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Lyme Borreliosis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2023
Extract
Lyme borreliosis (also known as Lyme disease) has become the most commonly reported tick-transmitted disease in the United States.’ The diverse clinical manifestations of the disease make diagnosis difficult, but Lyme borreliosis is quite responsive to treatment if recognized in the early stages.
In the early part of the century, Afzelius in Sweden and Lipschutz in Austria described a distinctive skin lesion, erythema chronicum migrans (ECM), which developed at the site of a previous tick bite. Later, Garin and Bujadoux in France, Hellerström in Sweden, and Bannwarth in Germany described the association of ECM with neurological diseases, including neuropathies, radiculopathies, and cranial nerve palsies. Lyme disease was first recognized as a separate syndrome in the United States by Dr. Allen Steere and his colleagues in 1976, after a homemaker, MS Polly Murray, brought an outbreak of arthritis to their attention. Epidemiological studies of this unusual geographical clustering of children in Lyme, Connecticut, who were thought to have juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, suggested another process. The illness was eventually found to be caused by a vectorborne spirochete, Borrelia burgdorferi, which is capable of infecting the cardiovascular, dermatologic, neurologic, and musculoskeletal systems.
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- Topics in Clinical Microbiology
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- Copyright © The Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America 1991
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