Ticks, Mosquitoes, and Other Invertebrate Disease Vectors

[LFC]

They may have come up with a simple and safe way to reduce Dengue Fever.

Dengue fever is caused by a virus that infects an estimated 390 million people every year, and kills about 25,000; the World Health Organization has described it as one of the top 10 threats to global health. It spreads through the bites of mosquitoes, particularly the species Aedes aegypti. Utarini and her colleagues have spent the past decade turning these insects from highways of dengue into cul-de-sacs. They’ve loaded the mosquitoes with a bacterium called Wolbachia, which prevents them from being infected by dengue viruses. Wolbachia spreads very quickly: If a small number of carrier mosquitoes are released into a neighborhood, almost all of the local insects should be dengue-free within a few months. It’s as if Utarini’s team vaccinated a few individuals against a disease, and soon after the whole population had herd immunity.

The World Mosquito Program (WMP), a nonprofit that pioneered this technique, had run small pilot studies in Australia that suggested it could work. Utarini, who co-leads WMP Yogyakarta, has now shown conclusively that it does. Her team released Wolbachia-carrying mosquitoes in parts of Yogyakarta as part of a randomized controlled trial. The results, which were unveiled last year and have now been published, showed that Wolbachia rapidly spread among the local mosquitoes, and reduced the incidence of dengue by 77 percent. “That provides the gold standard of evidence that Wolbachia is a highly effective intervention against dengue,” says Oliver Brady, a dengue expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who was not involved in the study. “It has the potential to revolutionize mosquito control.”

The trial’s results were so encouraging that the researchers have since released Wolbachia-carrying mosquitoes over all of central Yogyakarta—a 32-square-kilometer zone that’s home to more than 400,000 people. They’re now expanding into the densest surrounding provinces, aiming to protect 4 million people by the end of 2022. If they succeed, they should be able to prevent more than 10,000 dengue infections every year, Katherine Anders of the WMP told me. And the team is optimistic enough that it’s daring to think about an even grander goal: eliminating dengue from the city altogether.

[LFC]

It appears that there has been some movement forward in developing a malaria vaccine.

In a paper published in May, a large international team of researchers gave a progress report on one of those efforts. The work involved a vaccine developed in collaboration with Novavax and uses the same technology that went into the company's successful COVID vaccine. In short, the vaccine starts by taking a Plasmodium falciparum protein and modifying it so that it clusters into virus-sized particles. These particles are then injected alongside a chemical that boosts immune responses.

The team enrolled 450 infants in a malaria-prone region of Africa, with two groups given different doses of the vaccine and the third given an unrelated vaccine to serve as a control. The children were given three doses over three months, then a booster a year later. Testing showed that the two vaccine groups generated both antibodies and a T-cell response to the malarial parasite, with the levels being generally higher in the high-dose group. Antibody levels dropped slowly over time but quickly returned after the one-year booster shot.

Side effects were mild and typical of those seen with coronavirus vaccines.

The vaccine was very effective. Seventy percent of the participants in the placebo group ended up with a malaria infection by six months after the last of the three initial doses. In the two vaccine groups, only 29 and 26 percent of the participants did. That works out to an efficacy of 77 percent, a protection that stayed constant even as the children were followed out to a year after the third dose.

[LFC]

Disease carrying ticks are spreading.

It’s probably not the news you want to hear in the middle of a long-awaited summer: Dangerous ticks are spreading across the country.

Whether this season will be especially ticky depends on where you live or visit, experts say. But the range of several species that carry pathogens is expanding across North America. We’re now finding the parasitic arachnids in places we never have before.

Take the black-legged tick, which can transmit bacteria that causes Lyme disease. In the past two decades, the number of US counties with an established population has more than doubled. The lone star tick — a species implicated in potentially fatal allergic reactions to red meat, among other conditions — is also spreading fast.

