Humans infested with Ixodes ricinus are exposed to a diverse array of tick-borne pathogens in Serbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tick-borne pathogens (TBPs) pose a major threat to human health in Europe and the whole northern hemisphere. Despite a high prevalence of TBPs in Ixodes ricinus ticks, knowledge on the incidence of tick-borne diseases in humans infested by this tick species is limited. This study was conducted in the year 2019 on patients who presented themselves to the Pasteur Institute Novi Sad with tick infestations. Ticks (n = 31) feeding on human (n = 30) and blood samples from the same individuals were collected by physicians and a microfluidic real-time high-throughput PCR system was used to test the genomic DNA of the samples for the presence of 27 bacterial and eight parasitic microorganisms in Serbia. Except for one Rhipicephalus sanguineus s.l. adult male tick, all ticks infesting humans were morphologically identified as I. ricinus. A high proportion of ticks (74 %, 23/31) were infected with at least one of the tested TB microorganisms, being Rickettsia helvetica (54 %, 17/31) the most common pathogen, but Borrelia afzelii (9 %, 3/31), Anaplasma phagocytophilum (6 %, 2/31), Borrelia miyamotoi (6 %, 2/31), and Francisella like-endosymbiont (6 %, 2/31), Borrelia valaisiana (3 %, 1/31), Borrelia lusitaniae (3 %, 1/31), Rickettsia felis (3 %, 1/31) and Rickettsia aeschlimannii (3 %, 1/31) were also identified. Despite the high infection rate of TBPs in ticks, only two human blood samples (6 %, 2/30) tested positive for the presence of TBPs, one patient (code H12, 67 years old female) was diagnosed with Borrelia spp. and the other patient was diagnosed (code H17, 71 years old female) with R. felis infection. The tick infesting patient H12 tested positive for B. afzelii, and R. helvetica and the tick infesting patient H17 tested positive for R. felis. Upon clinical examination, both patients were diagnosed with erythema migrans. No additional discomfort was reported by the patient and no additional pathology was observed by the physician. We concluded that humans bitten by I. ricinus in Serbia are exposed to a diverse array of TBPs with clinical impact in the Serbian cohort studied.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".