Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the discovery of a new tick-borne virus this week, one of several newly identified pathogens that ticks are passing to humans. Why are so many
new tick-borne diseases being reported?
Improvements in medical technology, mostly. The newly discovered tick-borne diseases have probably been infecting humans for years, but they’re not easy to spot. Many victims never realize a tick has bitten them, and the symptoms, such as fevers, aches, and fatigue, are not distinctive and mirror those of common summer viral infections. The patient’s immune system usually fights off the illness unassisted, so doctors don’t bother running the battery of tests required to identify a new pathogen.
Only in the rare cases when a patient struggles with the infection are physicians likely to make a genuine discovery. (The disease identified this week, a member of the phlebovirus family, hospitalized two men in Missouri.) They order blood smears or antibody tests to identify the presence of a pathogen, and genetic analyses—which were either inefficient or completely unavailable to doctors just a few years ago—alert researchers to the presence of the previously unidentified bug. Researchers have also become more aggressive recently, with some searching within ticks themselves for evidence of new pathogens.
Lyme disease is a classic example of how long a disease can exist in a population without being identified.
Genetic research has suggested that the pathogen responsible for Lyme disease has afflicted humans for more than 5,000 years. Examinations of a mouse specimen collected from Central Park in the late 1800s suggest that the disease has been present in the United States for more than a century, and case reports indicate that Europeans were carrying the disease at about the same time.
In the early 1970s, fishermen in Long Island complained of a form of arthritis they called “Montauk knee,” but it wasn’t until later in the decade that doctors figured out that it was caused by an infectious agent. In 1982, researchers finally identified the spirochete that carried the illness. And Lyme disease, with its telltale bull’s-eye rash, is usually easier to identify than many other tick-borne illnesses.
Read the
full article for more.