There’s no single reason that explains why these blood-suckers are on the move. But one fascinating culprit is an increase in forest cover in the eastern US, which has helped facilitate the spread of white-tailed deer and other animals that ticks love to feed on. It’s a rare, counterintuitive example of how reforestation can carry unwanted consequences — or “ecosystem disservices,” as some researchers have put it.

More ticks means more tick-borne diseases, which have more than doubled since 2004. And these aren’t just concerns for backcountry hikers. In fact, your risk of encountering a tick may be higher while gardening or walking your pets — which, by the way, are at risk, too — relative to outdoor recreation, according to one large 2019 survey in the Northeast.

[LFC]

Evolution is a bee-yach.

The pandemic has introduced a lot of people to the idea of rapid antigen tests, which can quickly and conveniently reveal the presence of an infection. But in many parts of the world, rapid tests are a central feature of health care. If you don't have easy access to a testing lab infrastructure—and many in the developing world don't—rapid tests can provide a quick way of screening for common problems. In a number of countries, rapid test results are what determine whether people are given anti-malaria treatments or not.

But that may be causing a unique problem. A new paper suggests that the malarial parasite may be evolving so that it can't be recognized by the most commonly used rapid tests.

[LFC]

WHO approved a malaria vaccine for children. It's not great but with the number of people infected by malaria it sounds like a good start until something better is developed.

Every year, malaria kills more than 400,000 people, most of them children. There has been significant progress against the disease in the past few decades — death rates have fallen nearly in half since 2000 — but there’s still a long way to go.

For decades, researchers have been working on developing a vaccine. It hasn’t been easy. Malaria, a parasite infection, is hard to vaccinate against, and many attempted vaccines haven’t produced durable immunity.

But progress is happening. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced it has given its stamp of approval to a vaccine against malaria for children for the first time, after encouraging results from a pilot study that has reached hundreds of thousands of children across parts of sub-Saharan Africa since 2019. The vaccine, called Mosquirix and made by GlaxoSmithKline, is far from perfect — it produces about a 30 percent reduction in severe malaria in fully vaccinated children, which is lifesaving but smaller than would be hoped for.

But the WHO recommendation is a step forward in the fight against one of humanity’s deadliest remaining infectious disease enemies. It will likely lead to countries adding the vaccine to their childhood immunization programs starting immediately. And it’s only the first step of many to come. Researchers are already working to improve on Mosquirix, and with a combination of different approaches, it might be possible for the world to significantly cut down on malaria’s staggering human toll for good.

[Bact PhD]

Oct 7, 2021 16:32:54 GMT LFC said:

WHO approved a malaria vaccine for children. It's not great but with the number of people infected by malaria it sounds like a good start until something better is developed.

No joke!! I was reading papers about this and that malaria vaccine candidate back in the 1990s. Nothing seemed to make it forward for one reason or another. Thirty percent efficacy is hardly robust, but it’s far better than nothing at all.

[goldenvalley]

Oct 7, 2021 19:14:47 GMT Bact PhD said:

Oct 7, 2021 16:32:54 GMT LFC said:

WHO approved a malaria vaccine for children. It's not great but with the number of people infected by malaria it sounds like a good start until something better is developed.

No joke!! I was reading papers about this and that malaria vaccine candidate back in the 1990s. Nothing seemed to make it forward for one reason or another. Thirty percent efficacy is hardly robust, but it’s far better than nothing at all.

I worked with a woman from Papua New Guinea who was here on in an exchange program a couple of years back.  She suffers from malaria and has since she was a child. It lies dormant within her but flares up from time to time. I'm sure she's planning to get her young ones any vaccine that offers any hope of avoiding or alleviating it.

[LFC]

A vaccine that would repel ticks from actively embedding into humans? YES, PLEASE!

A new laboratory-stage mRNA vaccine that teaches the immune system to recognize the saliva from tick bites could prevent these bugs from feeding on and transmitting tick-borne diseases to people, according to a recent study my colleagues and I conducted in the Fikrig Lab at the Yale School of Medicine.

