[2] Named after Brazilian scientist Henrique da Rocha Lima,[3] B. rochalimae is also closely related to Bartonella henselae, a bacterium identified in the mid-1990s during the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco as the cause of cat scratch fever, which still infects more than 24,000 people in the United States each year.

[4] The patient's sickness was first attributed to Bartonella bacilliformis, a known related species with a similar appearance under a microscope that is spread by sand flies and infects 10% of the human population in some regions of Peru with Oroya fever.

[5] In this same year, Bartonella rochalimae was also isolated from 3 dogs and 22 gray foxes in a rural area of Humboldt County along the Trinity River corridor near the town of Hoopa in northern California, US.

The discovery was made at the Vector Borne Diseases and Diagnostic Laboratory of the North Carolina State University, College of Veterinary Medicine, and was published in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology.

The organisms was detected by DNA amplification performed at the Special Pathogens Laboratory of the Área de Enfermedades Infecciosas of the Hospital San Pedro, La Rioja, Spain, and it was published in the Emerging Infectious Diseases journal.