In response to Dr. Virginia Sherr’s letter in the May 19 issue on tick-borne diseases, the number of psychiatrists supporting this view has grown.

There is a continuing epidemic of tick-borne and other vector-borne diseases causing a massive burden of illness contributing to suffering, impairment, crime, disability, death, and economic loss afflicting children and adults. Some of those affected play a significant role in leading our civilization, shaping our culture, and impacting our survival as a species. As we learned from the Lyme-like spirochete, which causes syphilis, there is a need for psychiatrists to be more attentive to the psychological manifestations of infectious diseases.

Darwinian medicine has demonstrated the significance of infectious disease causing illness from an evolutionary perspective, that our bodies contain 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells, that there is increasing evidence infectious disease contributes to causing the common psychiatric syndromes, that patients with infectious encephalopathies are referred to psychiatrists with increasing frequency, and that recent perturbations of the environment have been advantageous to causative pathogens.

With the end of the Decade of the Brain, we need to enter the new millennium with a broader perspective that incorporates all the contributors of health and disease, including the greatest predator of man—the microbe.

Now is the time for APA to assume a more proactive position to protect our patients from harm and to assist us to achieve optimum treatment for affected patients.

We are pleased to report that APA has included the symposium "Microbes and Mental Illness" at the Institute on Psychiatric Services on October 25 in Philadelphia.

Although an official APA task force has not yet been formed, a group of psychiatrists and other concerned professionals organized a task force at the 1999 APA annual meeting. Since then, the group has grown and become quite active. We still need to mobilize APA to contend with the mental aspects of these infectious diseases and to help us fulfill our role as healers, humanitarians, advocates, and educators.

Robert C. Bransfield, M.D.

Red Bank, N.J.