Borrelia Burgdorferi

Lyme disease is a bacterial infection, caused by bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, that is transmitted through the bite of a tick. Bacterium borrelia burgdorferi is a spiral shaped bacteria (spirochetes) that causes lyme disease. This bacteria is carried by a variety of different kinds of ticks but the most common carrier is the blacklegged ticks or deer ticks. The tick doesn’t start out by carrying the disease, it receives it from another animal like a mouse, squirrel, or deer, and then it is passed onto the next animal or person they bite. This disease is usually diagnosed by signs of bullseye shaped rashes on the skin along with headaches and a fever. A series of blood tests will be taken just to confirm that the patient is infected with
lyme disease. Other late term symptoms may include Arthritis, joint pain and swelling, irregular heartbeat, numbness in hands or feet, and loss of muscle control. If lyme disease is left untreated the bacteria can spread to the joints, heart, and brain causing long term damage those areas. Untreated lyme disease will mainly target the body’s nervous functions and structures like muscles, nerves, the brain, and heart. When lyme disease is left in the body untreated for an extended period of time it can make it very hard to diagnose it. It can show many like symptoms of other diseases or conditions that, if the main bullseye rash is not present, it can make it difficult to diagnose. Borrelia burgdorferi is the sneaky bacterium that causes lyme disease, and it does this well by sneaking around your immune system.
This bacteria has many ways to shield itself by being caught by the body’s immune system, starting from right when it enters the body all the way until it's too late and the damage has already commenced. When the borrelia burgdorferi is transmitted into the body by the tick it is covered with the tick’s saliva, which contains certain things that shield it from the human immune system. It can be weeks after the tick bite and the immune system still may be completely oblivious to it being there, and won’t produce any antibodies to fight it off. This can be a big problem when a person knows they have been bitten and got the test, but the test may come back negative since their body hasn’t started defending
itself. Along with using saliva to camouflage itself it also has flagellum, which is a structure on the bacteria that acts like a tail so it can swim around in the body and go through what most other bacteria cannot. Although the flagellum does alert the immune systems to its presence in the body. Even though the body can identify that the foreign substance is present it can attack it properly. In defense the immune system creates a large inflammatory response that doesn’t do any good in killing the bacteria, but instead damages the tissues in the body. When bacteria and other invaders enter the body the immune system can usually detect the foreign attacker by its cell wall proteins, and then it can develop specific antibodies to attack and destroy the substance.
Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium has another unique ability that allows it to reshape the proteins on its cell wall, which successfully hides the bacteria from the immune system yet again. The immune system is searching for a specifically shaped cell protein wall, but since the bacteria has changes its protein shape it has become invisible to the immune system. Now that the body is trying to defend itself against an invisible attacker, the immune system is just blindly firing and attacking random areas, this causes more harm than good to tissues, organs, joints, skin,and even the brain. Because of the lyme bacteria’s unique ability to shapeshift it’s proteins, it can stay hidden from the immune system, and the body will keep attacking mostly itself. So overall instead of killing the invader the body is now destroying itself in attempt to destroy the
bacteria. As the body continues it’s self destruction, in attempt to kill the disease, the brain also falls under the attack of it’s own immune system. The brain has it’s own immune system that isn’t as good at finding and eliminating the bacteria as the rest of the body is. Also, the brain's immune system is trying to fight off the invisible invader, but ultimately ends up harming itself. In the brain’s immune system, instead of causing inflammation like the rest of the body, it’s toxin damages the nerves in the brain and spinal cord. This damage is what causes the muscle spasms and loss of control of muscle, primarily in the face causing one side to droop down. This disease has even another way to defend itself from being destroyed. As if being invisible to the body’s immune system wasn’t good enough, the bacterium creates a substance that surrounds it called a biofilm. This biofilm allows the bacterium to flex and twist to protect itself from environmental conditions in the body like antibiotic treatments. The biofilm makes the borrelia burgdorferi bacterium go into a dormant state until the environmental conditions pose no threat to it, and at that time it can then resume its attack on the body. Lyme disease in its long term stage can be treated, but with the the bacteria’s unique abilities to hide and evade our immune system it can make it difficult. Multiple treatment techniques must be used to completely eradicate the disease from the system, so that it will not be able to return and continue its destruction.