Additional Comments—Senator
John Madigan and Senator Zhenya Wang
1.1
The Department of Health must initiate an Australia-wide health sector
education program to communicate to doctors, nurses, hospital staff and other
health professionals the ongoing discrimination and vilification of those
suffering symptoms of Lyme disease; that such responses by health professionals
are unethical, unprofessional and counter to the credo of 'do no harm'.
1.2
The Department of Health must initiate a program of independent,
properly funded prioritised research to look into the incidence of Lyme disease
and Lyme-like illness in Australia.
1.3
The Department of Health must initiate an immediate public health
education response to alert all Australians about the dangers of ticks, symptoms
of Lyme disease and Lyme-like illness, and appropriate responses in the way it
has done for other infections, such as Zika virus. There must be an immediate
public awareness program for health professionals and the public about correct
tick removal. We take this opportunity to refer to media reports of
four major advertising campaigns under the Abbott and Turnbull governments
to at least $84.5 million. Public advocacy expenditure is not an unusual
request in this case. We refer to testimony given to the committee by Professor
Peter Collignon who said:
We should avoid people being bitten by ticks ... I think we
need a tick education program.[1]
1.4
The chief medical officer of every state and territory plus that of the
Commonwealth must come together as a matter of urgency – along with patient
representatives – to show leadership and devise a co-ordinated response.
1.5
Rules governing Medicare must be expanded to enable pathologists to
undertake a suite of testing to respond appropriate to tic-borne illnesses.
1.6
We take this opportunity to highlight Dr Richard Schloeffel's evidence
to the committee comparing the status of Lyme disease in Australia today with
the onset of HIV. Dr Schloeffel is medical director of Pymble Grove Health
Centre. He is also an adviser to the tick-borne diseases unit at Sydney
University and he has been treating Lyme-like illness for 20 years.
Additionally Dr Schloeffel is chairperson, Australian Chronic Infectious and
Inflammatory Disease Society.
1.7
Dr Schloeffel stated:
In 1983 I was a GP in Bellingen; I was only very young. I had
a few patients and they were gay men who were going to the bathhouses in San
Francisco. They developed illnesses that I had never heard of before—strange
pneumonia, strange gut infections—and they became immunosuppressed and they
died.
So I took an interest in this. Then by the late 80s we were
starting see a lot of these people, generally gay men, and we had the bowling
ball and the Grim Reaper. We found a virus that caused an infection that
lowered the immune response, and when the immune response was low enough people
got opportunistic infections.
We had a whole army of scientists working this out, finding
the virus and developing medications to prevent the virus from replicating, so
we actually stopped the epidemic. There was an intellectual process, but it did
not happen until children and women who got blood transfusions, and kids who
had haemophilia from the blood, started to get sick and die. They went, 'Oh my
God! We have to do something'.
Before it was only gay men, so it did not matter. There was
the same sort of thought process among the medical profession, that some people
are better than others and there was no emergency. Then it became very urgent
and it was extremely urgent. I buried probably 100 of my male patients who had
this disease before we had a treatment. Now, I was a GP treating their
co-infections trying to work out how to help their immunity.
I was an integrated doctor, even then. Then I went to Byron
Bay and worked up there. They were all coming up there to die and I did
palliative care. I saw all this, and it was all too late for them. There were a
lot of patients that we were able to treat in the early 90s who went on to AZT
and the associated medication. They are still alive and still well, just on
medication to suppress the virus. Now that is one germ, one entity.
The thing is that this illness is a multisystem infection
with multiple organisms. Where people get it from is vague. It is sexually
transmitted, it comes from blood transfusions, its congenital and it comes from
vectors. The array of symptoms is enormous, which makes it different to AIDS,
but the problem is the same. If you deny the illness is there but you have all
these people sick, then what is wrong with them? If you say to them, 'Yes, you
are sick. There's nothing you can do,' or, 'You're just putting it on,' that is
not real medicine. That is denialism.[2]
1.8
Dr Schloeffel also spoke about the arrogance and miasma of much of
Australia’s medical orthodoxy on this issue.
1.9
He told the committee:
I cannot talk for other doctors and their thought processes,
but I would like to say to every doctor in Australia, 'Wake up to yourselves.
Start listening that we've got a real illness. Let's have a proper
conversation. Let's do the proper science. Let's fund it.' We have tens of
thousands of people with Lyme-like illness and co-infections, some of whom are
dying, and they do not get a cent. Where is the research money for these
infections? We have to put money into it, we have to have a proper conversation
and the denialism has to stop, because that is actually malpractice. It is
actually negligence on the part of the medical profession.[3]
1.10
The time for a co-ordinated
response by our health authorities is now. The lives of thousands of Australians
are at stake.
Senator John Madigan Senator
Zhenya Wang
Navigation: Previous Page | Contents