A county-by-county look at the infections shows it’s found in four times as many counties now as it was in 1993, a team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.
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A young pop singer who battled Lyme disease was recently on the cover of People magazine. It also warns to not touch the tick directly with bare hands as it may increase chances of infection. The disease can attack joints, causing arthritis.
Another release from CDC claimed that most of the places affected are New England, upper Midwest, and mid-Atlantic States wherein a significant amount of inhabitants are not informed. Now, high-risk zones encompass nearly all of Massachusetts and New Hampshire and more than half of Maine and Vermont. The entire state of Connecticut, where the illness was first identified in 1975, has been high-risk for decades. On rare occasions, it can kill.
About 20,000 to 30,000 US cases are reported each year, but experts say there actually are as many as 10 times more. Because it can be difficult to know whether you have Lyme disease, the experts at NurseWise, a national multilingual nurse triage and health education provider, have put together five warning signs to help you recognize possible indications before you begin suffering from more advanced symptoms.
The researchers note that two major foci of largely contiguous counties met the high-incidence county designation in each five-year period.
The report was published online in a CDC journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases.
In the north-central counties in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa, where Lyme disease isn’t historically seen, that rate was up 250 percent.
More so often, the ticks thrive in moist and humid environments as well as wooded and grassy areas.
Lyme’s expansion into new areas “may occur because of changes in conditions that favor tick survival or because of geographic dispersal of infected ticks by birds and deer to areas where other necessary components already exist to support ongoing transmission”, wrote lead author Kiersten J. In some instances, Lyme disease can be fatal. That’s probably because a different tick-borne disease, southern tick-associated rash illness or STARI, was being mistaken for Lyme.
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There is no vaccine for Lyme disease, but the CDC suggests applying insect repellant as one of the preventive measures.
