My name is Marie de Prémonville, I’m French and aged 46.

Having been bitten multiple times by ticks as a teenager, I developed Lyme disease as a young adult. It took me 20 years to get to a correct diagnosis (I had been wrongly diagnosed with spondylarthritis and given cortisone for years, with no improvement at all, and my health had kept deteriorating).

My daughter, now aged 8, was bitten 5 years ago and got seriously ill 3 months after (she had received a 2-week antibiotic treatment that obviously wasn’t enough). We have been struggling together for 5 years, after almost 20 years of suffering on my part, after having seen my little child in unbearable distress and pain…

Fortunately for us, after 18 months of medical wandering, a naturopath helped us meet an immunologist who believed in chronic Lyme (thank God our Elisa and Western Blot were both positive, we were so lucky). He treated us for 3 years, regardless of the risks he was personally taking as to medical authorities and helped us out of the worst of our symptoms.

Life is still very complicated for us, but hadn’t he been there, hadn’t he agreed to help us in opposition with official guidelines, neither my daughter nor I would be in a state to write this message today. The epidemic keeps spreading, people are getting seriously ill every day, families are destroyed… And denial persists!

How can you look at yourself in the mirror, leaving millions of people in pain and despair? The new guidelines on the chronic disease MUST take into account up-to-date scientific literature on Lyme and take the full measure of the sanitary scandal threatening people worldwide! Don’t let us die in silence and indifference!