Black-legged tick nymph.
Professor Maria Dick-Wasser’s Ecological Epidemiology Laboratory Study how human activities affect tick-borne diseases, including Lyme disease and babesiosis. Two new papers (one just published and the other just accepted for publication) by current and former members of the lab offer new details about how these diseases hatch and spread. Here, Dick Wasser discusses the paper’s findings and how they may change our understanding of these disorders.
Prenatal mother-to-child transmission may lead to increased babesiosis (at least in mice).
Laboratory first paper Observe two pathogens: Borrelia burgdorferiwhich causes Lyme disease, and Babesia volewhich causes babesiosis, a disease that has been Northeast U.S. on the rise Last few years. Both pathogens are transmitted by the same species of black-legged tick and can infect the same host.
The pathogen that causes babesiosis can be passed from mother to child, which doesn’t happen with Lyme disease.
“One of the things we found is that the transmission from mother to offspring is really critical for the ability of babesiosis to spread,” Dick-Wassell said. “These findings are important because although our study was in mice, mother-to-child transmission of babesiosis has also been observed in humans.”
Mother-to-child transmission of babesiosis appears to contribute to its transmission more than co-infection with Lyme disease.
Diuk-Wasser’s lab initially set out to explore how the pathogens that cause Lyme disease and babesiosis interact: Do they help or inhibit each other? Babesia is not as easily transmitted as Lyme disease, but its rate of transmission has been increasing, so their hypothesis is that the pathogen that causes Lyme disease is enhancing or contributing to the emergence of babesiosis.
“I was surprised to find out how important mother-to-child transmission is [among mice] Not co-infection with Lyme disease, which was the focus of our original hypothesis,” Dick-Wassell said.
The paper used field data collected at Block Island, Rhode Island, as well as laboratory data to create a mathematical model that can estimate the capacity of the pathogen responsible for babesiosis transmission.
Climate change may be partly responsible for the increase in babesiosis.
In the past, in the northeastern United States, many outdoor feral mice would die in the winter, while ticks survived and spread the pathogen.But, says Dick Wasser, “we think there are more rats out there now that are surviving the winter and are hatching.” Babesia Throughout the winter, this was a secondary factor driving the spread. “
Different strains of Lyme disease thrive in different host animals, which may be why there are so many strains blooming.
There are always multiple strains of Lyme disease in the environment, some of which make people sicker than others. One question researchers face is why Lyme disease doesn’t behave like other diseases, such as COVID-19, in which one strain tends to take over, replicate and cause the vast majority of infections.
In their second paper, Dick-Wassell’s lab set out to explore the idea that certain strains of Lyme disease might be better suited to some animals than others. They found that some strains of the pathogen that cause Lyme disease are more common in birds, while others are more common in mice, which at least partially explains why you see all of these pathogens in nature.
Birds are more important to the spread of Lyme disease than previously known.
“We originally thought that the Lyme disease variant that caused the most severe disease in humans was the one carried by mice, but this study shows that it’s actually a hybrid,” Dick-Wassell said. “Birds also hatch some strains that are harmful to humans. This suggests that birds are more important to the spread of Lyme disease than we thought.”
The fact that there are multiple (more than 15) strains circulating at any one time makes us recurrent Lyme disease even in the same season. “It’s not like COVID-19, where one dominant strain is circulating and then another strain is circulating a few months later,” Diuk-Wasser said. Because there are so many strains circulating, and animals often carry multiple strains at the same time , so neither human nor animal populations can ever achieve herd immunity.
this story was originally Appear in columbia news.
