Isabelle filed a complaint against X for aggravated deception. The Elisa and Western-Blot test failed to detect his disease.
Isabelle A.’s way of the cross to obtain a diagnosis is not unique. Faced with the unreliability of the two Lyme disease screening tests used in France, many patients find themselves in diagnostic error. A situation that condemned this forty-year-old mother to use a wheelchair. This Wednesday, she therefore decided to file a complaint against X for aggravated deception.
Isabelle had initially felt tingling on one side of the body, which then spread throughout the body, day and night, associated with great fatigue. Despite repeated hospitalizations, it took him ten months for the disease to be identified.
Animals better diagnosed than humans
“A sample was sent to a veterinary laboratory. In fact, my file had to be passed off as that of a female dog, ”she says indignantly in the columns of the Parisian this Friday. After negative Elisa and Western-Blot tests, her husband, who had documented well, still had doubts. Doubts reinforced by a consultation carried out with Professor Christian Perronne, specialist in the disease at the hospital of Garches (Hauts-de-Seine).
The couple then decided to perform a PCR, which doctors cannot prescribe in France for humans… but which is available for animals. This test, authorized in Germany and the United States, is based on DNA analysis; he had allowed this patient to name her symptoms.
Obsolete protocols
To remedy this French delay, the Minister of Health announced in October the creation of a “Lyme plan”, aimed at reviewing the recommendations dating from 2006, and which patient advocacy associations consider outdated. Several axes will be reassessed. Research, information and protection of the general public against ticks will be strengthened. But it is above all the revision of the diagnostic and care protocols, announced by Marisol Touraine, which was expected by the associations.
“We were finally able to set up a timetable for the action plan against Lyme disease,” explained on January 20 to Why actor Corinne Daurès, Occitanie manager of the France Lyme association. A consultation will begin next month with two representatives of patient associations, and a significant amount of doctors. They will be involved in the development of the national diagnostic and care protocol (PNDS). “
Time plays against patients
Lyme disease is transmitted by ticks. But in the absence of signs of bite – which is common because the red spot, which betrays the disease, is not always visible – the very nonspecific symptoms direct doctors to other pathologies, Guillain syndrome -Stopped with depression, going through fibromyalgia.
If it is followed quickly after the bite, a simple antibiotic treatment allows a total cure, however, in a few weeks (even if the possible resurgence despite the antibiotics is debated in the scientific community). On the other hand, when the symptoms set in, it is often very difficult to get rid of them.
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