Researchers in the US have discovered a new bacterial species that causes the infectious Lyme disease in people. The new species, provisionally named Borrelia mayonii, is related to a strain called Borrelia burgdorferi which has long been linked to the disease.
Researchers at the Mayo clinic were testing blood of people with suspected Lyme, and came across unexpected findings in six of 9,000 patients tested between 2012-14. The samples of DNA in their blood didn’t match that of Borrelia burgdorferi. The researchers named the newly identified species B. mayonii, after the Mayo Clinic founders.
So far, the new species has only been found in the Midwest about 25,000 blood samples from residents of 43 other states were tested, with no positive results. Of more than 100,000 patient specimens, 102 tested positive for B. burgdorferi.
“We detected this result which was positive, but it was clearly different from what we would have expected for Borrelia burgdorferi, which at that time was the only known cause of Lyme disease in the U.S.,” says Dr. Bobbi Pritt, a microbiologist at the Mayo Clinic.
When they sequenced the genome of the bacterium, they realized it was different enough to be considered a new species. It’s been dubbed Borrelia mayonii, after the Mayo Clinic. News of the new species was published this month in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
The new species hadn’t appeared during routine tests on thousands of other samples over the course of a decade. Then, over the span of two years, it appeared in six patients out of about 9,000 tested for Lyme disease. They were all residents of Minnesota, Wisconsin or North Dakota.
“This discovery adds another important piece of information to the complex picture of tickborne diseases in the United States,” said Dr. Jeannine Petersen, microbiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The patients’ symptoms were a little different from the usual Lyme disease cases. Instead of the telltale bull’s-eye pattern associated with B. burgdorferi, rashes on these patients were diffuse or spotty. In addition to the fever, headache, rash and neck pain that accompanies the usual form of Lyme disease, patients who had contracted the new species of bacteria also experienced nausea and vomiting.
“This organism doesn’t behave completely like the Lyme disease that we all know,” says Pritt.
There were other odd symptoms. A child was nearly impossible to wake up from sleep. An adult had trouble with vision, and was seeing double. Two patients were hospitalized. Pritt says all have now recovered, except for one with continued arthritis.
Prior to this finding, the only species believed to cause Lyme disease in North America was Borrelia burgdorferi, the researchers said.
“To date, the evidence suggests that the distribution of B. mayonii is limited to the upper Midwestern United States. The new species was not identified in any of the approximately 25,000 blood samples from residents of 43 other states with suspected tickborne disease taken during the same period, including states in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic region where Lyme disease is common,” CDC added.
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