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The following is a summary of “Incidence of symptomatic Lyme borreliosis in nine European countries,” published in the September 2024 issue of Infectious Disease by Angulo et al.

Researchers conducted a retrospective study to estimate the incidence of symptomatic Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato (Bbsl) infections in Europe by adjusting public health Lyme borreliosis (LB) surveillance data for under-detection of symptomatic Bbsl infections.

They used seroprevalence studies and estimates of antibody detection’s symptomatic proportion and duration in individuals with Bbs-infection (derived from literature reviews) to adjust public health LB surveillance data. This allowed them to estimate the incidence of symptomatic Bbsl infection in 9 European countries from 2018 to 2022. 

The results showed that the prevalence of anti-Bbsl antibodies ranged from 2.3% in Romania to 9.4% in Germany. Detection multipliers varied across surveillance systems; with a 10-year antibody detection period, multipliers ranged from 2.4 to 10.5 in countries reporting all LB cases and 54.6 to 722.2 in those reporting only Lyme neuroborreliosis cases. The incidence of symptomatic Bbsl infection, adjusted for under-detection, was highest in Finland, Germany, Norway, Poland, and Switzerland, moderate in the Czech Republic and Denmark, and lowest in Ireland and Romania.

They concluded that adjusting LB surveillance for under-detection revealed a high incidence of symptomatic Bbsl infection in several European countries, and differences in LB surveillance systems should be considered when comparing surveillance data between countries and estimating the LB disease burden.

Source: ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(24)00313-8/fulltext