Some animals repeatedly exposed to tick bites are eventually able to develop resistance to tick feeding, where the ticks either detach soon after biting or cause skin redness that alerts the host to remove them. Scientists have observed this tick immunity in several animals that don’t typically serve as hosts to ticks, including guinea pigs, rabbits and cows.

In laboratory settings, guinea pigs bitten 2-3 times by ticks are able to develop robust immunity against them. While there have not been any formal studies on tick immunity in humans, people who have been repeatedly exposed to ticks can get itchy skin after getting bitten, a symptom that may be associated with tick immunity.

Our lab was curious if we could induce tick immunity without tick bites. So we developed an mRNA vaccine called 19ISP that teaches cells to recognize 19 selected proteins present in the spit that Ixodes scapularis, also known as the deer or black-legged tick, leaves on the skin during a bite. Instead of targeting proteins on the invading pathogen—like the spikes on the outside of the coronavirus—our vaccine targets proteins naturally found in the tick’s saliva.

We found that guinea pigs vaccinated with 19ISP developed skin redness after they were bitten, indicating that their immune system was activated and recruited inflammatory cells to the site to fight off infection. Like other animals that developed tick immunity after repeated bites, the ticks were unable to feed on the guinea pigs and quickly detached. None of the vaccinated guinea pigs tested positive for Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. Conversely, almost half of the non-vaccinated guinea pigs tested positive for Borrelia infection.

[Bact PhD]

Nov 17, 2021 23:08:58 GMT LFC said:

A vaccine that would repel ticks from actively embedding into humans? YES, PLEASE!

A new laboratory-stage mRNA vaccine that teaches the immune system to recognize the saliva from tick bites could prevent these bugs from feeding on and transmitting tick-borne diseases to people, according to a recent study my colleagues and I conducted in the Fikrig Lab at the Yale School of Medicine.

Some animals repeatedly exposed to tick bites are eventually able to develop resistance to tick feeding, where the ticks either detach soon after biting or cause skin redness that alerts the host to remove them. Scientists have observed this tick immunity in several animals that don’t typically serve as hosts to ticks, including guinea pigs, rabbits and cows.

In laboratory settings, guinea pigs bitten 2-3 times by ticks are able to develop robust immunity against them. While there have not been any formal studies on tick immunity in humans, people who have been repeatedly exposed to ticks can get itchy skin after getting bitten, a symptom that may be associated with tick immunity.

Our lab was curious if we could induce tick immunity without tick bites. So we developed an mRNA vaccine called 19ISP that teaches cells to recognize 19 selected proteins present in the spit that Ixodes scapularis, also known as the deer or black-legged tick, leaves on the skin during a bite. Instead of targeting proteins on the invading pathogen—like the spikes on the outside of the coronavirus—our vaccine targets proteins naturally found in the tick’s saliva.

We found that guinea pigs vaccinated with 19ISP developed skin redness after they were bitten, indicating that their immune system was activated and recruited inflammatory cells to the site to fight off infection. Like other animals that developed tick immunity after repeated bites, the ticks were unable to feed on the guinea pigs and quickly detached. None of the vaccinated guinea pigs tested positive for Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. Conversely, almost half of the non-vaccinated guinea pigs tested positive for Borrelia infection.

Although too late to help Mommie Dearest, this is a hella development!
(And it made Science, no less!) It will be interesting to see the toxicity studies—how much in tick salivary proteins can human goats handle in one shot?

[LFC]

Because the threat of Lyme disease isn't bad enough...

An infection rate higher than any previously recorded anywhere in the country for “the dangerous and rare” deer tick virus has been found in ticks in a Pennsylvania park.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection reported Thursday that its Vector Management Program detected “an unusually high infection rate” deer tick virus – a type of Powassan virus – in samples of adult ticks recently gathered in Lawrence Township Recreational Park near Clearfield in Clearfield County.

