Crowdfunding meets goal to procure Lyme disease program files
VANCOUVER — The Globe and Mail
Published
Saying she was frustrated because patients weren’t being adequately diagnosed or treated for Lyme disease, Liz Zubek quit British Columbia’s new Complex Chronic Disease Program (CCDP) in June.
Now, Dr. Zubek has teamed up with Lyme disease patients in a crowdfunding project to pay a freedom of information (FOI) fee for the release of medical documents related to the program’s management.
Gwen Barlee, a Lyme disease patient and policy director of Wilderness Committee, launched the project Monday morning and by noon had hit the target, raising half the total $2,160 fee. Dr. Zubek had promised to match dollar-for-dollar any donations made, so she will contribute the balance.
“I worked at the Complex Chronic Disease Program. It was a $1.2-million program, and yet we were not able to do anything that was in our mandate to do,” Dr. Zubek said about why she was supporting Ms. Barlee’s project.
“We were supposed to be looking at better testing for Lyme disease patients, yet there was no facility to improve the testing or to order the testing that we needed from elsewhere. … we were not able to treat the Lyme disease patients. There was no IV setup there. And we were completely at a stalemate to actually be able to meet the mandate of the program,” said Dr. Zubek, who helped start the CCDP in 2013.
there is lots of ticks in Victoria Bc ….For 2 yrs we kept telling specialist and doctors that grandkid had Lyme disease .We have been called ignorant until a Lyme test was taken in the USA that prove that they are ignorant ,that she had Lyme disease and that they doctors in Victoria should read up on it