The HPA no longer exists and Lyme disease testing is carried out on behalf of Public Health England by the Rare and Imported Pathogens Laboratory (for patients in England, Wales and Northern Ireland) and by the National Lyme Borreliosis Testing Laboratory at Raigmore Hospital (for patients in Scotland). The test kits they use for western blots have been independently verified by five scientific teams and they have a sensitivity of 57% at the best estimate and just 23% at the worst, which means blood infected with Lyme borreliosis that is tested using these kits stand a statistical probability of obtaining a negative result ranging from 43% to 77%. This is partly because of the limited native antigens in the test: there are 25 strains of Borrelia which cause Lyme borreliosis and the test kits currently used by these two testing laboratories only contain two of them, excluding the strain (Borrelia Garinii) which is proven to be the commonest strain in the United Kingdom.
The charity I represent, Caudwell Lyme Disease, considers this an unacceptably high rate of false negatives and is currently in negotiation with Jeremy Hunt and Simon Stevens to campaign for a superior and more sensitive test.
Public Health England has withdrawn the allegations made by HPA against foreign testing laboratories which use CE marked testing kits in formally accredited laboratories as unfounded. Therefore I request that you remove this misleading information from your website and provide more reliable information, which can be obtained from the following web page:
https://caudwell-lyme.net/lyme-disease-testing/
You may also be interested to learn that in a survey of 500 Lyme disease patients, Caudwell Lyme Disease found that 47% of patients with Lyme disease confirmed by erythema migrans rash or positive serology had been given a diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome by their doctor.