Transmitted by blacklegged ticks, also called deer ticks, DTV is a type of Powassan virus, which is rare in the U.S. but has been increasing in recent years. It can be transferred from tick to human within 15 minutes of a tick bite and can result in encephalitis or meningitis and hospitalization, and death in about 12 percent of people with the severe form of the disease.

Other tick-borne diseases, such as Lyme disease, take much longer to cause infection, typically 24 hours or more after the tick attaches to the host.

“The infection rate of ticks sampled from the Lawrence Township Recreational Park is extremely high, deer tick virus transfers very quickly through the bite from an infected tick, and the health outcomes from the deer tick virus are more severe than other tickborne illnesses typically seen in Pennsylvania,” said DEP Secretary Patrick McDonnell.

In samples from the park, 92 percent – 23 out of 25 sampled ticks – were positive for DTV.

The previous highest rate found at a single location in Pennsylvania was 11 percent, and the highest reported nationally in scientific literature was approximately 25 percent.

The statewide average infection rate for DTV in Pennsylvania was 0.6 percent in 2021.

[AnBr]

Welcome to Pennsylvania where everything wants to kill you.

[andydp]

Feb 2, 2022 21:34:27 GMT AnBr said:

Welcome to Pennsylvania where everything wants to kill you.

Just posted it on FB and tagged a few friends I know who live in PA.

[LFC]

Feb 2, 2022 21:34:27 GMT AnBr said:

Welcome to Pennsylvania where everything wants to kill you.

Pennsylvania, America's answer to Australia? Actually my previous experience has been that New Jersey has a greater risk for tick borne illnesses. Lyme is rampant and there are several places I've been swarmed with ticks in numbers I've never seen in PA.

We'll be treating our outdoor clothing with permethrin again this spring and we've got plenty of spray and topical picaridin for when we go into the field. We switched from DEET to picaridin in the last two years. It's a lot less damaging to your gear. The combination is incredibly effective.

[LFC]

Oh, FFS, how come ticks have suddenly become a vector for a whole basketful of really nasty diseases? It used to be pretty limited but it seems like every year or two there's another one popping up. This one is showing up in Georgia.

Certain ticks in Georgia are carrying an emerging virus that can make people sick, new research shows. The study found traces of the Heartland virus, one of the most recently discovered tickborne germs in the U.S., in the state’s lone star tick populations. The virus found in these ticks appears to be genetically distinct from samples collected elsewhere in the country, suggesting that it’s been present in Georgia for some time now.

The Heartland virus, also called Heartland bandavirus, was first discovered in 2009 by doctors in Missouri. By 2013, it was confirmed that lone star ticks (Amblyomma americanum) can carry and transmit the virus to humans. Its symptoms include fever, headaches, muscle pain, and a large loss of platelets, a blood component crucial to forming clots that prevent bleeding.

Cases of Heartland have been rarely documented since 2009. As of January 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 50 cases have been reported across 11 states in the U.S. Midwest and Southeast. Identified victims have been routinely hospitalized, and some have died, though these cases tended to involve people already in poorer health. Heartland isn’t easily identified, though, and it’s usually diagnosed after excluding other illnesses with similar symptoms, including other tickborne diseases. So it’s suspected that more cases have occurred than have been officially documented.

Heartland has been spotted in Georgia, where lone star ticks are abundant and are the most common source of human tick bites. So far, though, evidence of infection in Georgia had been only found in white tailed deer, a common tick host, and in a single human death. This new research, published in Emerging Infectious Disease, appears to be the first to confirm that the virus is actively circulating among lone star ticks in the state.

[pnwguy]

Mar 17, 2022 16:55:53 GMT LFC said:

Oh, FFS, how come ticks have suddenly become a vector for a whole basketful of really nasty diseases? It used to be pretty limited but it seems like every year or two there's another one popping up. This one is showing up in Georgia.

