Archive for the ‘Ticks’ Category

Ticks, Armadillos, Leprosy & Humans

http://outbreaknewstoday.com/leprosy-research-look-role-ticks-vectors-disease-28480/

Research looking into the role of (Amblyomma sculptum) ticks as vectors of Leprosy in armadillos and humans is being completed by Dr. Kevin Macaluso, MS, PhD Professor in the Department of Pathobiological Sciences the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine.

He also recently won a Research to STOP Neglected Tropical Disease Transmission (R2STOP) award.

Published on Jan 28, 2017
Outbreak News This Week Radio Show interview with Dr. Macaluso

A certain species of tick may be able to transmit leprosy to humans.  The species of tick called Amblyomma sculptum, is commonly found on armadillos and recent research has shown 50% of armadillos are infested with these ticks with an average 6 ticks per armadillo.

Since the research group does not maintain a colony of this particular tick found on armadillos, Macaluso is instead using Amblyomma maculatum (Gulf Coast Tick) in the lab as a model even though it has never been reported to be on armadillos.  This Gulf Coast tick does bite humans & other vertebrate hosts.

Interestingly, the armadillo is the only animal model able to mimic the symptoms observed in humans.
Mycobacterium leprae is not cultivable in vitro but two animals: armadillos in the U.S., and red squirrels in the UK are natural reservoirs of the bacillus.

Results revealed M. leprae RNA and antigens persisting in the midgut and present in the ovaries of adult female A. sculptum at least 2 days after oral infection, and present in their progeny (eggs and larvae), which demonstrates the occurrence of transovarial transmission of this pathogen. Infected tick larvae were able to inoculate viable bacilli during blood-feeding on a rabbit. Moreover, following inoculation with M. leprae, the Ixodes scapularis embryo-derived tick cell line IDE8 supported a detectable increase in the number of bacilli for at least 20 days, presenting a doubling time of approximately 12 days. As far as we know, this is the first in vitro cellular system able to promote growth of M. leprae. Finally, we successfully transformed a clinical M. leprae isolate by inserting the reporter plasmid pCHERRY3; transformed bacteria infected and grew in IDE8 cells over a 2-month period.

Taken together, our data not only support the hypothesis that ticks may have the potential to act as a reservoir and/or vector of leprosy, but also suggest the feasibility of technological development of tick cell lines as a tool for large-scale production of M. leprae bacteria, as well as describing for the first time a method for their transformation.

The author concludes that this new methodology will assist in screening of new leprosy drugs.

All of this is fascinating to consider since there has been a recent outbreak of leprosy in Florida as well as the fact that some leprosy drugs, Dapsone, and pyrazinamide (PZA) appear to be helping some Lyme patients.  In this study, a 7-8 week protocol of double dose dapsone combination therapy resulted in remission in 50% of patients for one year or longer.  

In fact, Dr. Horowitz reports that the Dapsone and PZA protocols have been the most effective treatment additions for resistant Lyme and autoimmune symptoms, with PZA being the most effective for dermatological manifestations of Bahcet’s and arthritic/granulomatous changes.

So the questions begging to be asked: are ticks playing a role in these leprosy outbreaks AND is leprosy playing a role in Lyme/MSIDS which could be explained by the success of mycobacterium drugs in some patients?

Category:

Lyme, research, Ticks, Transmission

UWM – Center of Excellence Vector Borne Diseases

http://news.wisc.edu/cdc-awards-10-million-for-insect-borne-disease-center/

University of Madison-Wisconsin News

MADISON – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has awarded $10 million to a consortium of Midwestern universities to establish a new research and training program to stem the spread of disease carried by vectors like ticks and mosquitoes.

The Upper Midwestern Center of Excellence in Vector Borne Diseases, http://grantome.com/grant/NIH/U01-CK000505-01 which will be led by University of Wisconsin–Madison medical entomologists Lyric Bartholomay and Susan Paskewitz, is aimed at elevating the understanding of vector borne diseases and improving public health response to diseases like Zika, West Nile and Lyme disease.

Part of a larger push by CDC to buttress the nation’s public health infrastructure to thwart vector borne diseases, including emerging diseases like Zika and West Nile, the new center will involve scientists – public health entomologists, epidemiologists, virologists and vector control experts – from UW–Madison, the University of Illinois, the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan and the Minnesota Department of Health.

A key objective of the new center, says Bartholomay, a professor of pathobiological sciences in the UW–Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, is to foster collaboration not only between university experts, but also with public health organizations at the local, state and federal levels. The goal, she explains, is to boost surveillance, prevention and response against the backdrop of a trend toward the emergence of new diseases and old diseases – like Zika and West Nile – in regions far from their places of origin.

The Midwest, according to Paskewitz and Bartholomay, is a “national hotspot for disease emergence and endemic transmission of vector borne disease.”

