Nanterre (AFP)

They accuse the screening tests of not having detected their disease in time: 93 patients with Lyme disease, transmitted by tick bites, on Thursday assigned two laboratories to market "defective products".

Patients, who sue the Italian laboratories DiaSorin and American Bio-Rad before the court in Nanterre, are standing up against diagnostic tests of the "Elisa" type, supposed to allow to detect Borrélia, the bacteria responsible for the disease from Lyme.

However, these tests "produce false positives and false negatives", argue the plaintiffs' lawyers, Julien Fouray and Catherine Faivre, who launched this collective action - "Lymaction" - in 2016, stressing that the reliability of the tests is "contested by part of the infectious disease community".

The "Elisa" tests, the first step in screening for the disease, are based on a blood test and have been systematically used since 2006 to detect the disease in a patient, under a protocol established by the health authorities.

According to the two lawyers of the bar of Epinal, these tests detect "between three and five pathogenic strains identified while there are twenty, according to the National Reference Center of Strasbourg".

- "Anxiety prejudice" -

They are therefore "defective products" and "the manufacturers are directly liable for the prejudice resulting from anxiety, in patients, from the uncertainty attached to the test results," explains Mr. Fouray.

Lyme disease is easily cured by taking antibiotics, when it is taken care of early, but is difficult to identify in its late forms because its symptoms can be numerous and are not specific (headache, nausea, pain joint and muscle, neurological problems, etc.).

Neither the lawyer nor the management of DiaSorin could be contacted to comment on the action brought against them. A spokesperson for Bio-Rad contacted by AFP did not wish to communicate "on a procedure in progress".

After this first judicial round, there will be "other subpoenas" before civil courts in the months to come in Paris and Bobigny, underlines Me Fouray.

And "nearly half a thousand plaintiffs" will appeal to the criminal in Paris, he continues, however wishing to remain discreet about this procedure, launched in February 2018, before the hearing on Thursday.

The 600 patients that the two lawyers represent in "Lymaction" "in any case expect a lot" from these procedures, underlines Me Faivre.

Diagnosis and treatment of Lyme borreliosis have been recurrent controversial issues since the first official recommendations issued in 2006.

The High Authority for Health must convene a new working group in March to work on recommendations on screening and management of the disease updated by the summer.

The latest, developed with the help of patient associations, date from July 2018. But the Academy of Medicine and several medical institutions immediately criticized them, urging health professionals not to follow them. Twenty of these institutions even published their own "recommendations" last year, leaving patients and practitioners in the dark.

In France, Lyme disease - the number of cases is probably underestimated because it is not a notifiable pathology - affected more than 68,500 people in 2018, or an average of 104 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, according to latest estimates published by the French public health agency.

© 2020 AFP