Senate Enquiry: ACCESS TO DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT FOR PEOPLE IN AUSTRALIA WITH TICK-BORNE DISEASES.

15/1/25

Committee Secretary

Senate Standing Committees on Community Affairs

PO Box 6100

Parliament House 

Canberra ACT 2600

Subject: Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Access to Diagnosis and Treatment for Tick-Borne Diseases

Dear Committee Members,

Please consider my submission into your enquiry for Australians to access proper diagnosis and treatment into tick-borne diseases. 

I sit at the intersection of both personal and professional experience with tick-borne diseases. 

In 2017 I suffered a debilitating relapsing fever type of Borrelia contracted in the sand dunes of Lancelin, Western Australia during a camping trip with my young family. There were literally billions of tiny nymph ticks swarming over the dunes, and over the sand at the oceans edge. Small enough to walk through the zipped up mosquito netting in our tent. Smaller than the grains of sand they scurried over.

After that, I experienced what at first seemed to be a flu. Drenching fevers, flu body aches, migraines, nausea. 5 days in bed in a blacked out room. The feel of my toddlers breath on my skin was too painful to bear. 

The month later, it happened again. Lasting 7 days. 

28 days later the debilitating pain, fever, sweats, migraines returned for 9 days. 

In the weeks between I was fine, then within a few hours, I was back in bed with blankets over the windows to block out the extra light seeping around the edges of my block out curtains. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t parent my two young sons, I couldn’t eat. The fever was so drenching I slept on towels that my husband could swap out for me when I saturated them. 

After the third month, I knew it wasn’t a flu. No flu relapses like that with the same symptoms every 28 days. Worsening each month. The only possibility I found that consul cause that was a tick-borne relapsing fever. Various types of borellia have that symptom presentation.

At that time, I’d been a Naturopath for 8 years, I had a busy paediatric and prenatal clinic serving woman and young children. I had enough clinical understanding to start asking deeper questions about my symptoms and a decent clinical network of other doctors and practitioners to turn to with my concerns. Luckily my family Dr was already one of the only two Dr’s in Perth literate enough to even recognise a tick-borne disease and brave enough to dare to treat a disease that the state and federal health departments, the AMA and AHPRA would tell them doesn’t exist in Australia. 

I consider myself lucky for 3 reasons. 1) I received a relatively fast diagnosis, because I knew who to go to, which saved me years of suffering. 2) I was already a health specialist, so I understood how to care for my body and support my healing. 3) the relapsing fever type of Borrelia species I had gave me 2-3 decent weeks a month where my cognitive capacity wasn’t affected, so I could research and apply my education and experience to map out my own healing pathway. 

Using a combination of antibiotics, herbal medicine and naturopathic treatments, I’ve been in remission since January 2018. My experience with a tick borne disease opened my eyes to the lack of information, testing, specialists and treatment in Australia. To how hard it is to recover and to receive the clinical guidance that we deserve. 

Ironically, I was able to access antibiotics, because I also suffer adult acne and rosacea. Not because I had a tick-borne disease. 

In Australia it’s not ok for a woman to be cosmetically blemished, but it’s ok if she suffers or dies because she is denied life-improving antibiotics for an internationally recognised infection.

After my own suffering, I pivoted my clinical practice to focus on that lost, misdiagnosed and misunderstood patient population. I’ve seen hundreds of patients with tick-borne diseases since late 2017. The vast majority of which were acquired in Australia. An overwhelming number of my patients experience significant improvement when they are treated for their tick acquired infections using Naturopathic medicine. Some would benefit from antibiotics too if they were available to them. 

Tick borne disease symptoms vary wildly based on the type and number of infections contracted, how long they’ve been sick and what their health was before they contracted their infection/s. But unanimously, my patients have been denied care, diagnosis, and effective treatments but allied health professionals. 

In my patients, the average time they are sick is 13 years before diagnosis. 

