Lyme Disease

(asked on 25th June 2018) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans he has to establish an effective monitoring system to help determine the number of people in England with Lyme disease.


Answered by
Steve Brine Portrait
Steve Brine
This question was answered on 28th June 2018

The number of laboratory confirmed cases of Lyme disease in England is recorded by Public Health England (PHE) derived from PHE’s laboratory information database. At present, cases diagnosed clinically by general practitioners are not centrally recorded.

Notification by practitioners is never complete, and a recent review by the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating Centre for the Department concluded that no surveillance system would give a complete picture, although laboratory data was the most robust data source to follow long term trends. Further information is available at the following link:

https://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/cms/Publications/Systematicreviews/Prevalence,diagnosis,treatmentandpreventionofLymediseaseanevidencemapandfoursystematicreviews/tabid/3701/Default.aspx

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