Researchers find new bacteria species that causes Lyme disease

February 11, 2016  22:43

Researchers have discovered a new species of bacteria that causes Lyme disease. The bacteria is the second species known to transmit the potentially debilitating illness in North America.

ABC News reported that the newly identified bacteria is called Borrelia mayonii, in honor of the Mayo Clinic researchers who assisted with the discovery, along with local health departments and scientists at the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.

The bacteria species was discovered after six people with suspected cases of Lyme disease ended up with unusual results.

Researchers did extensive genetic testing and determined that the patients were infected with a newly discovered bacteria.

Previously, only Borrelia burgdorferi was known to cause Lyme disease in North America, according to a study published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet.

Genetic testing at the Mayo Clinic and CDC showed that B. mayonii is closely related to B. burgdorferi.

Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told ABC News that the findings show how new technology has helped advance the understanding of emerging infectious diseases.

"This was likely a bacteria that was there all the time but because our scientific tests couldn't identify it. It was an unknown infection," Schaffner told ABC News. 

Schaffner also said the findings may help many others if they have suffered from a mysterious illness that turns out to be this new species of bacteria.

"The information will go out to doctors in the communities. They will start to ask for testing for this bug in a wider variety of cases," he said. "The clinical picture will mature as it goes on."

The new bacteria causes slightly different symptoms during the infection, including acute symptoms of nausea, vomiting and diffuse rashes instead of the "bull's-eye" rash associated with Borrelia burgdorferi-caused Lyme disease.

Limited information from the first six patients suggests that illness caused the new bacteria is slightly different from illness caused by B. burgdoferi.

In a press release, the CDC said that like B. burgdorferi, B. mayonii causes fever, headache, rash, and neck pain in the early stages of infection (days after exposure) and arthritis in later stages of infection (weeks after exposure).

However, B. mayonii was also associated with nausea and vomiting, diffuse rashes rather than a "bulls-eye" rash and a higher concentration of bacteria in the blood.

“This discovery adds another important piece of information to the complex picture of tick-borne diseases in the United States,” Dr. Jeannine Petersen, a microbiologist at the CDC, said in a statement Monday.

The new bacteria is also spread by the black-legged tick, or deer tick, according to researchers.

However, after extensive testing, researchers believe the bacteria is confined to the upper Midwest of the United States, with just six cases found out of 9,000 samples drawn in the Midwest of infected patients.

They found infected ticks in two counties in Wisconsin but believe there are infected ticks throughout Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Researchers said they saw no sign of the new bacteria after examining at least 25,000 blood samples from people with suspected tick-borne illnesses in 43 states other than Wisconsin.

The CDC said patients described in their report were treated with antibiotics commonly used to treat Lyme disease caused by B. burgdorferi.

The CDC recommended that health care providers who treat people infected with B. mayonii follow the antibiotic regimen described by the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

The CDC also said it is working closely with state health departments in Minnesota, North Dakota and Wisconsin to better understand B. mayonii and to plan future investigations, including better descriptions about the clinical aspects of the illness and the geographic extent of the infected ticks.

"CDC is investing in advanced technology to bring study of tickborne infections into a new era," said Ben Beard, Ph.D., chief of CDC’s Bacterial Diseases Branch. "Coupling technology with teamwork between federal, state, and private entities will help improve early and accurate diagnosis of tickborne diseases.”

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