MILES O’BRIEN:
After removing these ticks, Dr. Hu will grind them up and test them for the Lyme bacteria.
The ticks have been bred in the lab, under sterile conditions, so if Borrelia is there, it can only have come from the patient. Deploying ticks as bacteria detectors may seem far from a practical test, but it could give researchers some ideas on how to devise one.
Rheumatologist Allen Steere and his team at Massachusetts General Hospital are working on better tests and treatments as well. His lab is filled with more than 40 years of blood, cells and tissues samples from Lyme suffers.
In 1975, Steere was the investigator who first connected the dots between a cluster of children with symptoms of arthritis in Lyme, Connecticut, and what came to be known as Lyme disease.
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