Keith Hepburn
My friend Carol Prest says "People with MS need proper testing for Lyme Disease, especially when 1 in 4 MS patients have been misdiagnosed".
I agree!

This from our friends in Australia

Interpreting Lyme Disease Blood Tests

How do you interpret Lyme Disease Blood Tests??

 Firstly, it must be stressed that Lyme Disease is NOT diagnosed on the basis of a blood test.  This is because there are currently too many false negative results.  A “negative” Lyme Disease blood test does not rule out a Lyme bacterial infection. Lyme Disease is a clinical diagnosis based upon previous medical history and current presenting symptoms – blood tests assist in guiding treatment, but should NOT be used for diagnosis.  False positive blood test results are very rare, especially when specific Lyme Disease bands are taken into consideration.

 We need to note that currently the Lyme Disease Association of Australia (LDAA) does not recommend being tested in Australia (except privately by PCR test – although it is currently not as accurate as testing performed in the USA or Germany).  Anecdotally, we have found that the vast majority of testing for Lyme Disease is unreliable.  This is based on the fact that many of our members have tested negative in Australia, but positive in the specialty Lyme Disease Blood Reference Laboratory IGeneX in the United States at the same time.  There are many different reasons for this discrepancy, and we hope that testing in Australia will improve in the future.  However we currently can not recommend testing in Australia, as it is not reliable enough at this stage.

Read the rest of this article here:

http://lymedisease.org.au/about-lyme-disease/interpreting-lyme-disease-blood-tests/