Lyme Disease Definition, Symptoms & Treatment: Ticks Carrying the Disease Have Spread in the US

Half of all the counties of the U.S. has ticks that already carry the so-called Lyme disease. 

Lyme disease, according to Fox News, is a bacterial infection that is spread by a black-legged tick called Ixodes scapularis. The tick is also known as deer ticks. Aside from this type of tick, the western black-legged tick called Ixodes pacificus also spreads the disease. These two kinds of ticks are usually found in grassy and wooded areas.

Fox News adds that the bacteria carried by these ticks are called Borrelia burgdorferi. The symptoms include fatigue, fever, and headache. But these can be mistaken as flu at times. And some patients also develop a "bull's eye" rash characteristic right after the ticks have bitten their victims.

CBS News, meanwhile, shows that the treatment to most cases easily includes antibiotics. However, there are patients that are left untreated with the disease, which can lead to chronic neurological problems and joint inflammation for weeks or months or even years after its infection.

CBS News further says that these parasites that carry the disease have been first studied in 1998. The study examines where these ticks live. The report that is from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been published in the Journal of Medical Entomology.

CDC reports that there are 30,000 cases of Lyme disease are reported each year. However, these cases are merely a fraction of the actual number of incidents. According to an analysis that the group has published in the summer of 2015, there have been cases of around 329,000.

Science says the said study noted that 45.7 percent of U.S. counties have reported the cases of the disease, which reflected a 30-percent increase since 1998. These ticks are found across 37 counties in the eastern part of the country. Hence, the black-legged tick has totally undergone explosion of its population in just less than two decades.

Moreover, another study that is published in Plos One in 2015 shows that the population of the black-legged ticks behave in a different manner in the northern and the southern parts of the U.S.

Isis Arsnoe, a parasitologist from Michigan State University, and colleagues have found out also that nymphs of the black-legged tick in the north are more active and bolder in finding hosts. Also, the Arsnoe's team found out that the tick nymphs that originate from Rhode Island and Wisconsin are 20 times more likely to appear from a litter of leaves where they can easily be in the path of humans passing there. On the other hand, those that originate from Florida and Tennessee do not behave as such.