Few things will leave you feeling quite so grossed out as returning from a jaunt outside and finding a tick clinging to your skin. Not only is the unwelcome parasite sucking the blood from your body, but it may also be leaving something behind: bacteria, viruses, or parasites that can cause at least 15 different diseases, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Lyme disease, Powassan virus, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and Heartland virus are just a few of them.
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Another, babesiosis, is causing particular concern. The disease is colloquially known as “American malaria,” partly because of its ever-widening spread and partly because of its clinical profile. Like malaria, the disease is caused by a parasite (carried by ticks instead of mosquitoes) that infects red blood cells. And like malaria, it can lead to headache, fever, chills, nausea, vomiting, altered mental state, anemia, low blood pressure, respiratory distress, and more.
Now, a new paper published in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases found that more Americans are getting babesiosis—often alongside other tick-related infections.
Paddy Ssentongo, an infection disease fellow at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, and his colleagues studied more than 3,500 Americans with babesiosis from 2015 to 2022. Their first striking finding is how fast the disease is exploding across the U.S. population. In the seven-year span of the survey, cases of babesiosis increased an average of 9% per year—due, the researchers concluded, to a warming world which is expanding the range of the black-legged tick, the principal babesiosis vector. In the Northeast, the spread has been astronomical: babesiosis grew by 1,422% in Maine from 2011 to 2019, and 1,602% in Vermont during the same period, for example.
Read More: We Used to Have a Lyme Disease Vaccine. Are We Ready to Bring One Back?
The ticks are not making their…
