Beyond Lyme: New Tick-Borne Diseases On The Rise In U.S.

Written by Global Lyme Alliance | Mar 12, 2017 5:00:00 AM

from NPR, March 11, 2017 by Michaeleen Doucleff and Jane Greenhalgh It all started in the shower. Tucker Lane looked down, and there they were. "Two ticks, on my right hip, directly next to each other," he says. At the time, Lane didn't think much about it. He grew up on Cape Cod. Ticks are everywhere there in the summer. "Just another tick bite. Not a big deal," he thought. That was June. In September, everything changed. "I was working outside, and I just had a pounding headache," says Lane, 24, who works as a plumber and at a pizza restaurant. He tried taking ibuprofen. But that night the headache got worse. "I was sweating but was cold. And I had tremors," he says. He started projectile vomiting. He developed a high fever and double vision. After two trips to the doctors — and no improvement — Lane's mother, Lynn Cash, called an ambulance.

[caption id="attachment_4189" align="alignright" width="338"] Tucker Lane and his mother, Lynn Cash, sit in the wooded backyard of his home in West Barnstable, Mass. Kayana Szymczak for NPR[/caption] At first, doctors wouldn't treat him, Cash says. "They accused him of opiate abuse." They thought Lane was going through withdrawal.

But scans of his brain showed that it was swelling. And he was quickly losing consciousness. His doctors decided to rush him to Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "By the time they got him upstairs [into a room], within another 48 hours, he was in a coma," Cash says. At that point, doctors were stumped. They thought he might have some kind of infection. "His MRI was very severe," says Jennifer Lyons, a neurologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital. "He had a lot of inflammation in the very deep parts of his brain." But she didn't know what was causing the infection. Cash felt differently. She says she knew exactly where the problem was coming from: "I knew it was a tick thing." Cash's family has been on Cape Cod for many generations; she has seen a lot of Lyme disease and even had it herself. But she had never seen anything like this. This was something new. Something even more frightening. The more we look, the more we find The world is in a new age of infectious diseases. Over the past 60 years, the number of new diseases cropping up per decade has almost quadrupled. The number of disease outbreaks each year has more than tripled since 1980. The U.S. is no exception. The country is a hot spot for tick-borne diseases. In the past 50 years, scientists have detected at least a dozen new diseases transmitted by ticks.

"The more we look, in a sense, the more we find," says Felicia Keesing, an ecologist at Bard College in upstate New York. "Around here, there's anaplasmosis, babesiosis and a bacterium related to Lyme, which causes similar symptoms."

And that's just in the Northeast. In the Midwest, you can find Heartland virus, a new Lyme-like disease and Bourbon virus — which is thought to be spread by ticks but hasn't been proven yet. In the South, there's Southern tick-associated rash illness. Out west, there's a new type of spotted fever. And across a big swath of the country, there's a disease called ehrlichiosis. Most of these diseases are still rare. But one is especially worrying. "It's a scary one," Keesing says. "Our local tick — this blacklegged tick — occasionally carries a deadly virus that's called Powassan virus," says Rick Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. Powassan is named after a town in Ontario, Canada, where the virus was discovered in 1958. Now it's here in the U.S. The country records about seven cases each year on the East Coast and in the Upper Midwest. What makes Powassan so dangerous is that it attacks the brain, making it swell up. In about 10 percent of cases, Powassan is deadly. And if you do recover, you have about a 50 percent chance of permanent neurological damage. Read the entire article on NPR.

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