Dr. Jeffrey Gladden explains how Borrelia and other tick-borne microbes establish long-term infections in body tissues rather than causing immediate illness. A single tick bite can seed microbes that stay dormant for years, and in high-tick areas like New England, a large portion of the population likely carries these hidden pathogens without knowing it.
So Borrelia doesn't care about making you sick. It cares about having a presence in your body and then later having opportunities to spread to other hosts. Well, that's actually the way most microbes work. So if you have been bitten by a tick in your lifetime, there's a good chance that you have some tick-borne microbes buried in your tissues. So I picked these things up when I was a kid playing in the woods. Sure. So they can be present for a very long time. And this is true of Borrelia, the co-infections, and many, many things beyond that. So we pick things up, they end up in our tissues. As long as cells are healthy and autophagy is functional, then these microbes stay quiet. If we were able to dig deeply in the tissues of people in New England or other areas where there are a lot of ticks, probably find that most of the population are carrying these microbes.
