To Dye For

Have you ever heard of Polly Murray?
Probably not.

Have you ever heard of Lyme Disease?

Polly Murray is the reason we know about Lyme Disease. She is the mother who refused to take the illness plaguing her family, her neighbours family, her entire block lying down. For YEARS she harassed the CDC, who continually ignored her pleas. THIS IS CONNECTED, she was saying. THIS IS INFECTIOUS, she pleaded, while they chalked it up to a coincidental case of juvenile arthritis in all the children on her street. 

When they finally relented, they sent Alan Steere, a rheumatologist (not an infectious disease specialist) who determined it was in fact an infectious disease being spread by ticks in Lyme, Connetticut. What happens next is interesting. 

He looked at the infection through a rheumatologist lens and made some determinations about the disease that are contradicted to this day. He arbitrarily divided the symptoms up into major and minor categories. He then "cured lyme disease" by "eliminating all the major symptoms with 2 weeks of antibiotics", leaving only minor symptoms. He then invented something called post-lyme syndrome, which means, the minor symptoms you live with for the duration of your life because Steere "cured lyme disease". It's the standard by which every Doctor treats Lyme Disease today. And it's totally bogus. Thus was born, the controversy of Lyme Disease. 

My point is that a determined mother can change everything. And I'm determined to get food dye out of our food supply, no matter how many scientists and researchers and boards and regulating agencies tell me there's nothing I can do. They are not doing their job correctly, as far as I'm concerned, because I have seen first hand what 3 years of dye consumption can do to a dye-sensitive child. So I might as well be the right person for the job.