United States: Finding a tick on your skin after playing outside can feel really gross! Ticks are tiny bugs that bite and suck blood, but they can also carry germs that cause diseases. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says ticks can spread at least 15 different illnesses, including Lyme disease, Powassan virus, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and Heartland virus. So, it’s important to check for ticks after being outside.
As reported by Time.com, One of these, babesiosis, has taken a center stage of being most worrisome. The disease is also commonly referred to as “American malaria” both due to rising geographical distribution of the disease and due to disease presentation characteristics.
Like malaria, disease is a parasite that literally affects the red blood cells with ticks that transmit the disease rather than mosquitoes. And like malaria, this disease – the flu – produces headache, fever, chills, nausea, vomiting, altered mental state, anemia, low blood pressure, respiratory distress, and more.
Now, a new paper in the journal of Open Forum Infectious Diseases has highlighted that increasing numbers of people in the US are being infected with babesiosis—although usually in combination with other tick-borne diseases.
Paddy Ssentongo, an infection disease fellow at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, and his team analyzed about 3,500 Americans with babesiosis from 2015 to 2022. The first thing that shocks them is the growth of the sickness and how quickly it is spreading through the United States population.
Average annual growth of babesiosis over the course of the seven-year survey amounted to 9%; the researchers attributed this to the rising temperature of the Earth, which results in a widening distribution of the black-legged tick, the chief transmitter of babesiosis. In the Northeast, the spread has been astronomical: Indeed, babesiosis increased by 1,422% in the New England state of Maine between 2011 and 2019 or by 1,602% in another small northern state, Vermont.
The ticks themselves do not migrate to new sites independently; instead, they piggyback on one of their key hosts—the white-tailed deer, which themselves are shifting their particular range in response to climate change that brings warmer temperatures and less snow.
Geography is not the only issue here. Even the ticks are also spread with higher densities of pathogen. The ticks move on deer but acquire disease when feeding on mice and other small mammal hosts; if these hosts are infected with Lyme disease or babesiosis — or other pathogens— so will the tick and transmit a disease to a human on whom it feasts.
That’s a very big problem as the researchers found.
Of the people in the sample group who were found to be carrying Lyme disease or the babesiosis or other infectious agents, the parasite will pick them up too- and pass them on to a human when it bites and that’s big problem, as the researchers found.