Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the rate and extent of the spread of Lyme disease in (1) the United Kingdom, (2) other parts of the European Union, and (3) other parts of the world.

Public Health England monitors laboratory-confirmed Lyme disease (also known as Lyme borreliosis) in England and Wales, devolved administrations of Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate local arrangements in place.

The rate of laboratory-confirmed Lyme borreliosis and its regional distribution in England and Wales has not changed significantly in recent years, data for 2013 will be published shortly.

Assessment of Lyme borreliosis in other European Union (EU) countries is co-ordinated by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). Reporting systems and criteria are not standardised throughout EU countries and this data is not routinely collected by ECDC. Therefore as an assessment of Lyme borreliosis using routinely collected data across the EU is not available.

Reporting of Lyme borreliosis worldwide is co-ordinated by the World Health Organization (WHO) based on the heterogeneous reporting systems and criteria adopted by individual countries.