Enlarge/ This highly magnified scanning electron microscopic (SEM) image depicts a number of spirochete bacteria, atop a culture of cotton-tail rabbit epithelium cells. (credit: CDC/David Cox)
A California man is the first person in the Western US to have a confirmed infection with a curious bacterium that has lurked in the region for over two decades—and researchers fear the pathogen may finally be emerging there.
The bacterium is Borrelia miyamotoi, a corkscrew-shaped spirochete that is spread by black-legged ticks and causes a rare disease called Hard Tick Relapsing Fever. The spiraled microbe is a relative of the more well-known Borrelia burgdorferi spirochete, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. But B. miyamotoi has many notable differences from its cousin, including its inconspicuous spread.
While Lyme disease was first reported in 1975 in the US and B. burgdorferifirst identified in 1982, B. miyamotoi was only first identified in ticks in 1995 in Japan. But once discovered, it was soon found in many other places, including in Europe and many parts of North America. Ticks collected in California as early as 2000 were found to carry the new spirochete, for example. Yet, the first cases of disease caused by B. miyamotoi in the US were only first confirmed in 2013 in the Northeast. Until now, no confirmed cases have been reported in the western part of the country, despite the bacterium’s prevalence in adult black-legged ticks (Ixodes pacificus) being similar to that of B. burgdorferi, the Lyme disease spirochete.
by #AI April 13, 2023 · Automatic
