Tick borne diseases?

[SaraB]

Well. There goes my plan to live on the west coast.

[Doberluv]

Besides the first 8 years of my life in New Jersey and about 10 years in Idaho, I've lived in western Washington for forty years. I've never had a tick on me. I can't imagine chosing not to live somewhere because of a tick. There are precautions that are talked about in these articles. There are so many things that have higher odds of hurting you than ticks. I know...try telling that to the people who have been affected by them. But really, it's not all that rampant.

[SaraB]

We have so many ticks here it's not even funny. Everyone in my family and every dog we have owned has been diagnosed with at least lyme disease. My dogs personally have been diagnosed with eurlicha and anaplasmosis as well. My horse had eurlicha. We go hiking and I pull generally 12-24 ticks off of each dog before I put them back in the car. So yes, my want to avoid an area because of a disease carrying tick is not unfounded.

[JessLough]

Originally Posted by sassafras

Just to put the icing on your tick cake, that can happen in the US, too.

Tick borne diseases act very differently in dogs than they do in people. In the vast, vast majority of cases dogs do not get sick at all or have mild disease.

I ran this by an infectious disease guru and they were not even sure if ferrets could GET lyme, they've never seen it. Do you have deer ticks there? Not all ticks spread lyme and other tick borne diseases.

Deer ticks are possible, I've actually never *seen* a tick so I'm not sure what kind it was.

There have only been a few cases of lyme in ferrets in NA, but it's thought that may be more because most don't go outside around here.

And yes, it's definitely not a person.

[smkie]

can't imagine not seeing one. I have been bit three times this year alone and that is staying out of the woods. WE won't get near them from spring to frost. AFter that, a good hard killing frost we are good to go until March. Use to be april but not anymore. My brother saw one crawling across the table cloth in a restaurant once. Most of the people I know that got bit got bit in their own yards. Not even close to a wooded tall weeded section. My bite came from a hike. AN unprotected hike. Lyme has been found in a lot of countries, I don't know if I can find the map of how it has spread again or not. But I believe the statistics are an infected person ever six minutes. I will go see if I can find that link. Now we get a new one..the Midwest Virus. Oh joys. THe two men infected with the news virus were 60 miles apart so that leaves a lot of room in between. Have you ever seen how many ticks come out of one? Stuff of nightmares.

With deer ticks, they can be so tiny you don't even know you were bit. I have a friend that had the paralyzing bite and was not treated as a tick borne illness, but it was misdiagnosed as an agent orange from his days of service. They have also found a lot of lyme the brains of deceased Alzheimer patients, ms too. THere is a lot of info out there, but it takes forever to get through it. Thing is we should all be paying attention and taking as many precautions as possible. WOUld it make me stay out of Missouri, if I Could go back and undo it, I don't know.I love the woods with all my heart, and so many of my most favorite memories with friends, with my dogs, are all wrapped up with hills and a canopy of green. Probably not, but I would go back and on that day, where the proper clothes, and use the proper sprays and would not go down in spring which is the worst.

[smkie]

Not the one I am looking for, but the numbers are the same.
Seeing it go across the world is a bit mind blowing.

http://www.lymediseaseassociation.or...d=69&Itemid=36

http://theconference.ca/the-spread-of-lyme-disease

remember too that these are reported cases. THere are proabaly equally as many out there that are misdiagnosed as I was. There was nothing worse they could have done then to give me steroids. My doctor just didn't know. SHould have known, because this information was out there. I will never get the denial thing.

[Doberluv]

Originally Posted by SaraB

We have so many ticks here it's not even funny. Everyone in my family and every dog we have owned has been diagnosed with at least lyme disease. My dogs personally have been diagnosed with eurlicha and anaplasmosis as well. My horse had eurlicha. We go hiking and I pull generally 12-24 ticks off of each dog before I put them back in the car. So yes, my want to avoid an area because of a disease carrying tick is not unfounded.

