Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many people have been diagnosed with Lyme disease in each clinical commissioning group area in each year since 2009.

Public Health England (PHE) supports the National Health Service by issuing information leaflets for doctors on the recognition of the signs and symptoms of Lyme disease, holding general practitioner training days and worked to raise awareness, including on the distribution of the disease.

Acute Lyme disease with an erythema migrans rash is primarily a clinical diagnosis. Public Health England reports data for reference laboratory confirmed cases. Cases confirmed by reference laboratory testing record only a referring laboratory address, not the originating centre therefore this data is not available by clinical commissioning group. Data on reference laboratory confirmed cases can be found in the PHE annual Zoonoses reports, available at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/zoonoses-reports

Lyme disease is considerably more common in central Europe than in the United Kingdom, and the incidence varies by both country and region within each country. According to the World Health Organization, Central Europe and the Baltic States have the highest incidence. Germany is close to many of the high risk areas, so inherently has more cases. The German data also reports all clinically diagnosed cases based on the characteristic rash, and not the laboratory confirmed cases. The UK only reports laboratory confirmed cases and so the numbers in Germany would appear higher even without the higher risk of Lyme in that region.