“There is a trend toward new emerging disease,” says Paskewitz, who chairs UW–Madison’s entomology department. “We’re seeing invasions of new species and pathogens. It is these new things moving around.”

The deer tick is one of the most important disease vectors in Wisconsin and will be under the microscope as a new center for vector borne disease takes shape at UW–Madison.

For example, not only are new tick species such as the lone star tick showing up in places like Wisconsin, places where they didn’t live before, but they are carrying a wider variety of disease. When Paskewitz joined the UW–Madison faculty in 1991, Lyme disease was the only known tick-borne disease endemic to Wisconsin. Today, she says there are at least half a dozen diseases that can be transmitted by the blood-sucking arachnids found in the Badger State.

There are likely a number of reasons why new vector borne diseases are on the rise in the Midwest. Changes to the landscape such as deforestation and urbanization, shifts in animal populations such as white-tailed deer, and changes in climate all are likely contributors, according to the Wisconsin scientists. Another possibility, says Paskewitz, is that scientists are simply getting better at finding new invasive species of mosquitoes and ticks and their bacterial and viral pathogens.

The new CDC-supported center will have three primary objectives:

*Grow the cadre of public health entomologists. Increased opportunities for graduate training in the field, and a new certificate program that will equip students to better identify vectors, conduct disease surveillance and use the appropriate tools to reduce insect populations.
*Create a network of scientists, mosquito control, and public health experts and officials at the local and state levels to better coordinate and facilitate surveillance and response to outbreaks of disease.
*Conduct research to improve and devise new methods to predict disease emergence and outbreaks as well as to optimize surveillance networks and pathogen detection. Research will also focus on evaluating and improving methods for controlling disease vectors like mosquitoes and ticks, with the ultimate goal of reducing human risk and exposure.
“Our vision is to provide training at all levels, including the undergraduate, graduate and professional levels,” says Bartholomay. “We hope we can provide a conduit of really well trained people who will be positioned to respond to outbreaks.”

The certificate program and training opportunities will be available at all of the partner institutions.

Research, say Paskewitz and Bartholomay, will be essential, as changing environmental conditions allow vectors and the diseases they carry to exploit new geographic regions and susceptible human and animal populations. “We don’t want to look for only what we expect,” explains Bartholomay. “We want to look for new diseases and understand the threats they pose.”

UW-Madison, she adds, is well positioned to do this through existing faculty, staff and technical resources, such as next-generation gene sequencing technologies that can be used to identify viral and bacterial pathogens associated with ticks and mosquitoes.

The new center will also have an outreach component. The idea, say Bartholomay and Paskewitz, will be to give the public access to region-specific information about tick and mosquito activity, ways to accurately identify vectors, and information about the pathogens transmitted by ticks and mosquitoes.

***If you are from Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, or Minnesota, please call and make sure that a preponderance of this money is going into tick research.  When I spoke at the Wisconsin capital a year ago at the Evidence Based Health Policy Project:  https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2016/03/04/health-policy-recap/ (please read), I spent considerable time discussing the plight of Lyme patients. That we are co-infected with numerous pathogens which make our cases far more complex than most realize. I spoke of borrelia, alone, and that it is pleomorphic with three shapes it can change into at will and that proper treatment needs to address this complexity and that 21 days of doxycycline, the current CDC standard of care is like throwing sand into the ocean. I spoke of 3 generations of Wisconsinites living under the same roof – all infected with MSIDS (multi systemic infectious disease syndrome). I explained that the myth that Lyme (borrelia) only causes a little joint pain and fatigue needs to be dispelled and that there is significant cognitive and psychological impairment with some suffering with severe anxiety, rage, confusion, depression, and memory loss.

I made it clear that Wisconsin should be focusing on ticks and the diseases they carry – NOT ZIKA, which according to Susan Paskewitz, Professor and Researcher, Medical Entomology Laboratory, UW Madison, Northern mosquitos can not even carry Zika. They have found some West Nile in mosquitos here.

 

 

 

Category:

Lyme, mosquitoes, research, Ticks, Zika

Deer Tick in Raptor’s Mouth

http://doi.org/10.11158/saa.22.2.5

Abstract

We document the first report of a blacklegged tick, Ixodes scapularis Say, parasitizing an American Kestrel, Falco sparverius Linnaeus (Falconiformes: Falconidae), in Canada. A fully engorged I. scapularis nymph was collected from the base of the tongue of an American Kestrel nestling recovered at Mirabel, Québec. This nestling had recently fledged the nest, and was exposed to I. scapularis immatures that were host-seeking in the surrounding low-level vegetation.

DNA barcoding was used to confirm the identification of the tick. Primers of the flagellin (fla) gene were employed to determine whether the Lyme disease spirochete, Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato (s.l.) Johnson, Schmid, Hyde, Steigerwalt & Brenner, was present in the I. scapularis nymph; the tick was negative.

