There’s a new type of Lyme disease in New York state.Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.Almost all cases of the tick-borne illness in the United States are caused by corkscrew-shaped bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi.But B.
burgdorferi is actually one of two Lyme disease-causing species in the U.S.The other, Borrelia mayonii, is far more rare.
Until now, it has only ever been detected in Minnesota and Wisconsin.Both types of bacteria are spread by deer ticks.
According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report published Thursday, a case of B.mayonii Lyme disease was detected in upstate New York last July.
The novel infection occurred in an adult living in Herkimer County, which stretches from the edge of Utica into the Adirondack Mountains.The individual hadn’t recently traveled, according to the report.
The state health department found a handful of ticks on the person’s wooded property that tested positive for the bacteria.But a much wider search, of more than 1,500 ticks from 24 New York counties, didn’t find the bacteria again.It’s unclear exactly how the bacteria made their way to Herkimer County.“While this finding was unexpected, we do know that a range of ticks and tick-borne disease can change geographically over time,” a spokesperson from the New York State Health Department said in an email.
Douglas Norris, a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, said that the bacteria has likely been present in New York ticks for a couple of years, though it appears to be contained to a very small area.Same disease, different symptomsResearchers know much less about B.mayonii than they do about B.
burgdorferi.There have been far fewer infections from the former to study, and the bacteria was only discovered by Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic researchers in 2016 –– 35 years af...