Ellen Stromdal was at a garden party in the coastal Virginia in June 2023 when her friend Albert Denkan stood as he was sitting and suddenly fainted. Denkan is in the open air in the mid-eighties of the last century-it is still active and healthy to its era. Stromdal, an insect scientist who works at the US Army’s Public Health Center, has rushed to the army’s public health arm beside him. When Denkan came, I noticed that his tanned skin was saturated in yellow. “This man looks off Gond,” I thought about herself.
Denkan spent the next few days and out of the emergency room. His doctors managed countless blood tests and excluded the usual suspects of heart disease – heart disease, diabetes, and pneumonia. Finally, based on the recommendation of Stromdahl, the wife of Denkan, Nancy, asked his doctors to test for a child’s poisoning, a rare disease that resembles malaria caused by microscopic parasites carried by black -legged ticks. The positive test returned not only to the child, but also for Lyme, which is another most common disease resulting from the same type of tick.
If Dunkan’s doctors have been infected sooner, they may have eliminated it with a mixture of oral antibiotics and anti -submarine drugs. But Denkan, after weeks of his illness, he needed a procedure called the stock exchange. Doctors pumped all the affected blood from his body and replaced the donor blood. About two weeks after the garden party, it was good again.
Child disease is rare About 2000 cases in the United States every year. But what made the Denkan case more strange is that he contracted with children in Virginia, a state that recorded only 17 cases required locally for the disease between 2016 and 2023.
I got a Stromdel wondering whether children’s inflammation could become more common in Virginia and the neighboring states. The following two years spent working with a team of 21 researchers from all over the eastern United States and South Africa to assess the spread of Babesia Microti, the parasite that causes children’s disease, in ticks and humans in those states from 2009 to 2024.
results TicketAnd published in April in the Medical Insect Journal, it reveals that the Babesia parasia is expanding quickly across the mid -Atlantic. This transformation, which coincided with changing weather patterns, can pose a serious threat to people in societies in which the disease is considered rare for a long time.
“Wherever we found positive signs, there were cases,” Stromdel said. “They are small numbers, but for this reason we want to give early warning before more people get sick.”
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One of every four cases of childhood disease is without symptoms. People who develop symptoms, especially the elderly and people with immunodeficiency, can completely get sick with fever, chills, anemia, fatigue, and jaundice. Other than treatment, parasites, which affect and destroy red blood cells, can lead to the failure of the organ and death.
Babesiosis is usually found in the northeast and the upper West. Between 2015 and 2022, cases are concerned in the states that are regularly reported – Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rod Island, and Wisconsin – It increased by 9 percent per yearThe researchers in great development are attributed to warmer temperatures caused by climate change, which provides more black leg opportunities for people’s bite in a specific year and more habitats to spread to them.
The climatic conditions in the south of the middle of the Atlantic Ocean were always welcomed by the signs, but winter warmer than the average Speak regularly dark In recent years, some states in the region have turned into raising sites throughout the year for ticks and small rodents such as mice, cards, and tremors-creatures that carry Lyme bacteria and Babesia’s parasite in their blood. The normal annual rainfall, which satisfies the soil and adds to the total humidity in the region, also encourages the multiplication of ticks. The winter season was from 2023 to 2024 across a large part of the Atlantic 4 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit is warmer than usualAnd many countries were some of the most prominent members of the players and Ganers on the record.
Stromdahl studies the movement of ticks and the diseases it carries for decades. I saw everything – including the north spread of The only star markWhich can transfer a reaction for life, sometimes deadly on red meat. But she even shocked to discover what a Babesia parasia has spread.
She and her participants collected 1310 marks in Virginia, Maryland and Dillauer and found a B. microti parasite in all three states, indicating that there is a possibility of more human issues throughout the South Atlantic. None of these states did not find the parasite in the tick before.
Many ticks that authors have also been infected with bacteria that cause Lyme disease. Lyme-Babesiosis is an active search field. Experts suspect that a tick with a disease is more willing to develop the other, but they still do not know the exact cause. What they know is that Lyme is a harbinger of children’s disease. Previous studies on the disease transmitted by ticks I found that the areas that witnessed the rising cases of Lyme disease from the eighties to the early first decade of the twentieth century mentioned more cases that caused this to two decades to two decades.
“The results contained in the Stromdal paper are consistent with what we saw in the northeast: Babesia’s infection seems to be spreading in the event of a Lyme infection already.”
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Authors also examined the child’s human cases. It is particularly concerned about two hot points: the five provinces surrounding the city of Baltimore, and the Dellava island-a coastal ground tournament of 180 miles with parts of Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. Fifty -five percent of Maryland’s state issues were from Baltimore, and about 38 percent of Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, and Colombia County Completely from the Dilmarva Peninsula.
Experts believe that children’s disease is not severely due to a lack of awareness of doctors. Stromdal and her colleagues hope that their findings inspire health departments in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to admit that children’s disease is a growing concern, a monitoring of affected signs, and clarification of public health warnings. If doctors in the area know the test of children’s disease, severe cases such as Denkan can be avoided.
The authors warn: “The judicial states in the southern region in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean should expect children’s cases.” “The expansion of the tick occurs at a quiet rate that public health guidelines with regard to the prevention and treatment of tick diseases can be old.”
Climate change is not the only environmental factor that drives the growing density and expanding the population of ticks. Efforts over the past few decades to re -reinstall it The arid areas encouraged herds of white dressed deer, and animals that pick up ticks and carry them miles before the analogy fell to the paper waste, to to Multiply. Low rates From entertainment and living, they add to the population. At the same time, a Continuous expansion of suburban development The pressure on the forest areas is to put more people in contact with the ticks and the diseases they carry.
“The most important house is that the disease transmitted by ticks is an increased risk,” said Ladu. She added that the big question, with the increasing population of the tick, is to know where and when the affected ticks overlap with people. “There is still a great need for data to understand the number of times these infected ticks come into contact with humans.”