Guess we need to do more to promote possums in the wild. They evidently are efficient tick eaters, and they can be good stew food for GOP voters. Granny can whip up some possum vittles like nobody's business, if that worthless Jethro would get out and hunt more.

[LFC]

Evolution is amazing.

How mosquitoes seek out and feed on their hosts are important factors in how a virus circulates in nature. Mosquitoes spread diseases by acting as carriers of viruses and other pathogens: A mosquito that bites a person infected with a virus can acquire the virus and pass it on to the next person it bites.

For immunologists and infectious disease researchers like me, a better understanding of how a virus interacts with a host may offer new strategies for preventing and treating mosquito-borne diseases. In our recently published study, my colleagues and I found that some viruses can alter a person’s body odor to be more attractive to mosquitoes, leading to more bites that allow a virus to spread.

[goldenvalley]

Jul 1, 2022 18:08:41 GMT LFC said:

Evolution is amazing.

How mosquitoes seek out and feed on their hosts are important factors in how a virus circulates in nature. Mosquitoes spread diseases by acting as carriers of viruses and other pathogens: A mosquito that bites a person infected with a virus can acquire the virus and pass it on to the next person it bites.

For immunologists and infectious disease researchers like me, a better understanding of how a virus interacts with a host may offer new strategies for preventing and treating mosquito-borne diseases. In our recently published study, my colleagues and I found that some viruses can alter a person’s body odor to be more attractive to mosquitoes, leading to more bites that allow a virus to spread.

Mosquitoes love me.  Does that mean I'm a good virus spreader?   

[AnBr]

A regular typhoid Mary.

[LFC]

Admittedly I didn't have "Giant Snails that Spread Brain Worms" on my 2022 Bingo card.

Officials in Florida are again battling a highly invasive, extraordinarily destructive giant snail species that also happens to be capable of spreading parasitic worms that invade human brains.

The giant African land snail (GALS)—aka Lissachatina fulica—can grow up to 20 centimeters (8 inches) long and is considered "one of the most invasive pests on the planet," according to the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. It ravenously feasts on over 500 plant species—including many valuable fruits, vegetables, and ornamentals—while prolifically spawning, pushing out several thousand eggs in its multiyear life span.

In late June, Florida state officials confirmed the presence of GALS on a property in Pasco County, on the west-central coast of the state, just north of Tampa. They have since set up a quarantine zone around the property and began snail-killing pesticide treatments last week.

While the snails are a grave threat to agriculture and natural vegetation in the state, the invasive mollusks also pose a health risk. They're known to transmit rat lungworm parasites, which can invade the human central nervous system and cause a type of meningitis. For this reason, officials warn people not to handle the mammoth snails without gloves.

[LFC]

Lyme disease appears to be on the rise in America. On a personal note I walk in fields and waterside vegetation that's prime habitat for ticks. I've seen fewer ticks this season than any other year I can ever remember and I've been in the field in PA, NJ, and VA quite a bit. Granted I take precautions but I've pulled less than half a dozen Dog and Lone Star Ticks off and no Deer Ticks.

Newly released data is the latest to show that Lyme disease cases in the U.S. are on the rise. The research found that private insurance claims related to the tickborne disease have substantially climbed since 2007, including more recently in the last five years. This relative increase was especially dramatic in rural areas.

The research comes from FAIR Health, an independent nonprofit organization that formed in 2009 as part of a settlement between New York State and local health insurers over allegedly fraudulent out-of-network charges. Since then, in collaboration with health policy researchers, the organization has collected and regularly analyzes reams of private insurance claims data, in what they say is the largest database of its kind in the U.S.

For this new report, researchers tracked claims that mentioned a diagnosis of Lyme disease dating back to 2007. Between 2007 and 2021, they found that claims reported from people living in cities and other urban areas rose by 65%, and by 357% from people in rural areas. The report is also an update to an analysis conducted by FAIR Health in 2017, and Lyme disease diagnoses have continued increasing since then as well. Between 2016 and 2021, claims from urban areas rose by 19% and by 60% in rural areas. An accompanying infographic can be seen here.