I didn't mean or say that it was unfounded. I wouldn't want to live somewhere where there were tornadoes. That's my "thing" that creeps me out a lot. Nothing wrong with choosing to live somewhere where there are not as many ticks.

You implied something about wanting to move to the west coast. I said that I hadn't had any bad experiences with ticks here on the west coast where I live. I have pulled them off my Lab when we lived out in the country, but I never had any on me. I'm not sure, but I don't hear of that many incidents around here, but maybe there are. I just haven't seen that many, not even in north Idaho where I lived and hiked in wilderness areas.

That is not to say that there is no chance, just that I never pulled 25 ticks out of my dog...only 2 or 3, maybe 4 in the 13 years I had her.


http://theconference.ca/the-spread-of-lyme-disease

According to this map that Smkie posted, western Washington appears to be at low risk for Lymes. The other map on the other site looks contradictory. So, I don't know. All I know is that I've never had a tick on me, no symptoms of anything and I don't know anyone personally who has who lives around here. So, that is why, I guess, I'm not overly paranoid.

[Doberluv]

Originally Posted by smkie

can't imagine not seeing one. I have been bit three times this year alone and that is staying out of the woods. WE won't get near them from spring to frost. AFter that, a good hard killing frost we are good to go until March. Use to be april but not anymore. My brother saw one crawling across the table cloth in a restaurant once. Most of the people I know that got bit got bit in their own yards. Not even close to a wooded tall weeded section. My bite came from a hike. AN unprotected hike. Lyme has been found in a lot of countries, I don't know if I can find the map of how it has spread again or not. But I believe the statistics are an infected person ever six minutes. I will go see if I can find that link. Now we get a new one..the Midwest Virus. Oh joys. THe two men infected with the news virus were 60 miles apart so that leaves a lot of room in between. Have you ever seen how many ticks come out of one? Stuff of nightmares.

With deer ticks, they can be so tiny you don't even know you were bit. I have a friend that had the paralyzing bite and was not treated as a tick borne illness, but it was misdiagnosed as an agent orange from his days of service. They have also found a lot of lyme the brains of deceased Alzheimer patients, ms too. THere is a lot of info out there, but it takes forever to get through it. Thing is we should all be paying attention and taking as many precautions as possible. WOUld it make me stay out of Missouri, if I Could go back and undo it, I don't know.I love the woods with all my heart, and so many of my most favorite memories with friends, with my dogs, are all wrapped up with hills and a canopy of green. Probably not, but I would go back and on that day, where the proper clothes, and use the proper sprays and would not go down in spring which is the worst.

That's it. There are sprays and wearing more protective clothing could surely reduce the risk. Perhaps my not seeing them much is due to a different climate and environment. (?)

[Doberluv]

http://www.aldf.com/usmap.shtml


http://www.cdc.gov/lyme/stats/charts...elocality.html



Lyme Disease In Washington: Tick Surveillance
In order to better understand Lyme disease in Washington, the Department of Health did surveillance and established Lyme disease as a reportable condition.

Fig.10 Ixodes angustus (left) and Ixodes pacificus, partially engorged. Dale Tilly.

Tick Surveillance
In April 1989, the State Laboratory began coordinating a statewide tick surveillance system. By December 1990, the State Public Health Laboratories had collected over 2,000 ticks; samples were obtained from all 39 counties. Most of the ticks (68.7%) were Dermacentor species (dog ticks), which are not competent vectors of B. burgdorferi. Eight percent were Ixodes pacificus, while 16.3 percent were Ixodes angustus (Fig. 10). Ixodes ticks are only rarely found east of the Cascade Mountains.
http://www.nwcphp.org/resources/lyme...k-surveillance

This is interesting:

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=124286
September 7, 2012
This year's mild winter and early spring were a bonanza for tick populations in the eastern United States. Reports of tick-borne disease rose fast.

