The Trans-Atlantic Movement of the Spirochete Borrelia garinii: the role of ticks and their seabird hosts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The spirochete <i>Borrelia garinii</i>, one of three genospecies of <i>B. burgdorferi</i> sensu lato (<i>B. burdorferi</i> s.l.) that can cause Lyme disease in humans, has recently been isolated from seabirds from a colony in Newfoundland, Canada. Previous records of <i>B. garinii</i> in seabirds suggest that it has been endemic in seabird colonies in the greater North Atlantic since at least the early 1990s. We determined the prevalence of <i>B. garinii</i> in different seabird hosts from colonies in the northwest Atlantic. We recorded <i>B. garinii</i> from Gannet Islands, Labrador, and Gull Island, Newfoundland, Canada, in Atlantic Puffins (<i>Fra-tercula arctica</i>), Herring Gulls (<i>Larus argentatus</i>), Common Murres (<i>Uria aalge</i>), and Razorbills (<i>Alca torda</i>). Prevalence of infections varied between years and within and among species. Ticks from Atlantic Puffins had a prevalence ranging from 10.3 to 36.4%, although the highest prevalence was noted in Herring Gulls (37.5%) in 2005. Earlier studies from the same localities failed to find evidence of <i>B. garinii</i>, suggesting a recent arrival of the spirochete into the northwest Atlantic. <i>B. garinii</i> is closely related to European strains of the spirochete, and its likely source is from areas of endemicity in the Bothnian Gulf and the northeast Atlantic seabird colonies where seabirds, songbirds, and two different tick species come in close proximity. Phylogenetic studies suggest a gradual movement of the European strains into seabird colonies in the northeast Atlantic with subsequent spread into the North and northwest Atlantic colonies. Atlantic Puffins seem to be suitable reservoirs, although other abundant species such as Common Murres and Thick-billed Murres (<i>Uria lomvia</i>) may be involved in <i>B. garinii</i> dynamics. Further work is urgently needed to help document the ecology and spread of this spirochete of importance to human health.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".