Madison Area Lyme Support Group

Sadness washed over me as I walked through the house in Lyme, Connecticut, where Mary Luckett “Polly” Murray used to live. Built in 1853, it was located in a rural area surrounded by forests, rolling hills, and cranberry bogs. The house needed a fresh coat of paint, and the yard had gone to seed. The new owner had recently divorced and hadn’t replaced the furniture his ex-wife had taken. There were mattresses on the floor and unfinished projects spilling out of the garage. The owner and his dog seemed unwell. Taking in the scene, I thought, this looks like the flotsam and jetsam of another family destroyed by Lyme disease.

The previous owner, Polly Murray, was an artist, a mother of four sick children, and the disease’s first unofficial epidemiologist. She died in 2019 of Alzheimer’s disease. In the 1960s, she began documenting the bizarre constellation of symptoms that afflicted her family and neighbors living along the Connecticut River. In April, I visited the Medical Historical Library at Yale University to review her original Lyme patient case histories, turning back the pages of time in search of the origins of this mysterious outbreak.

These first-hand accounts raised a lot of questions for me. Why did it take 11 years, from 1964 to 1975, for the medical system to take notice and take action? In 1975, the investigation was assigned to Allen Steere, MD, a young Yale rheumatology fellow who had just returned from a CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) assignment in Liberia. Why did Steere narrow the symptomology so soon in the investigation and downplay most of the neurological symptoms? Why did it take six more years to identify the underlying tick-borne bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi? Did CDC-EIS, the U.S. organization that investigates suspicious disease outbreaks, find it strange that three tick-borne diseases suddenly appeared a few miles from the Plum Island biological weapons lab?

As I looked through the boxes of her notes, I was struck by the unusual nature of the symptoms and the point-source geographic origin. What happened there, and what can we learn from Polly’s eyewitness account?  (See link for article)

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For more:

• https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2019/07/24/lyme-heroine-polly-murray-dies/
• https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2020/09/25/why-should-we-care-about-lyme-disease-a-colorful-tale-of-government-conflicts-of-interest-probable-bioweaponization-and-pathogen-complexity/
• https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2018/12/28/the-history-of-lyme-disease-dr-burrascano/
• https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2019/02/22/why-mainstream-lyme-msids-research-remains-in-the-dark-ages/  This link includes a summary of Burrascano’s video on the history of Lyme disease
• https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2022/06/14/the-history-of-lyme-disease-has-a-wisconsin-chapter-its-still-being-written/