While Lyme disease is the most common tick-borne disease in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, new research results emphasize that it is not the greatest cause for concern in most Southeastern states.

The findings are published today in a paper in the journal Zoonoses and Public Health.

The majority of human-biting ticks in the North--members of the blacklegged tick species--cause Lyme disease, but these same ticks do not commonly bite humans south of mid-Virginia.

Biologist Graham Hickling of the University of Tennessee, co-author of the paper, says many patients in Southeastern states, who become sick from a tick-bite, assume they have Lyme disease, but the odds of that being the case are low.

"Ticks in the eastern U.S. collectively carry more than a dozen agents that can cause human disease," says Hickling.

"Here in Tennessee we regularly collect lone star ticks that test positive for Ehrlichia, [a tick-borne bacterial infection]. Lone stars are an aggressive species that account for most of the human bites that we see in this region. So ehrlichiosis has to be a big concern, yet most people have never heard of it."

In contrast, says Hickling, there have been no confirmed reports to date of the Lyme disease pathogen among the sparse populations of blacklegged ticks found in Tennessee.

"The Southeast is dominated by different tick species than the ones that attack humans in the North," says Ellen Stromdahl, an entomologist at the U.S. Army Public Health Command and lead author of the paper.

"The lone star tick is by far the most abundant tick in the Southeast, and which species of tick bites you is critical because different ticks carry different diseases. In the Southeast you are unlikely to be bitten by the blacklegged ticks that spread Lyme disease," Stromdahl says.

Most bites in the Southeast are from the tick species that spread spotted fever rickettsiosis and ehrlichiosis, but not Lyme disease.

A complicating factor for public health officials is that tick species are on the move, as wildlife populations, forest habitats and weather patterns change across the continent.

This spring the Tennessee Department of Health, for example, reported a 500 percent increase in tick-borne rickettsiosis.

"Identifying health risks in the face of changing climates will be critical in coming years," says Sam Scheiner, National Science Foundation program director for the joint NSF-National Institutes of Health Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases (EEID) program, which funds Hickling's research.

At NSF, the EEID program is co-funded by the Directorates for Biological Sciences and Geosciences.

"This study will inform public health officials about what diseases are found in which areas," says Scheiner, "so they can minimize human health problems."

Hickling's work is also in collaboration with scientist Jean Tsao of Michigan State University and is part of an EEID project to identify the ecological factors leading to distributions of tick species and pathogens--in particular, where the Lyme disease tick and pathogen are found.

Lyme-infected blacklegged ticks are expanding south through Virginia, and lone star ticks are moving north, the scientists have found.

The bite of the lone star tick can create a bulls-eye rash that appears like that of Lyme disease, but the rash isn't caused by the Lyme bacteria.

The scientists say that this almost certainly leads to misdiagnosis of some patients in mid-Atlantic states, where both tick species are common.

The best way to distinguish Lyme from other tick-borne diseases is to be vigilant for tick bites, and whenever possible save any tick that manages to bite you, the biologists recommend. Store the tick in your freezer or in a vial of alcohol so it can be identified if you become ill.

In the Northeast, Lyme disease awareness campaigns have focused public attention on the nymphal blacklegged tick--which is responsible for most disease transmission and which is tinier than the adult form.

While nymphal blacklegged ticks and nymphal lone star ticks--which also bite humans--can be distinguished, the two are often confused by the public.

In one study, 13 of 20 patients reporting tick bites to physicians were given antibiotics on the assumption that they were at risk for Lyme disease, yet 53 of the 54 ticks removed from those same patients were lone star ticks, which do not spread Lyme disease.

"Where you live determines which tick species is likely to bite you," says Tsao, "and therefore which diseases you're most likely to contract."

The biologists say they are happy that recent treatment recommendations have begun to emphasize the importance of considering the tick species and its infection status as part of the diagnostic process.

Their advice: Stay open-minded about which tick-borne diseases are most common in your area--and save the tick that bites you.

-NSF-