Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

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This is Scientific American 60-second science. I'm Christopher Ndalata. Got a minute?

Lyme disease may be the most well-known illness spread by ticks, but it's far from the only one.

The most common vector for lime is the deer tick, and it spreads five other known pathogens.

One of those pathogens is what's called the Babesia parasite. It infects red blood cells, like malaria,

causing the sometimes fatal disease babesiosis. Now we learn that these tick-borne diseases

may have more in common than their host, because Lyme disease may actually facilitate the spread

of babesiosis. That's according to a study in the journal Plus One.

Researchers allowed ticks to feed on mice infected with babesiosis, or with both bobbiciosis and

lime. And ticks that fed on mice with just bobbiciosis were less likely to pick up the parasites

than were ticks who munched on mice carrying both infections.

Study author Maria Duke Vosser of Columbia University says the one-two punch of both diseases could be too much for the mice to handle.

The immune system may be, we could say, occupied with one pathogen and decreases the response

to the other one.

Based on field studies, she and her co-authors believe the same

phenomenon may be happening in nature, too. For now at least, babesiosis isn't as widespread as

Lyme. And if these results are correct, cutting down on Lyme's prevalence might also slow the spread of

babesiosis. So we would get a synergistic effect of a control method that would attack both diseases at the same time.

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