all of you who have personal
stories, or other evidence of suffering caused by the corruption of the individual doctors,
researchers, politicians, institutions and corporations listed below, to come forward with your
stories publicly and also submit them to the US Department of Justice.
If you do not feel ready to take this step, but are still willing to share your story or evidence
with others, you may submit your text anonymously to be included with the others on an internet
website set up for this purpose. We also ask you all to further circulate this message throughout
the Lyme community.
All of the individuals and organizations listed at the end of this message have been named in an
official complaint filed with the US Department of Justice. They stand accused of complicity in a
gigantic medical fraud, affecting patients both in the USA and abroad, and of deliberate violation
of our human rights for personal and financial gain.
Specifically, they are all charged with promoting one or more myths which, while enriching vaccine
manufacturers, biotech and insurance companies, have simultaneously caused suffering on an
unimaginable scale.
Re-writing the definition of Lyme disease, its diagnosis and treatment to suit the profit needs
of industry has meant that severely and chronically disabled people are denied help; labelled
"hysterical", malingerers, and even mentally ill; given misdiagnoses which entail inappropriate
treatment causing an exacerbation of their illness or even death. All have suffered pain, many
have lost their livelihoods and seen the destruction of their marriages, family relationships
and friendships ;children who could have been saved have lost their physical and mental
abilities; parents have suffered harassment and even removal of their children through social
services' ignorance of the disease. Patients have been driven to despair by this situation and
some to suicide.
The myths would have us believe that Lyme disease is overdiagnosed and that it does not occur
outside certain very limited geographical areas. By using serological methods which are known to be
unreliable and which even at their best can only detect a small fraction of the known strains of disease-
causing borrelia bacteria, statistics are artificially kept low. A lack of accurate public health
information and intense, industry-led pressure on local physicians not to diagnose Lyme means that
many cases won't even reach the stage of a blood test. Finally, artificial "case definitions" of
Lyme disease restrict the debate to a very narrow and specific band of patients, when in fact a more
honest approach would be to state that an epidemic of chronic borrelioses, resistant to antibiotics,
often devastating in their effects, and persisting in the eye and brain tissue, has hit three
continents.
Travel of people and pets will obviously spread the disease. Despite misleading claims to the
contrary, Lyme can be transmitted across the womb, causing miscarriage, neonatal death, birth
defects or chronic illness in the child.
Claims that the illness is easily resolved after four weeks of antibiotics, and any residual
symptoms indicate either an untreatable auto-immune "post-Lyme syndrome" or that the patient is
lying, or crazy, were designed to suit the needs of insurance companies. Many physicians have found
that prolonged antibiotic treatment is necessary, with relapse if stopped too early. Patients are
not stupid. They know they are not imagining or pretending their symptoms, and the notion of a post-
Lyme "auto-immune disorder" in the absence of continuing infection has never been proved.
Though the US Center for Disease Control acknowledges that Lyme is a clinical diagnosis,
nevertheless physicians are constantly urged to rely on a faulty two-step blood testing procedure,
despite the mountain of evidence indicating that the so-called "screening test" is not sensitive
enough. Finally, the way in which the confirmatory Western Blot is performed and interpreted in most
labs has become corrupted. The Dressler-Steere criteria falsely narrows detectability of the
disease, and was devised mainly to allow the marketing of commercial vaccines. Further, known
antigenic components of the bacteria are simply not tested for.
Other known detection methods are either played down, falsely discredited, or covered up altogether.
Moreover, the highly-funded Lyme researchers deny the reality of co-infections in Lyme patients,
which can be as chronic and disabling as the borrelial infection itself.
The "experts" behind these myths also assured the American public of the safety of the LymeRix
vaccine, yet it had to be withdrawn from the market due to a torrent of adverse reactions, including
activation of latent Lyme, miscarriages and tumors.
Honest clinicians and lab researchers have been hounded by the commercial lobby, who use their
political influence on regulating bodies and medical journals to strip them of their funding, their
credibility, their licences.Practitioners have been forced to shut down and the pressure has even
led to some suicides.
THE ACCUSED
The following have all been named by scientist and veteran Lyme campaigner Kathleen Dickson in a
complaint filed with the US Dept.of Justice. These individuals and institutions are named as being
responsible for causing mass suffering, by propagating one or more of the myths already described:
COMPANIES
Aventis (incorporating the former Pasteur Merieux Connaught) Castle-Connolly Medical Ltd. Corixa
Glaxo SmithKline Beecham Imugen Kaiser-Permanente L2 Diagnostics Lifespan Quest Diagnostics Inc.
Trinity Biotech (now incorporates MarDx) Yale Corporation
ACADEMIC INSITUTIONS
New York Medical College Yale University
GOVERNMENT AGENCIES
NY OPMC NY Department of Health EUCALB
OTHER ORGANIZATIONS
ALDF Mayo Clinic NY Business Group on Health Robert Woods Johnson Foundation
INDIVIDUALS
Barbour, Alan Bergstrom, Sven Connolly, John Dattwyler, Raymond Dennis, David Fauci, Anthony Fish,
Durland Gray, Jeremy Johnson, Barbara Kantor, Fred Klempner, Mark McSweegan, Ed Molloy, Phillip
Nadelman, Robert Nowakowski, John O'Connell, Susan Persing, David Schoen, Robert Shapiro, Eugene
Sigal, Leonard Steere, Allen Weinstein, Arthur Wormser, Gary
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If you feel that you or someone close to you has suffered because of the myths described above, or
if you wish to submit other evidence to contradict those myths, please submit your material to us to
be forwarded to the US Dept of Justice en masse, as well as published on a website. (Please indicate
if you would prefer to post your story anonymously only.)
Published evidence which blasts the myths, (some of it written by the accused themselves, in the
years before the rise of the vaccines) will be presented on the website alongside your material.
Please send your replies to [email hidden] Finally, we draw your attention to the fact that the
original author of the complaint to the US Department of Justice, Kathleen Dickson, is the target of
a vicious campaign to discredit her and has been threatened with jail. If you would like to get
involved in the campaign to defend Kathleen , or in Lyme-RAFT, the new campaign being set up to help
parents and children facing difficulties from social services or other state agencies due to their
ignorance of tick-borne disease, please email [email hidden] Further information on tick-borne
disease may be found on the following websites: www.ilads.org www.lymetruth.org
www.lymediseaseassociation.org www.lyme.org www.actionlyme.com www.lymenet.org
www.wildernetwork.org/index.html www.lymesucks.org
Thanking you, With best wishes,
Lisa Masterson Lyme-RAFT Rights and Action for Families with Tick-Borne Disease
This document may be freely distributed and copied as long as it is not abridged or modified
in any way.