Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I present the report of the Community Affairs References Committee on Lyme-like illness in Australia together with the Hansard record of proceedings and documents presented to the committee.

Ordered that the report be printed.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

This report consists of three chapters. We talk about the patients and we outline the details of how the inquiry was conducted and the background to Lyme disease. We also talk about testing for infection and treating the illness. I remind the chamber that this is in fact the committee's second report on this inquiry. We tabled an interim report in May, where we articulated some of the details around patient illness, the nature of the illness and the divided nature of the medical profession on this, and that people feel stigmatised, bullied and harassed and that that makes people sicker. We articulated in that report the need for some further inquiry and what the committee would do if, after the election, the Senate were minded to re-refer this issue to us: we would like, or needed, to look at the issues around testing for the infection and treating people.

The first chapter of this report is titled 'Putting patients first'. The reason that we articulated that is that that is what we think needs to happen. For too long it has gone unacknowledged in this country that people are really sick. There have been arguments about whether this is classic Lyme, chronic Lyme or Lyme-like illness. In fact, there is a growing consensus now that we should not call it Lyme at all and that we should be referring to it as something else. A number of other names have been suggested to avoid the stigma that goes with Lyme. It is not just the stigma; it is the fixation on actual Lyme.

What I should articulate here is that we have had a lot of evidence from hundreds and hundreds of submitters and from a number of people that appeared before us. There is continuing disagreement over how you test for the presence of Lyme. There is continued dispute over whether the bacteria is actually in this country or not. I always stuff up the pronunciation of the American version of the bacteria that affects this, Borreliaburgdorferiand there are other types in Europe and Asia. There is continued dispute over whether that actually exists in Australia. But, while that argument has been going on, people have been sick. There is now research—and we heard again of the research that has been done on identifying other pathogens in ticks. At the moment, people are referring to the illness more as a tick-borne illness, because new pathogens are being identified here in Australia. We are yet to identify whether they can be transmitted to humans and what impact those pathogens could have on human health.

We make 12 recommendations, and they address these issues. The 12 recommendations are around testing and around how we can support the patients that are sick. We talk about the need for the Australian government Department of Health to engage with stakeholders following the publication—and this is the only time I am going to attempt to say this; I am looking at Senator Moore, because she knows I cannot pronounce 'serological' very well—of the review by the National Serology Reference Laboratory, which is commonly known as NSRL.