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A 26 year-old female patient presented to the Tropical Medicine outpatient unit of the Ludwig Maximilians-University in Munich with febrile illness after returning from Southern Africa, where she contracted a bite by a large mite-like arthropod, most likely a soft-tick. Spirochetes were detected in Giemsa stained blood smears and treatment was started with doxycycline for suspected tick-borne relapsing fever. The patient eventually recovered after developing a slight Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction during therapy. PCR reactions performed from EDTA-blood revealed a 16S rRNA sequence with 99.4% similarity to both,  Borrelia duttonii , and  B .  parkeri . Further sequences obtained from the flagellin gene ( flaB ) demonstrated genetic distances of 0.066 and 0.097 to  B .  parkeri  and  B .  duttonii , respectively. Fragments of the uvrA gene revealed genetic distance of 0.086 to  B .  hermsii  in genetic analysis and only distant relations with classic Old World relapsing fever species. This revealed the presence of a novel species of tick-borne relapsing fever spirochetes that we propose to name “ Candidatus  Borrelia kalaharica”, as it was contracted from an arthropod bite in the Kalahari Desert belonging to both, Botswana and Namibia, a region where to our knowledge no relapsing fever has been described so far. Interestingly, the novel species shows more homology to New World relapsing fever  Borrelia  such as  B .  parkeri  or  B .  hermsii  than to known Old World species such as  B .  duttonii  or  B .  crocidurae .

"Candidatus Borrelia kalaharica" Detected from a Febrile Traveller Returning to Germany from Vacation in Southern Africa