“Overall diagnoses are more frequent in urban areas because the population is larger in urban areas. However, our data indicate that diagnoses of Lyme disease in rural areas are increasing more rapidly,” Thomas Swift, chief operating officer at FAIR Health, told Gizmodo in an email.

The newest findings line up with other research indicating that Lyme and other tickborne diseases are becoming more common over time. Based on their own analysis of commercial insurance data, for instance, researchers with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently estimated that over 450,000 Americans are now being diagnosed and treated for Lyme annually—more than 10 times the number of reported cases and up from the 300,000 annual cases previously estimated by the CDC.

FAIR Health’s data also suggests that people outside of areas where Lyme is known to be endemic are coming across these disease-carrying ticks more often, at least in some years. In 2017, for example, claims from North Carolina rose substantially, with the state having the third highest proportion of Lyme-related claims against all diagnoses that year. By 2021, North Carolina was no longer in the top five, but Maine had supplanted it as third on the list—the latter state having previously never been in the top five. In both 2017 and 2021, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont were the four other states with the highest proportion of Lyme-related diagnoses.

[LFC]

The CDC has a table of state by state rates of Lyme disease. The rate is per 100,000 as of 2019. Maine (121.1) and Vermont (113.1) lead the way by a long shot with New Hampshire (81.3) coming in third. DE (63.6), PA (52.8), RI (49.7), and WV(39.2) round out the rest above 30.

[LFC]

A Lyme disease vaccine is undergoing expanded trials.

A large-scale trial for a crucially needed vaccine has just gotten underway. Over the weekend, the first volunteers enrolled in the trial testing out a Lyme disease vaccine candidate developed by Pfizer and Valneva. Researchers hope that the multi-dose shot will protect kids and adults against six strains of the bacteria that cause Lyme in both the U.S. and Europe.

The candidate is code-named VLA15. Typically, vaccines train the immune system to recognize a germ, or some important part of it, so that we can better fight off the real thing if it ever enters our body. The strategy used with VLA15 is a bit tweaked, though, thanks to a quirk in how we catch Lyme from ticks. Lyme bacteria (Borrelia) live inside the gut of ticks and are usually only transmitted to humans a day or more after a female tick has started feeding on us. The vaccine is supposed to teach our body to spot a protein on the surface of Lyme-causing bacteria known as OspA. The hope is that ticks will slurp up anti-OspA antibodies from our blood, allowing them to reach the tick’s gut and stop transmission before it can even take place.

The new study is a phase III randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial that’s expected to enroll around 6,000 volunteers over age 5 who live in areas of the U.S. and Europe where Lyme is endemic (according to the trial’s pre-registered design, up to 18,000 participants may ultimately be recruited). Test subjects will be given three doses of VLA15 or a placebo before the next tick season in the spring starts, then a booster shot a year later. It’s possible, though not yet established, that people would require boosters to maintain strong immunity against Lyme over time.

“With increasing global rates of Lyme disease, providing a new option for people to help protect themselves from the disease is more important than ever,” said Annaliesa Anderson, senior vice president and head of vaccine research and development at Pfizer, in a statement. “We hope that the data generated from the Phase 3 study will further support the positive evidence for VLA15 to date, and we are looking forward to collaborating with the research sites across the U.S. and Europe on this important trial.”

[LFC]

We've had a wildly warm winter here in the Northeast. With this report all I can say is, "Shit!"

A rare but sometimes fatal tickborne infection may be expanding its range in the U.S., local and federal health officials warn in a report this week. They say that a case of Heartland virus led to a man’s death in 2021. The infection is thought to have been caught in either Virginia or Maryland—a region of the country where the virus hasn’t been spotted in humans until now.

