ArticlePLoS neglected tropical diseases2016
"Candidatus Borrelia kalaharica" Detected from a Febrile Traveller Returning to Germany from Vacation in Southern Africa.
Article in PLoS neglected tropical diseases, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 35 citations in OpenAlex.
- Tick borne relapsing fever - a systematic review and analysis of the literature.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2022Pooled it
- Relapsing fever revisited: New insights into neglected borrelial infections.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2026Review
- New host record of Amblyomma pakhtunensis on the Indian Pangolin (Manis crassicaudata) with detection of a distinct Borrelia lineage.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Prevalence of Lyme Disease and Relapsing FeverPathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Aetiologies of bacterial tick-borne febrile illnesses in humans in Africa: diagnostic limitations and the need for improvement.Frontiers in medicine · 2024Review
- Detection of Old and New World Relapsing Fever Borreliae inMicroorganisms · 2023Article
- Comparative Analysis of Tick-Borne Relapsing Fever Spirochaetes from Ethiopia and Nigeria.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Molecular evidence ofFrontiers in veterinary science · 2023Article
- Review
- Human-pathogenic relapsing fever Borrelia found in bats from Central China phylogenetically clustered together with relapsing fever borreliae reported in the New World.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2021Article
- Pathogenic New World Relapsing Fever Borrelia in a Myotis Bat, Eastern China, 2015.Emerging infectious diseases · 2020Article
- Tick-Borne Relapsing Fever Caused by Borrelia persica in Traveler to Central Asia, 2019.Emerging infectious diseases · 2020Article
- Lyme disease and relapsing fever in Mexico: An overview of human and wildlife infections.PloS one · 2020Review
- Combination of microbiome analysis and serodiagnostics to assess the risk of pathogen transmission by ticks to humans and animals in central Germany.Parasites & vectors · 2019Article
- Ornithodoros savignyi, the Tick Vector of "Candidatus Borrelia kalaharica" in Nigeria.Journal of clinical microbiology · 2018Article
- Case Report and Genetic Sequence Analysis of Candidatus Borrelia kalaharica, Southern Africa.Emerging infectious diseases · 2018Article
- Update on Tick-Borne Bacterial Diseases in Travelers.Current infectious disease reports · 2018Review
- Relapsing Fevers: Neglected Tick-Borne Diseases.Frontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2018Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A 26 year-old female patient presented to the Tropical Medicine outpatient unit of the Ludwig Maximilians-University in Munich with febrile illness after returning from Southern Africa, where she contracted a bite by a large mite-like arthropod, most likely a soft-tick. Spirochetes were detected in Giemsa stained blood smears and treatment was started with doxycycline for suspected tick-borne relapsing fever. The patient eventually recovered after developing a slight Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction during therapy. PCR reactions performed from EDTA-blood revealed a 16S rRNA sequence with 99.4% similarity to both, Borrelia duttonii, and B. parkeri. Further sequences obtained from the flagellin gene (flaB) demonstrated genetic distances of 0.066 and 0.097 to B. parkeri and B. duttonii, respectively. Fragments of the uvrA gene revealed genetic distance of 0.086 to B. hermsii in genetic analysis and only distant relations with classic Old World relapsing fever species. This revealed the presence of a novel species of tick-borne relapsing fever spirochetes that we propose to name "Candidatus Borrelia kalaharica", as it was contracted from an arthropod bite in the Kalahari Desert belonging to both, Botswana and Namibia, a region where to our knowledge no relapsing fever has been described so far. Interestingly, the novel species shows more homology to New World relapsing fever Borrelia such as B. parkeri or B. hermsii than to known Old World species such as B. duttonii or B. crocidurae.
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Registered trials
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