Allen Steere

Dr. Allen Steere is a professor of rheumatology, a medical researcher, and the discoverer of Lyme disease. Steere discovered Lyme disease in 1976 when he noticed a cluster of people with similar unexplained symptoms, which other doctors initially believed were juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, in a heavily wooded Connecticut town called Lyme (and the next town over, which is conveniently named Old Lyme), though the bacteria responsible were not discovered until 1982. Steere was also a leader of the research for the Lyme vaccine, though it was taken off the market in 2002.

Chronic Lyme disease

Steere is an outspoken critic of so-called "chronic Lyme disease" - the belief that Lyme's infection of the body is persistent and not treatable with the two-to-five week antibiotic courses recommended by the people who actually do science and research and that kind of stuff. Steere believes that those who do suffer from Lyme-related symptoms after treatment do so because of autoimmune effects of the Lyme-causing bacteria, not because of persistent infection. He believes others never had Lyme in the first place, instead having either chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia. Despite the agreement of most medical experts that chronic Lyme disease is not real, a substantial number of patient "advocacy" groups and individual "advocates" arose to promote chronic Lyme diagnosis and treatment. Unfortunately for Steere, a major form of advocacy is intimidating, harassing, stalking, and writing death threats toward him.