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Original article
Persistent brain infection and disease reactivation in relapsing fever borreliosis
Christer Larsson (a), Marie Andersson (a), Jenni Pelkonen (b), Betty P. Guo (a), Annika Nordstrand (a) and Sven Bergström (a)
(a) Department of Molecular Biology, Umeå University, SE-901 87 Umeå, Sweden
(b) Department of Medical Microbiology, Turku University, Turku, Finland
Received 19 January 2006; accepted 20 April 2006. Available online 30 May 2006.
Abstract
Relapsing fever, an infection caused by Borrelia spirochetes, is generally considered a transient, self-limiting disease in humans. The present study reveals that murine infection by Borrelia duttonii can be reactivated after an extended time as a silent infection in the brain, with no bacteria appearing in the blood and spirochete load comparable to the numbers in an infected tick. The host cerebral gene expression pattern is indistinguishable from that of uninfected animals, indicating that persistent bacteria are not recognized by the immune system nor cause noticeable tissue damage. Silent infection can be reactivated by immunosuppression, inducing spirochetemia comparable to that of initial densities. B. duttonii has never been found in any host except man and the tick vector. We therefore propose the brain to be a possible natural reservoir of the spirochete. The view of relapsing fever as an acute disease should be extended to include in some cases prolonged persistence, a feature characteristic of the related spirochetal infections Lyme disease and syphilis.
Keywords: Borrelia duttonii; CNS; Immune privileged sites; Latency; Reservoir; Immune evasion
Corresponding author. Tel.: +46 90 785 6726; fax: +46 90 772 630.
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