Mouse Meals Laced With A Vaccine Might Be Key To Slowing Lyme Disease

Scattered around a couple dozen homes in Redding, Connecticut, researchers placed black plastic rodent-sized shelters.

“They’re usually used to hold rodenticide for rats,” says Kirby Stafford, an entomologist with the Connecticut Agricultural Experimental Station.

But for this experiment, each of the structures housed rodent food laced not with poison but with a Lyme disease vaccine – for mice.

About half of ticks infected with Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, get the bug from biting infected white-footed mice. That makes these small woodland critters the most important carriers of the bacteria, Stafford says. If the pathogen could be reduced or eliminated in the mouse population, Stafford believes that could reduce human infections, too.

Read the rest of the story at WBUR’s website.