Saturday 9 January 2010

RESEARCH INDICATES LYME DISEASE IN USA PRE COLONIAL TIMES

http://www.pnas.org/search?fulltext=Lyme+disease&submit=yes
Biological Sciences - Microbiology:
Anne Gatewood Hoen,
Gabriele Margos,
Stephen J. Bent,
Maria A. Diuk-Wasser,
Alan Barbour,
Klaus Kurtenbach,
and Durland Fish
Phylogeography of Borrelia burgdorferi in the eastern United States reflects multiple independent Lyme disease emergence eventsPNAS 2009 106:15013-15018; published online before print August 14, 2009, doi:10.1073/pnas.0903810106
...States reflects multiple independent Lyme disease emergence events Edited by Barry...mouse reservoirs intervenes in the Lyme disease cycle. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 101...States reflects multiple independent Lyme disease emergence events. Since its first...
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Abstract
Since its first description in coastal Connecticut in 1976, both the incidence of Lyme disease and the geographic extent of endemic areas in the US have increased dramatically. The rapid expansion of Lyme disease into its current distribution in the eastern half of the US has been due to the range expansion of the tick vector, Ixodes scapularis, upon which the causative agent, Borrelia burgdorferi is dependent for transmission to humans. In this study, we examined the phylogeographic population structure of B. burgdorferi throughout the range of I. scapularis-borne Lyme disease using multilocus sequence typing based on bacterial housekeeping genes. We show that B. burgdorferi populations from the Northeast and Midwest are genetically distinct, but phylogenetically related. Our findings provide strong evidence of prehistoric population size expansion and east-to-west radiation of descendent clones from founding sequence types in the Northeast. Estimates of the time scale of divergence of northeastern and midwestern populations suggest that B. burgdorferi was present in these regions of North America many thousands of years before European settlements. We conclude that B. burgdorferi populations have recently reemerged independently out of separate relict foci, where they have persisted since precolonial times.

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