Guest guest Posted August 4, 2006 Report Share Posted August 4, 2006 Looks to me like at least in the research field, they're admitting these infections can lie latent for an extended period of time. There are several 2006 papers mentioning this like it was an accepted idea. Oh <sigh> how research is disconnected from the clinician.. 1: Microbes Infect. 2006 May 30; [Epub ahead of print] Persistent brain infection and disease reactivation in relapsing fever borreliosis.Larsson C, Andersson M, Pelkonen J, Guo BP, Nordstrand A, Bergstrom S. Department of Molecular Biology, Umea University, SE-901 87 Umea, Sweden. 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. PMID: 16782384 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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