Willy Burgdorfer inoculating ticksNIAID/RML
Wilhelm “Willy” Burgdorfer, who spent decades researching arthropod-borne infections, died last week (November 17) at age 89.
Burgdorfer was a scientist at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Hamilton, Montana. He was best known for identifying the spiral-shaped bacterium that causes Lyme disease, which was named Borrelia burgdorferi in his honor. Burgdorfer was an expert in “tick surgery,” as he called it, according to The New York Times, and studied tick- and insect-borne diseases including Rocky Mountain spotted fever, relapsing fevers, and plague.
In the early 1980s, Allen Steere of the Yale University School of Medicine and others had already surmised that the cause of fevers and swollen joints among children near Lyme, Connecticut, was ...
