Read on Twitter
I& #39;m gonna do a little science Twitter if you want to learn about about zoonotic diseases--those diseases spread between animals and people. Are you coming along? 1/
Diseases spread between animals and people? You bet they do. And there are a lot of them. The flu, plague, rabies, even SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. But today I& #39;m going to talk about tick-borne diseases. 2/
If you ever found a tick embedded in your skin after you spent some time outdoors, you may have worried about your risk of contracting #LymeDisease 3/
With my colleagues @evolutiomary and Jeff Peters, I published a paper about Lyme Disease and some other tick-borne diseases in a scientific journal called Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases. You can see the abstract here: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/vbz.2020.2619">https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.10... 4/
So back to our scenario--you have an embedded tick. Does that mean you are going to contract Lyme disease? That might not be the right question to ask. 5/
In North America, the black-legged tick (also called the deer tick) is widespread and can transmit Lyme disease. But it can transmit other diseases as well. 6/
They carry babesiosis, or "like tick-borne malaria," anaplasmosis, Ehrlichiosis, and Powassan virus. So Lyme disease is just one potential disease you are exposed to. 7/
Our research team had a pretty simple question. If you came home from a day in the field and had an embedded black-legged tick, what was the probability it carried something that could make us sick? 8/
We worked in Vilas County, Wisconsin. It is a fantastic part of the world with over 1300 lakes. There are lots of vacation homes and forests and trails and public lands to explore. Tourism is the county& #39;s number one industry. 9/
So we went out and collected black-legged ticks. By the time we were done, we had 461 of them. We took them back to the lab, and used DNA fingerprinting to look for fingerprints of 3 disease-causing microbes: the beasts that cause Lyme, babesiosis, and anaplasmosis. 10/
So here is what we found. About 1 in 2 ticks carried something that could be transmitted to people. But the real kicker was this--in 14% of the ticks we surveyed, we found multiple pathogens. That means... 11/
An exposed person could contract multiple diseases from the same tick. You could get Lyme and babesiosis, for example. 12/
So if you find yourself on the receiving end of a tick bite and begin to feel ill, don& #39;t just get tested for Lyme disease. You need a test panel for all of the tick-borne pathogens you may have been exposed to. Tell your doctor this, because they might not know. 13/
One last thing to know. It takes 24-48 hours for those pathogens to move from a tick into you. If you discover a tick bite quickly, you are probably at low risk of contracting one of these diseases. Thanks for reading through. end/
