Not all cell walls are created equal. Take the peculiar makeup of the Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium’s cell wall. It might play a role in lingering symptoms of Lyme disease — the most common tick-borne infection in the United States. That makeup might also be key to developing new treatments for the disease, researchers report in two studies published April 23 in Science Translational Medicine.
Somewhere between 90,000 and nearly 500,000 people are diagnosed and treated for Lyme disease each year in the United States. About 15 percent of those people continue to experience symptoms including fatigue, body aches and memory problems even after the acute phase of the disease