“There’s no human vaccine, and there’s not likely to be one,” says Alan Barbour of the University of California, Irvine, who headed up the study. “We have to focus on lowering the risk. One way to do that is by treating the animals that carry the disease.” Rabies offers a good example of how this might be accomplished, says Barbour. By deploying vaccine-laced food bait, public health officials have managed to lower the rabies infection rate in wildlife and significantly limited the spread of the disease to pets and humans. (I have to admit, that up until he explained this, I imagined that immunizing mice would require tiny little syringes.)
An Expensive Public Health Problem
Although Lyme disease only emerged in the U.S. in the past 40 years or so, around 25,000 cases are now reported every year in this country and the medical costs of these cases are estimated to range in the billions of dollars. Despite the growing importance of the disease, little is known about the evolution and ecology of the bacterium, B. burgdorferi, that causes the illness.
With an eye to eventually designing a Lyme vaccine for wildlife, researchers at UC Irvine sought to understand why as many as 15 different strains of B. burgdorferi exist in the wild at differing degrees of prevalence. In the parts of the country where Lyme disease is most common, the majority of white-footed mice are infected with B. burgdorferi during the course of the year. Unlike humans and lab mice, white-footed mice don’t get sick when they’re infected with B. burgdorferi, so the bacteria grow and multiply within them, and when a deer tick bites it sucks up B. burgdorferi along with its blood meal. Does the white-footed mouse determine which Lyme disease-causing strains are most successful?
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