A new tick-borne infectious disease has been discovered by Russian researchers in collaboration with the Yale School of Public Health.
"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," Yale professor of epidemiology Durland Fish, co-author of the paper with Peter Krause of the Division of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases, said in a press release.
The disease is caused by the spirochete Borrelia miyamotoi, which was discovered in Connecticut in 2001 and is a distant relation of Lyme disease pathogen Borrelia burgdorferi. Fish's team had not previously known whether it caused disease in humans.
Yale researchers were able to compare patients sickened with the new bacterium in Russa with those having Lyme disease in the U.S. The disease, like Lyme disease, causes high fever, and researchers found the bacteria in all ticks that transmit Lyme disease in the U.S., and 2 percent of all ticks tested in the Northeast and Upper Midwest.
There are no diagnostic tests available, a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will allow Yale researchers to develop a procedure to look for cases of the new disease in the United States. The study appeared in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.
