Folk, I´m not arguing that any one test is 100% reliable, in fact I was arguing the opposite, and since this is the case, I don´t think statements such as 95% of people with ME have Lyme are 100% reliable either. However, if you say that (for instance) 80% of people with ME have some sign of exposure to Lyme, compared to say 10% in controls, that to me would be a fairly strong indication that Lyme has something to do with a lot of ME cases.
As for false positives not ´making up` for false positives, if you go back and read what I wrote again, I did not claim that the true rate of Lyme in Lerner´s patients is likely to be the same as that De Meirler purports to find in his patients, only that the true rate in Lerner´s patients is likely to be higher than what he currently observes. When I said logical, I was referring to the faulty logic of using a two-tier test to diagnose an illness, since the sensitivity will be limited by the least sensitive test, which in this case seems to be the ELISA, and to make matters worse it is used first (so some patients will never know that their Western Blot´s would have been positive, since they have a negative ELISA). Therefore a more sensitive test (such as the WB or LTT-Elispot) which is not limited by a less sensitive one (such as the ELISA), will by definition pick up more cases of Lyme, assuming that the specificity of the three tests is the same.
Also, the difference between a diagnosis of Lyme and one of ME is considerable in my opinión, since the first has a recognized cause and treatments, while the second doesn´t. It´s like the difference between being diagnosed with Malaria and being diagnosed as suffering from mal aria (the symptoms might have been the same in some cases, but the second is potentially a much more useful diagnosis). So if you were suggesting that one diagnosis has as much explanatory potential as the other, I would have to disagree.
