I have been afflicted with Lyme Disease for over 5 years. Getting the word out about the dangers of lyme is difficult at the best of times. It is therefore with a glad heart that October is turning out to be the month that the Ontario and national media are finally beginning to dig deeper into claims that lyme disease is affecting many Canadians and that the medical system is ill-equipped to diagnose and accurately test for it.

In a nutshell:

• Global – Sunday, October 11, 2009 @6:30 p.m. ET and again @11:30 p.m. ET. The Lyme Action Group has been instrumental in setting up and will be taking part in this “16:9 The Bigger Picture” in-depth nationwide piece on lyme disease and its dangers for Canadians. The day after the broadcast, the story will be available online on the Global site. Right after the live show, Global will be hosting a live blog event for viewers to interact with reporters, producers and guests. This blog event will go live immediately after the program.
• CTV – end of October. W-Five (date and time still to be confirmed). Paula Todd and the CTV crew came over to our place this past week for about 4 hours, following a number of contacts with the producer over the course of the previous 3 weeks. As well as our involvement, there are a number of other parts to this investigative news piece. More details to follow…

Hopefully this is just the beginning. Quick news pieces don’t do that much to raise awareness of such a complex illness. BUT, investigative news pieces which require a lot of in-depth research on the part of producers and news anchors are just what is needed to convince people that the threat is real and has so far been under-reported and over-simplified.