Summertime is right around the corner and along with the warmer weather, we have already been warned about mosquitoes and the diseases they can carry, like West Nile virus and Zika virus. However, health experts are also warning people to be aware of the health threat from tick-borne viruses.
There are now fears that cases of a one-time rare tick-borne disease called Powassen are expected to rise across the United States this year as warmer winters have lead to increases in the tick populations, reports WebMD.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 75 cases of POW virus disease were reported in the northeastern and Great Lakes region of the United States over the past 10 years.
The CDC also notes that there is no specific treatment, but people with severe POW virus illnesses often need to be hospitalized to receive respiratory support, intravenous fluids, or medications to reduce swelling in the brain. The most likely time of getting bitten by a tick is during late spring, early summer, and mid-fall when ticks are most active.
Dr. Jennifer Lyons, chief of the Division of Neurological Infections and Inflammatory Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, points out that everyone, regardless of if they are newborns or the elderly, including those who are immunocompromised, are at risk from POW, meaning if you are bitten by a tick, you can get the disease.
“About 15 percent of patients who are infected and have symptoms are not going to survive,” said Lyons, who is also an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. “Of the survivors, at least 50 percent will have long-term neurological damage that is not going to resolve.”
“You basically feel nonspecific flu-like stuff,” including “muscle aches and pains; maybe you have a little rash on your skin, but almost certainly, you’ll have a fever and the headache,” she told CNN.
Transmission of the Powassen virus
The Powassan (POW) virus is an RNA virus that belongs to the genus Flavivirus, and is related to West Nile, St. Louis encephalitis, and Tick-borne encephalitis viruses. There are three main species of ticks in the U.S. that can carry the POW virus.
However, Ixodes scapularis, commonly known as the deer tick or blacklegged tick, is the one to be most concerned about because it often bites humans and is also the primary vector of Lyme disease.
For those who go on to develop a more serious and life-threatening illness from the POW virus, the symptoms will progress “very quickly over the next couple of days,” Dr. Lyons said. “You start to develop difficulties with maintaining your consciousness and your cognition. … You may develop seizures. You may develop the inability to breathe on your own.”
This summer will be bad for tick-borne illnesses
Based on the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station’s annual tick summary report (PDF) for 2016, in 2012, 19 percent of deer ticks received and tested were found to be infected with Lyme disease. In 2016, 29 percent were shown to be infected with Lyme disease.
Goudarz Molaei, a research scientist at the station is predicting a higher number of new Lyme disease infections in the coming months due to larger numbers of ticks and higher infection rates among them. This also means that the probability of an increase in the number of POW cases is very likely.
Every year, around 30,000 cases of Lyme disease are reported to CDC by state health departments and the District of Columbia. The number is probably much higher because many people don’t show symptoms of the disease. Researchers estimate that 329,000 (range 296,000–376,000) cases of Lyme disease occur annually in the United States.
Of interest is a study Digital Journal reported on in February 2015, covering 19 years of data collection by the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. The study, published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, showed that warming temperatures not only influenced the earlier emergence of ticks but influenced their spread to new regions.