I wish to thank Roxanne Moore Saucier for her expert reporting of the Lyme disease problem in Maine (BDN, July 25). She, along with Geoff Beckett of the State Epidemiology Office and patient Bill Chinook, have given your readership a good look at this devastating illness and how it can effect our residents.

Physician and patient knowledge of tick-borne diseases must be heightened to a new level of awareness in our state, as the disease becomes more widespread. The costs to our people on a personal level, as well as state level, are devastating when tick bites are ignored, unidentified and misdiagnosed. Everyone agrees that early recognition and treatment is the most cost-effective way of limiting the long-term disabling effects of Borrelia Burgdorferi and its co-infections. The controversy over treatment for long-term, disseminated disease is recorded in news accounts all over the nation on a daily basis – let’s at least become knowledgeable about new-onset Lyme disease and prevent those patients from becoming embroiled in the debate.

I urge those who have a close encounter with a deer tick, please send it to our state epidemiology lab for identification and tracking. Lyme disease is rarely reported on publicly in our state, but according to the Maine Epidemiology Web site it is the sixth most reported infectious disease, more commonly reported than AIDS, Legionnaires, West Nile Virus and hepatitis, all illnesses we frequently hear about in the news.

Constance Dickey RN

Maine Lyme Disease

Support Group

Hampden