Thank You for running the article entitled: "Ticked: Nisswa Woman Learns to Live With Rare Allergy" in the Thursday Feb. 15 edition of the Brainerd Dispatch.
Diane Van Eeckhout's rare allergy to red meat, possibly caused by the saliva of a tick (commonly called the Lone Star tick) is difficult to understand, but the incidence of this rare allergy is increasing as this tick species moves ever northward. While commonly found in the Southeast U.S, the Lone Star tick has already found its way to New Jersey, New York, and may be hitching rides on small animals to other states like Minnesota.
What Minnesotans need to know is that the Lone Star tick carries a Lyme-like disease called Starri disease caused by a very close cousin of the Lyme bacterium called Borrelia lonestarrii. It causes all the same symptoms of Lyme disease and can often cause an expanding red rash at the tick bite site. While it is treated the same as Lyme disease, it cannot be detected by Lyme blood tests like the C6-Peptide test used to detect Lyme disease.
In all there are over 10 species of Borrelia that cause Lyme disease, but only the single genospecies (Borrelia burgdorferi) isolated from the Northeast U.S. is detected by current Lyme blood tests.
The latest Lyme species found in Minnesota is Borrelia mayonii, a species discovered by the Mayo Clinic.
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Other Borrelia species that cause Lyme that are poorly detected by Lyme tests include: B. bisettii, B. americana, B. kurtenbachia, B. carolinensis, B. andersonii, B. spielmanii, and half a dozen more European species that have not yet migrated to America.
Possibly the worst pathogen in this family is B. myamotoi, a tick-borne relapsing fever that is associated with amyloid plaques in human brains associated with dementia.
Thomas M. Grier
Executive Director of the Dr. Paul H. Duray Pathology Research Fellowship
Duluth
