First Record of Ixodes affinis Tick (Acari: Ixodidae) Infected with Borrelia burgdorferi Sensu Lato Collected from a Migratory Songbird in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Migratory songbirds transport hard-bodied ticks (Acari: Ixodidae) into Canada during northward spring migration, and some of these bird-feeding ticks harbor a wide diversity of pathogenic microorganisms. In this study, we collected a nymphal Ixodes affinis Neumann from a Common Yellowthroat, Geothylypis trichas (Linnaeus), at Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Qubec, and it was infected with the Lyme disease bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato (s.l.) Johnson, Schmid, Hyde, Steigerwalt & Brenner. Using PCR on this tick extract and DNA sequencing on the borrelial amplicons, we detected B. burgdorferi sensu stricto (s.s.), a genospecies that is pathogenic to people and certain domestic animals. In addition, we collected an I. affinis nymph from a Swainson's Thrush, Catharus ustulatus (Nuttall), at Toronto, Ontario, and a co-feeding nymphal blacklegged tick, Ixodes scapularis Say, tested positive for B. burgdorferi s.s. These bird-tick findings constitute the first reports of I. affinis in Ontario and Qubec and, simultaneously, the first report of a B. burgdorferi s.l.-infected I. affinis in Canada. Since Neotropical and southern temperate songbirds have a rapid flight pace, they are capable of transporting ticks infected with B. burgdorferi s.l. hundreds of kilometres to Canada. Healthcare professionals should be cognisant that migratory songbirds can transport diverse genotypes of B. burgdorferi s.l. into Canada from southern latitudes that may be missed by current Lyme disease serological tests.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".