Lyme Disease's Newfound Cousin

摘要

In January, tick-borne disease expert Peter Krause of Yale University and colleagues reported a new Lyme-like disease in the United States. After discovering the first human cases in Russia in 2011, Krause now thinks the disease - still too new to be named - could exist wherever hard-bodied ticks transmit Lyme. The bacterial culprit, Borrelia miyamotoi, enters a person's bloodstream via tick bite and elicits flulike symptoms similar to Lyme disease, but with a relapsing fever instead of the telltale bulls-eye rash. The fever develops as a person's immune system designs and cranks out an antibody specific to the bacteria. But B. miyamotoi keeps changing outer-surface proteins, and the fever returns each time the immune system has to scramble to make a new antibody.