Co-feeding Transmission and Its Contribution to the Perpetuation of the Lyme Disease SpirocheteBorrelia afzelii(In Reply to Randolph and Gern)
| Autor: | Franz-Rainer Matuschka, Dania Richter, Rainer Allgöwer |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2003 |
| Předmět: |
Microbiology (medical)
Ixodes ricinus biology Epidemiology Transmission (medicine) lcsh:R lcsh:Medicine Tick bacterial infections and mycoses biology.organism_classification medicine.disease Borrelia afzelii medicine.disease_cause Epizootiology Virology lcsh:Infectious and parasitic diseases Infectious Diseases Lyme disease Italy Borrelia parasitic diseases medicine lcsh:RC109-216 Nymph |
| Zdroj: | Emerging Infectious Diseases, Vol 9, Iss 7, Pp 895-896 (2003) |
| ISSN: | 1080-6059 1080-6040 |
| Popis: | To the Editor: Although transmission between co-feeding vector ticks may perpetuate particular tick-borne viruses, this mode of transmission plays no role in the epizootiology of Lyme disease spirochetes (1,2). In their letter, Randolph and Gern defend their suggestion that tick-borne pathogens perpetuate effectively by direct passage from one feeding tick to another by criticizing our analysis (3). These researchers mainly address our comparison of the transmission efficiency between simultaneously feeding ticks with that between ticks feeding sequentially on a persistently infected rodent. Our experiments demonstrate that approximately six times as many larvae (85.4%) acquire Borrelia afzelii spirochetes from a systemically infected mouse than from a mouse on which an infected nymph is feeding simultaneously (13.6%) (1). In nature, however, larval ticks rarely co-feed with nymphs on mice or voles; only approximately one fifth (18.8%) of these hosts harbor both subadult stages simultaneously. And of the nymphs, only approximately one quarter (26.4%) are infected by Lyme disease spirochetes. As a result, the natural transmission efficiency between simultaneously feeding ticks would be only one twentieth (5%) of that observed in the laboratory. Multiplying the experimentally observed efficiency of co-feeding transmission (13.6%) by the likelihood of larval and nymphal ticks co-infesting small rodents, as well as by the prevalence of infected nymphal ticks, reduces the efficiency of co-feeding transmission in nature to |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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