On January 1, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched 15 new medical diagnostic codes for Lyme disease complications. But much to the dismay of the committee members who ferried the codes through the long approval process, 1C1G.2, the code for congenital Lyme borreliosis, went missing before publication.
In response, Professor Jack Lambert, MD, PhD, a committee member and a U.K. an expert on infections in pregnancy, has developed a free physician CME course that reviews the evidence for maternal-fetal transmission of Lyme disease and makes the case for why this code needs to be reinstated into the International Classification of Diseases, 11th Edition (ICD-11), the worldwide data foundation for analyzing health statistics.
He also explains how the ICD-11 “deciders” only reviewed a subset (12 of 58) of the important studies, ignoring the 46 other papers that shows that congenital Lyme is a real problem that urgently needs to be tracked and studied. He then goes on to review the evidence in the most important papers, documenting maternal-fetal transmission and the poor outcomes that resulted in disability or death of newborns.
In the end, Dr. Lambert argues that by providing an easy-to-access code for congenital transmission, we will more rapidly be able to understand the true burden of the disease worldwide. You can listen to this and his other course, “Congenital Lyme & co-infections,” on Invisible’s Montecalvo Platform for Tick-Borne Illness Education website.
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