TY - JOUR AU - Cutler, Sally J. AU - Bonilla, E. Margarita AU - Singh, Rajbir J. T1 - Population Structure of East African Relapsing Fever Borrelia spp. T2 - Emerging Infectious Disease journal PY - 2010 VL - 16 IS - 7 SP - 1076 SN - 1080-6059 AB - Differentiation of endemic East African tick-borne relapsing fever Borrelia duttonii spirochetes from epidemic louse-borne relapsing fever (LBRF) B. recurrentis spirochetes into different species has been questioned. We assessed a noncoding intragenic spacer (IGS) region to compare genotypes found in clinical samples from relapsing fever patients. Although IGS typing was highly discriminatory and resolved 4 East African tick-borne relapsing fever groups from a disease-endemic region in Tanzania, 2 IGS clades were found among LBRF patients in Ethiopia. The 2 IGS sequence types for B. recurrentis overlapped with 2 of the 4 groups found among B. duttonii. All cultivable isolates of B. duttonii fell into a single IGS cluster, which suggests their analysis might introduce selective bias. We provide further support that B. recurrentis is a subset of B. duttonii and represents an ecotype rather than a species. These observations have disease control implications and suggest LBRF Borrelia spp. could reemerge from its tick-borne reservoirs where vectors coexist. KW - Relapsing fever KW - Borrelia KW - louse-borne relapsing fever KW - tick-borne relapsing fever KW - vector-borne infections KW - Ethiopia KW - Tanzania KW - East Africa KW - bacteria KW - research DO - 10.3201/eid1607.091085 UR - https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/16/7/09-1085_article ER - End of Reference