We provide the first report of I. scapularis parasitizing a raptor in Canada and, likewise, the first account of this tick species attached to the oral cavity of a bird. Moreover, this bird parasitism is the first documentation of a tick on a falconid bird in Canada.

Free, full text (pdf file, 502KB):
http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.11158/saa.22.2.5

Category:

Lyme, research, Ticks

Promising Tick Research

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-01/yu-hw011317.php

PUBLIC RELEASE: 16-JAN-2017

How ‘stealth warrior’ bacteria turn a tick’s gut microbes against itself

YALE UNIVERSITY

New Haven, Conn.– Before infecting humans, tick-borne bacteria or viruses first have to get past a tick’s defenses to colonize it. How this occurs is not well understood. To investigate, Yale researchers studied a model of the second-most-common tick-borne infection in the United States, human granulocytic anaplasmosis, which can cause headaches, muscle pain, and even death.
The researchers found that in ticks, the bacterium that causes the infection, A. phagocytophilum, triggers the expression of a particular protein. This protein alters molecules in the tick’s gut, allowing the bacteria to enter and colonize the gut microbes.

“It’s like a stealth warrior that indirectly changes the tick by using the tick’s own defense system,” said Erol Fikrig, M.D., chief of the Infectious Diseases Section at Yale School of Medicine and senior author of the study.

The unexpected finding could help scientists develop strategies to block A. phagocytophilum and other tick-borne agents that cause disease, say the researchers. Fikrig’s team will explore the phenomenon in the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, and its work could have implications for other mosquito-borne infections, such as Zika and West Nile.

The study was published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Other authors are Nabil M. Abraham, Lei Liu, Brandon L. Jutras, Akhilesh K. Yadav, Sukanya Narasimhan, Vissagan Gopalakrishnan, Juliana M. Ansari, Kimberly K. Jefferson, Felipe Cava, and Christine Jacobs-Wagner.
This work was supported in part by a gift from the John Monsky and Jennifer Weis Monsky Lyme Disease Research Fund, by a National Institutes of Health grant, and by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Category:

Anaplasmosis, Lyme, Ticks, Uncategorized

Tick Related Red Meat Allergy Found in Minnesota & Wisconsin

http://www.mprnews.org/story/2017/01/12/tick-triggered-meat-allergy-northern-minnesota  (Click here to listen to the audio – approx. 3.5 min)

The Lone Star tick is supposed to stop dead in its tracks below the Iowa border but increasing numbers of people are being bitten by ticks and developing the red meat allergy (alpha-gal allergy) usually pinned on the Lone Star tick.

What gives?

According to Dr. Alaaddin Kandeel, an allergist at Essentia Health in Duluth, he’s diagnosed 18 patients with alpha-gal allergy – 10 from northeast Minnesota and 8 from northwest Wisconsin – hardly accepted Lone Star territory.  In the audio he states he diagnoses approximately 1 patient per month with Alpha-gal allergy and that the reactions can be severe, from passing out to life-threatening reactions.

And he’s not alone.  Dr. Chris Cleveland, also an allergist but in North Dakota, has also discovered alpha-gal allergy in his Minnesota patients.

Elizabeth Schiffman, epidemiologist at the Minnesota Department of Health says they get:

“sporadic reports of lone star ticks, but we don’t know of any established populations because when we’ve gone out and done our routine tick surveillance, what we really find are wood ticks….and then those black legged ticks, or the deer ticks.”

And while tick borne diseases are reportable by law in Minnesota, allergies like the alpha-gal allergy are not, so there really is no way to know how many are affected.

Is something other than the lone star tick causing the allergy?

Scott Commins, one of the researchers who first identified alpha-gal, states that researchers may be guilty of pigeonholing the allergy on the lone star tick due to the fact that there are now patients with alpha-gal allergy from all over the world where a variety of ticks are found.  His current work is trying to identify what is in the tick bite that is causing the allergy.

He does have a hypothesis.

He feels that perhaps when the tick bites an animal that already carries the alpha-gal carbohydrate, something in the tick’s saliva triggers an allergic reaction when it then bites a human.  He also feels genetic factors play a role.  He states,

“We know that in some patients the allergy fades over time. There are others where this appears to be long-lasting,” he added. “The issue is we don’t know what defines the groups or how to predict who will end up in each group at the outset. It may depend on further tick bites.”

Another challenge is that the reaction happens hours after eating so patients don’t make the connection, and according to Commins it causes painful stomach cramps but not the usual itching hives that allergies are known to cause.

However, Suzanne Keithley-Myers, the woman featured in the story had hives that made her want to “claw her flesh,” as well as stomach pain that made her fear for her life.

Alpha-gal allergy was discovered 7 years ago and now there are several thousand patients diagnosed with it.

Commins also states:

“I don’t want to alarm people, but I do feel that there probably is legitimate concern that this may be something that is the tip of the iceberg (in Minnesota) with the cases that you have at the moment.”

Category:

research, Ticks