Waiting for a cure: Lyme disease author sees science as salvation

by Robert Miller

STAFF WRITER

Article Last Updated: 07/08/2008 06:30:18 AM EDT

In 1993, hoping to raise their two sons away from the mean streets of

Queens, author Pamela Weintraub and her husband Mark made a circle on

a map with Grand Central Station as the bull's eye.

Working from that central point out, they chose the beautiful wooded

New York town of Chappaqua as their life's destination.

Welcome to what she calls Lymelands -- the New York-Connecticut

suburbs where Lyme disease is endemic.

"It would be the biggest mistake of our lives,'' Weintraub writes in

her new book "Cure Unknown; Inside the Lyme Epidemic'' about the

history and treatment of Lyme disease in the United States.

"If only we'd known how infected we'd get from living on that land

and how much skepticism we'd face from local schools and doctors, if

only we'd understood that we, ourselves, would be the bulls-eye, we

would have never left Queens.''

Thanks to the ticks in the woods near her home, Weintraub, her

husband and both her sons would become severely ill with the disease

and force the family to move to Stamford. Her younger son, David, is

still suffering from a re-infection he picked up at Purchase College

in New York.

At various times, they suffered from headaches, fatigue, arthritis,

and in Weintraub's cases "a buzzing'' that coursed through her

muscles.

"It felt like electricity going through my body,'' she said.

But living with Lyme gave Weintraub both the insight and the dogged

ambition to find out some truths about the disease.

Read the rest at http://www.newstime s.com:80/ healthylife/ ci_9815689

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Contact the author, Robert Miller, and thank him for a balanced story.

at bmiller@newstimes. com

I got my book at Barnes and Noble.

Ann