Emergence of Lyme disease as a social problem: analysis of discourse using the media content.

Background: Chronic Lyme disease (LD) is a matter of debate worldwide and has emerged as a social problem. We aim to analyze the media content and describe the transformation process of a collective pain into a social problem in France.

Methods: Using social science methodology, a corpus of articles from 20 newspapers and videos from seven major TV stations from 1987 to 2017 were analyzed for discourse content.