Author: Aimee Cunningham / Source: Science News
There’s no sign that ticks are backing down.
A record high of 59,349 cases of tickborne diseases were reported in 2017 in the United States.
That’s a 22 percent increase in cases — or roughly 11,000 more — than were reported in 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on November 14.Lyme disease accounted for most of the reported diseases, with nearly 43,000 cases in 2017, up from over 36,000 in 2016. There were increases in all six tick-related illnesses reported, though, including Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Because underreporting is common, experts expect the actual number of cases is higher than what the data show.
“The United States is not fully prepared to control these threats,” the agency said in statement.
The Tick-Borne Disease Working Group, set up by Congress in 2016 to address the threats that ticks pose, also released its first report on November 14, with input from public health officials, scientists, patients and clinicians. Science News discussed the findings with the working group’s chairman, infectious disease physician John Aucott, who is also the director of the Lyme Disease Research Center at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
His answers were edited for length and clarity.
SN: What’s the main takeaway of this new report?
Aucott: The key message is these tickborne diseases are serious, even potentially deadly, rapidly growing threats, and they affect hundreds of thousands of people.
So you [have to] combine prevention and accurate diagnoses and treatment.
SN: What are the gaps in prevention, diagnosis or treatment of these illnesses that you identified?
Aucott: A big component of prevention is the potential for future vaccine development [and] better ways to control ticks or control mice that harbor the infections. And there was an almost universal consensus that there needs to be improvement in diagnostic tests. We want to identify, diagnose and treat at the earliest stage, where the prognosis is the best.
We also need to fill in gaps in knowledge about how to better take care of the patients that don’t recover from their tickborne disease. [But] it’s hard to know what the best treatment is for the people that don’t get better until we understand the biology of…
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