When I was diagnosed with Lyme disease after 24 months of seeing specialist after specialist who could not tell me what was wrong with me, though I was getting sicker and sicker, and I was eventually diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, I often wondered why this happened to me.
Fast forward six months from being diagnosed with Lyme and I am introduced to one of the most amazing women I have met in my life. Tireless, fearless and not asking for permission to change the world, Tammy Crawford (who's daughter went on the same journey as me as with so many diagnosed with lime) in two years has become a dynamo in the world of Lyme advocacy and science. A chance encounter on a plane caused her to seek out scientists from TGen Arizona and ask them to create a diagnostic tool for Lyme so that patients can get the answers they need sooner than the average two years. Why? Because if left untreated for more than three weeks, Lyme becomes entrenched in the body, wreaking havoc and going largely unseen by our body's immune defenses. Chronic Lyme is thought to lead to a whole host of auto immune diseases in including multiple sclerosis, ALS, parkinson's, alzheimers, fibromyalgia and many others. Current tests for Lyme disease are only 50 percent accurate and with the CDC reporting 300,000 cases of Lyme each year, the numbers are likely double or even triple that number.
It is my honor and my privilege to work with Tammy and FocusOnLyme.org to bring awareness to this disease and the work she is doing to bring good science to market.
We are excited that our work has made it into genome.com a well respected trade publication. Next week we've booked Tammy on Horizon with Ted Simons on KAET/PBS, we are working on a story for the local ABC Affiliate and we've secured stories in the Arizona Daily Sun, Frontdoors Magazine and the radio station KTAR with host Mike Weinstein.
