Despite thousands of Aussies claiming they suffer or suffered for Lyme Disease, there's no evidence it exists Down Under and the bacteria behind it does not exist in local animals or ticks, which infect humans through their bites.

Lyme Disease is characterized by high temperature and headaches in the early stages, which often progresses to memory loss, joint pain, and even facial palsy if untreated.  But health officials have long maintained that the disease is not here.  They're supported by the new report in Monday's Medical Journal of Australia; it says that unless patients had been overseas, they likely received false positive test results. 

That isn't good news for patients who've experienced symptoms mistaken for Lyme Disease who are looking for relief from long-term treatment with antibiotics for what's now being referred to as "Lyme disease-like illness", something that's unnecessary and contributes to the larger problem to antibiotic resistance.

"Until there is strong evidence from well performed clinical studies that bacteria present in Australia cause a chronic debilitating illness that responds to extended antibiotic therapy, treating patients with so-called 'Lyme disease-like illness' with prolonged intravenous or oral antibiotic therapy is both unjustifiable and unethical," says the report.  "(It) is likely to do much more harm than good."

The report - by ACT Pathology executive director Professor Peter Collignon and his co-author Dr. Gary Lum, principal medical adviser with the federal health department - says these patients might be infected with some other form of tick-borne bacteria.  But it hasn't been identified yet.

Lyme Disease is named after the town of Lyme, Connecticut, where doctors identified a group of infections during the mid-1970s.  Reports of the symptoms of what would be called Lyme Disease were noted in medical histories for centuries before.  In fact, the bacteria most-associated with Lyme Disease - Borrelia burgdorferi - has been around for thousands of years; scientists found it in the mummified remains of Otzi the Iceman, whose body was found by hikers in a thawing glacier along the border of Italy and Austria in 1991.