January 2001 • Volume 7 Number 1
Help CDC study Lyme-like disease
The CDC needs your help to investigate a rash disease. It's showing up in patients from the lower Midwest to Florida, and it looks a lot like Lyme disease. The problem: Investigators haven't found Borrelia burgdorferi (the bacterium that causes Lyme disease) when they've studied these patients.
And yet physicians in Missouri, Arkansas and points Southeast were seeing tick bites, rashes and some constitutional illness in 2000. The illness is tentatively called "Southern tick-associated rash-illness" by the CDC.
The culprit may be a newly recognized organism called Borrelia lonestari. As the name implies, this organism has been found in the Lone Star tick, Amblyomma americanum. Borrelia lonestari, however, is tough to identify and culture. The more information CDC gets on working with it and the illness, the better.
That's where you come in. Patients with tick-bite-associated erythema migrans-like lesions should be asked to provide informed consent via a consent form and to provide skin biopsy, blood and urine specimens to be tested using experimental laboratory tests. Specimens may not be tested immediately, but may instead be stored in an appropriate fashion to allow for future testing of various etiologic hypotheses once further testing is available.
The CDC wants physicians to contact CDC now so the physicians can receive background materials soon and be prepared to look for presenting signs in March, when ticks start biting again.
If you're interested in sleuthing out the new disease and have patients who are or have been in the lower Midwest or the Southeast, call Ned Hayes, M.D., principal investigator at the CDC, at (970) 221-6474. Barbara J. Johnson, Ph.D., is also investigating the strange illness. Reach her at (970) 221-6473.
FP Report | Headlines |AAFP Home | Search