Health & Medicine - Posted by Helen Dodson-Yale on Thursday, September 22, 2011 11:38 - 4 Comments 
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A new tick-borne disease, characterized by high fever, could be confused with Lyme disease. There are currently no diagnostic tests available, but Yale researchers have received funding to develop a diagnostic test procedure to look for cases of the new disease in the United States. (Credit: Geoffrey Attardo)
YALE U. (US) — Scientists have discovered a new tick-borne disease that may be infecting humans in the U.S. and elsewhere.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
The disease is caused by a spirochete bacterium called Borrelia miyamotoi—a distant relative to Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. The new bacterium, previously known only from ticks in Japan, was originally found in deer ticks in Connecticut in 2001, but it was not known if it also caused disease in humans.
The bacteria have since been found in all tick species that transmit Lyme disease throughout the United States and Europe.
By collaborating with a medical team studying tick-borne diseases in Russia, researchers led by Durland Fish, professor of epidemiology at Yale University, were able to compare disease symptoms in patients infected by the new spirochete in Russia with those having Lyme disease in the United States.
The new disease is characterized by high fever, which relapses without treatment and may be confused with Lyme disease. There are currently no diagnostic tests available, but Yale researchers have received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a diagnostic test procedure to look for cases of this new disease in the United States.
“This is the first time we will have a chance to identify a new tick-borne disease in the United States based upon evidence that the agent occurs in ticks,” says Fish, co-author of a paper in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, and co-investigator on the NIH grant along with Peter Krause, a senior research scientist in the division of epidemiology of microbial diseases.
In the study, scientists report finding B. miyamotoi in about 2 percent of the deer ticks in the Northeast and upper Midwest and have been conducting experiments with mice in the laboratory that become infected when fed upon by deer ticks.
Because bites from deer ticks cause more than 25,000 cases of Lyme disease each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control, the Yale team is gearing up to determine if there is any illness that is caused by B. miyamotoi infection in the United States.
More news from Yale University: http://opa.yale.edu/
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4 Comments
Bob Barry
Mick Alonso
The CDC has gone on record saying that they believe only 6-12% of Lyme disease cases are actually being reported to them, so where’s the big lie?
Ryan
The lie is in the seeming refusal of the CDC to update their woefully inadequate treatment guidelines for anyone other than those who are in the very early stages of infection. The lie is in the reluctance of doctors to give appropriate diagnostic tests for Lyme, which are more expensive but more accurate than the standard, wide-spectrum tests. I know this first hand as I had chronic Lyme disease which was in the worst atage – neurological – before the doctors had even found it. If they had done the ELISA test the first day I walked in there, instead of six months down the line after they had tried everything else (western blot, MRI, CT, bone scan, stomach endoscope) and milked my family for thousands of dollars to pay for these useless diagnostics, the inadequate treatment they gave me (one month of doxicycline which is indicated ONLY for early cases) might have actually stood a chance at curing me instead of just making me sicker.
Luckily for me, nutrition, immune support and detoxification succeeded where the quacks failed.
Rhi
Ryan, This happened to my dad too, but he was not so lucky. Ended up on methadone for pain control from severe neuropathy, just one of his neuro problems from Chronic Lyme’s. Took years before than ran an ELISA and found it. Lucked up on an astute doc in Florida, but by then, the damage was done. Good luck.
“Because bites from deer ticks cause more than 25,000 cases of Lyme disease each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control” ~ WOW, that is completely LAUGHABLE, I think they are missing at very least a zero at the end of that number… more than 250,000 people in Pennsylvania will be infected from Lyme disease caused by bites from deer ticks alone. I can only pray that one day this BIG LIE will stop.