The report was published online Thursday in Emerging Infectious Diseases by officials with the Virginia Department of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health, as well as doctors at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

The man was in his late 60s and visited an emergency room in November 2021 with symptoms of fever, diarrhea, aches, and general discomfort. He didn’t appear to have any tick bites, but given his symptoms and the fact that he spent time between two homes in rural Virginia and Maryland, his doctors suspected a tickborne infection and sent him home with antibiotics. Unfortunately, two days later, he returned to the ER with new symptoms, including confusion and unsteady gait, and he was then admitted to the hospital.

The man’s health continued to worsen, and he was soon sent to a specialized care center. Despite testing for various germs, doctors couldn’t find the source of his illness. He eventually developed hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis, a rare but life-threatening condition in which the body’s white blood cells attack the organs. His lungs and liver started to fail, and he developed cardiac arrest. He was then placed in palliative care. Thirteen days after his symptoms began, he died.

Doctors still suspected that he had contracted an infection spread by insects or ticks. Given the possibility of an ongoing threat to the public, officials with the Virginia Department of Health launched an investigation. They sent blood samples to the CDC for more extensive testing and went to the man’s homes in eastern Maryland and central Virginia the following summer to collect ticks in the area. The CDC testing finally revealed that he was infected with the Heartland virus, and a subsequent autopsy determined that he had died from complications of the infection.

Heartland virus was discovered in 2009 by doctors at the Heartland Regional Medical Center in northwestern Missouri. It’s known to be spread by the Lone Star tick (Amblyomma americanum), which is commonly found throughout the Eastern and Midwestern U.S. Many known cases of Heartland virus have led to hospitalization and death, but it’s only been sporadically documented in humans. Around 50 cases have been reported in over a dozen states to date, including Kentucky, Indiana, and as far north as New York.

[Bact PhD]

”Shit!”, indeed.

[LFC]

Tick borne illnesses continue to spread here in the U.S.

Much of the focus on preventing tick-borne illnesses in the United States has been targeted toward education about Lyme disease, the most prevalent illness associated with bites from blacklegged ticks, or deer ticks.

But over the last decade, cases of a flu-like illness called babesiosis, also transmitted by deer ticks, have more than doubled in some Northeastern states, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevented reported Thursday.

The infection, caused by microscopic Babesia parasites, primarily is transmitted by tick bites, although people who get blood transfusions and organ transplants also may become ill. In some cases, mothers can transmit babesiosis to their infants.

Some people who become infected with babesiosis may not develop symptoms, but others can experience mild to severe illnesses. Symptoms include high fever, excessive sweating, chills, headaches, muscle and joint pain, and loss of appetite.

The CDC's latest data on babesiosis comes against the backdrop of a general increase in all tick-borne diseases, which climbed 25% in the United States from 40,795 reported cases in 2011 to 50,856 in 2019. What stands out about babesiosis is that its prevalence has rapidly grown in the Northeast.

Although the first case of babesiosis was documented in Massachusetts in 1969, the infection didn't become nationally reportable until 2011. It's now monitored and tracked in 41 states, including New Jersey, where cases increased by 40% from 2011 to 2019.

In Pennsylvania, which has the highest number of Lyme disease cases in the U.S., babesiosis is not currently a reportable illness. But research that follows how and where infections occurred suggests babesiosis is an emerging illness that could become endemic in Pennsylvania. It's already endemic in New Jersey, New York and five other states, the CDC said.

The CDC suggested Pennsylvania consider making babesiosis reportable to better identify where the Babesio parasite has become more common. The state Department of Health did not immediately respond when asked whether that is a possibility.

Gee, like this wasn't foretold.

Once considered rare in the U.S., babesiosis is now prompting the CDC to urge greater awareness and education for people who live in or travel to states where the infection has become prevalent. The majority of cases are reported during the spring and summer months, when tick activity is at its highest.

The CDC believes babesiosis may be spreading north as a result of rising temperatures and growing deer populations.