The secret Swiss Agent: Puzzling comments reveal new twist to the Lyme disease saga
Excerpted from the Stanford Medicine: (10/13/2016)
While I was conducting a 2013 biographical interview with Willy Burgdorfer, PhD, the discoverer of the Lyme disease bacterium, he reluctantly confessed that he’d left something important out of his Lyme discovery articles. There was another bacterial perp at the scene of the mysterious outbreak of juvenile arthritis in Lyme, Connecticut, circa 1979. He nicknamed this new tick-borne organism (from the rickettsia genus) the “Swiss Agent,” after he found that many of the original Lyme patient blood samples reacted strongly to tests that identified a type of rickettsia found in Switzerland. Yet he never published these results, and he died before he could fully explain why.
Lyme Handbook 