New tick-borne illness could be ‘substantial health threat’

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – @ParkstBrett

Researchers working in China have identified a new bacterium capable of infecting and causing illness in humans, according to a new report in the journal Lancet Infectious Disease.

Carried by ticks, the newly-identified Anaplasma capra could be a “substantial health threat” to humans and animals, the study team said in a University of Maryland School of Medicine (UM SOM) press release. They added that the bacterium is most likely confined to Asia and Japan at the moment.

“This is an entirely new species of bacteria,” said Dr. J. Stephen Dumler, study author and an expert on tick-borne diseases from UM SOM. “This had never been seen in humans before. We still have a lot to learn about this species, but it may be that this bacteria is infecting humans over a wide area.”

Goats and ticks and such

In the study, researchers tested nearly 480 patients from northeastern China that had suffered a tick bite in the spring of 2014.

Six percent of volunteers were discovered to have been infected by the new species of bacteria. The researchers noted that the newly-found microbe is related to other Anaplasma bacteria that can cause disease when passed on from ticks to humans. Dumler found one such illness, human anaplasmosis, 20 years ago.

The outward symptoms of A. capra sickness include a high temperature, headache, fatigue, faintness and muscle aches. The scientists were able to treat the infection with antibiotics, notably doxycycline.

The study team emphasized that because this bacterium had been unknown until now, public health experts hadn’t thought to see how far and wide it has spread. In China, the microbe frequently appears in goats. In fact, the scientists chose to call it “capra” because the word means “goat” in Latin. However it may also infect animals other than goats.

Currently, it is hard to identify the infection as there is no blood test with which to do this.

The study researchers suspect the taiga tick as a source of transmission. A relative of the deer tick, the taiga tick’s ranges stretches from Eastern Europe, across Russia, to China and Japan. The researchers noted that about 20 percent of the world’s population lives in tick’s range.

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