A Saskatchewan Lyme Disease advocacy group says the provincial health authority is not representing those in Saskatchewan who have been diagnosed with the disease.
The Lyme Disease Board of Saskatchewan says they fear more people have been misdiagnosed with other diseases due to the doctor’s inability to properly diagnose patients.
President of the Lyme Disease Board Triant Steuart said the provincial government stating there has only one case of Lyme Disease in the last nine years isn’t true.
“My wife and I are two (people diagnosed), we are both positive with Borrelia Burgdorferi for Lyme Disease and there are hundreds of others in our group that are positive,” Steuart said. “The tests that we gotten were from Germany and the United States, and those tests are not recognized here.”
Steuart said this seems to be an issue not many people want to talk about.
“At this time, I’ve reached out to MLA’s on both sides of the aisle, none of them want to have a conversation,” Steuart said. “Federally, the health minister says they can’t help us in Saskatchewan because health care is a provincial issue, but when I try to talk provincially, the politicians don’t want to touch it with a 10-foot pole.”
Steuart said the College of Physicians have threatened doctors who were diagnosed with Lyme disease outside of Saskatchewan.
“The physician that saved my life, my wife’s life and he had roughly 40 other patients was told to stop treating us and had to disseminate us amongst other patients,” Steuart said. “He treated us with long-term antibiotics, he saved our lives. It’s like I’m in a bad Netflix movie here in Saskatchewan; this is really going on in the birthplace of healthcare.”
Some provinces, such as Ontario, have already started telling residents to get checked if they are bitten by a wood tick due to high numbers of infected ticks.