The consensus that we don’t have “Lyme” in Australia and therefore our doctors have no training or experience in recognising and diagnosing any of the numerous tick-borne infections we do have or any of the novel Borrelia infections that we do have is costing Australian patients their health and livelihoods. Not only do our doctors not know about the infections that we do have, they are actively discouraged from treating Lyme disease and other tick borne diseases even when they were acquired internationally. 

If a patient is lucky enough to find a sensitive doctor with an open mind, who does run one of the blood tests for a recognised tick infection such as scrub typhus, the Doctor generally has no knowledge to also run tests for the other infections such as bartonella, babesia or other rickettsia types. And if the original test comes back positive, they offer a woefully inadequate short course of a single antibiotic and wipe their hands after “treating” the infection with no understanding that a longer course can prevent the development of DSCATT or that Australian ticks can carry multiple infections that require different classes of antibiotics and different initial treatment lengths. There is also a lack of understanding that it is difficult to check an antibody response to this infections immediately after bite as well as in chronic infections, because the infections themselves alter the patients immune response reducing their antibody formation to infections such as borellia and bartonella. 

As the first option most patients turn to with their symptoms, every GP in Australia needs to know the types of our tick-borne diseases, their major presenting symptoms and how to effectively treat them as their patients first line of defence.  

They also need to understanding the symptoms of overseas acquired Borellia burgdorferi and acknowledge how often Australians travel overseas and spend time in nature while they are there. These simple changes will save countless people from debilitating symptoms and loss of quality of life.

If GP’s could recognise and treat initial infections more effectively, it would improve the daily quality of life of our citizens and reduce the development of DSCATT. 

Diagnosis within Australia is woefully inadequate for borrelia species. The novel strains we have here have not been included in our tests as we focus solely on Borrelia burgdorferi- which may be of use to our International travellers, but is not useful to patients with Australian acquired infections. This leaves our citizens needing to pay $1500+ to utilise overseas labs that test for extra types of borrelia which may cross-react with our novel types. Species such as the relapsing fever types that caused my own sickness. 

In my 8 years of clinical experience treating 100’s of tick-borne disease patients, Naturopathy and herbal treatments excel at treating the long term infections and repairing the damage that occurs from these complex infections when patients have been suffering for years or decades. It’s unparalleled in that patient group. 

However, treatment using the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society guidelines for the treatment of tick-borne diseases using multiple antibiotic strains for 6+ months is the most effective initial treatment I’ve witnessed my patients undergo and it it also necessary for some of my chronically ill patients to receive it as a adjunctive therapy to what I offer them. We currently have two GP’s in Australia with that training and experience. Both are very close to retirement age. 

Antibiotics can kill infections effectively, but herbal medicine is far superior at repairing the organs and modulating the immune system. If GPs could better recognise and treat initial symptoms, there would be fewer debilitated patients who need my expertise and my clinical days could be spent once again seeing happy patients having healthy babies, rather than my current very sick patients riddled with fatigue, pain, neurological and psychological symptoms experiencing extreme suffering. 

Our patients are in a crisis situation. They need better awareness in front-line medical professionals. And in my opinion that needs to focus initially on training GP’s and removing the punitive restrictions that they face if they treat tick-borne disease patients. Training then needs to extend to all allied health professionals as a number of my patients have sought me out after having a chiropractor, optometrist (“cat-scratch fever” from bartonella infections can have an optical involvement) or nurse practitioner discuss the possibility that their complex and chronic health condition could be lyme-like illness. 

Ignoring the very real human costs of allowing people to suffer needlessly by denying them treatments and diagnosis, the comparatively small upfront cost in training and utilising existing antibiotics for a proper treatment length, would have kept many of my patients in the workforce, paying taxes and having children. All things with a long term positive effect to our economy. Disabled people cost our economy far more than healthy people. 

Yours sincerely, 

Briana Gunn 

Clinical Naturopath