Lyme disease, also called Lyme borreliosis, is the name by which an infectious disease is known that is caused by various species of spirochetes belonging to the genus "Borrelia" which present different clinical pictures, the most important being of them B. burgdorferi, Borrelia afzelii and Borrelia garinii. These are transferred to humans by very diverse species of ticks; mainly on the European continent, it is transferred by Ixodes ricinus and in smaller proportions by I. persulcatus, while in North America the main responsible is I. scapularis.
This is a zoonosis, since it is transmitted naturally to humans from the carrier animal, which act as a reservoir for the spirochete, with wild rodents and cervids being the main responsible.
This is the most prevalent tick-borne disease in the United States and Europe. In humans, it can affect the skin, the nervous system, the skeletal muscles and also the heart, for that reason it is that specialists classify it as a multisystemic disease.
The first studies of this disease were carried out in 1883 by Alfred Burchwald, and by 1902 Karl Herxheimer and Kuno Hartmann also contributed their research and in 1909 it was Benjamin Lipschutz and Arvid Afzelius, who offered their contributions, these being lastly those responsible for describing chronic erythema migrans in Europe. A year later, Afzelius set out to describe the association of these lesions with the bite caused by the tick.
In the 1970s, various studies were carried out in which it was possible to study more than 50 patients with the presumed diagnosis of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis in residents of three neighboring communities located in the city of Connecticut, in the United States: being the cities of Old Lyme, Lyme and East Haddam selected. Those in charge of doing the investigations described the infection in a fairly detailed way, as well as its association with a vector, so the disease was named after the locality of Lyme.
