New method for testing for Lyme disease may be available soon

As many of you know the issue of Lyme disease and increasing awareness and testing for this disease is something that I have worked to bring to the forefront while I have served on the Board of Supervisors.

In 2010, I brought Temple Douglas, a student of Thomas Jefferson High School at the time, before the Board in recognition of her efforts to develop a better Lyme test. Temple had seen the issues with blood based tests which have to wait for antibodies to be present to detect the disease.

Building on Temple’s work, Dr. Emanuel Petricoin, a University Professor and Co-Director at the Center of Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine in the School of Systems Biology at George Mason University, and his partners have been working to further the success of this project.

If successful, this new test method could help the residents of Fairfax County and our neighbor Loudoun County, the two jurisdictions in Virginia with the highest number of Lyme cases, as well as millions of Americans in the Lyme infested areas of the North East, the upper Midwest, and areas of California. Such a breakthrough would be historic in the fight against Lyme.

That is why I am happy to let you know that the George Mason University Center for Applied Proteomoics and Molecular Medicae together with Ceres Nanosciences, a local Virginia company, will begin rolling out a new method of testing for Lyme disease.

This new testing method uses the patient’s urine to see if he or she is positive for Lyme disease at a very early stage, which allows the patient to fight the disease early on.

In clinical trials this test has achieved a sensitivity of virtually 100 percent for early stage Lyme disease and has shown a reversal from positive to negative, if the patient was successfully treated for the disease. Current tests are inaccurate during the early onset of the disease.

This is a truly remarkable achievement for our region and when more information becomes available I will be sure to make it known to the public. I have high hopes this will be an important step in fighting this horrible disease.

–From Pat Herrity’s April 28, 2015 e-newsletter to constituents