According to a recent post by Dorothy Kupcha Leland at Lymedisease.org, the CDC has recently revised the numbers of estimated cases of Lyme in the U.S. to 476,000 new cases per year. They have even retroactively adjusted estimates going back to 2010.
But, when the CDC reports cases, it's not so cut and dry as it sounds. Kupcha Leland explains that "'[r]eported cases' are those cases which have been thoroughly vetted and found to adhere to the CDC’s narrowly defined surveillance criteria." The responsibility of verifying and reporting cases falls on local agencies, and some do better jobs at it than others.
The new estimates are apparently based on insurance claims which coded for Lyme disease. However, medical diagnosis and treatment coding is not always cut and dry. Various factors can impact the accuracy and reliability of assessing the true number of annual Lyme disease cases through insurance reporting.
A quote from the CDC apparently argues that the new figure "likely includes some patients who were not actually infected.” To this Kupcha Leland rebuts that it is also likely that this figure excludes many misdiagnosed cases.
Click here to read the full article and Kupcha Leland's sources.
Post by C. Fisher
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