As summer rolls in I feel like every day there is a new disease carried by ticks. At first I thought it was a dirty blood issue but mosquitoes don’t carry the same diseases. Yes I know mosquitos are also bad.
In: Biology
Ticks like mosquitoes aren’t dangerous by themselves, it is purely the diseases they carry. The diseases are different because they need to be transported by an animal which has its own immune system which can fight diseases, the disease needs to be adapted to survive in both hosts.
> but mosquitoes don’t carry the same diseases
Oh they definitelly do. But not everywhere. Japanese encephalitis which is spread by mosquitoes throughout all of South-East is absolutely terrible. It’s absolutely essential to vaccinate if you go to SE Asia. Local residents get vaccinated too.
The leading cause of death on planet earth is malaria. Mosquitoes absolutely carry disease. They carry a disease so bad that richer countries fight it nonstop so well it mostly went away.
ticks carry diseases that are bad but not SO bad America cares to fix it right now
As any critter that sucks blood for a meal, it’s not the bite that causes the problem, but the eventual parasite, virus or bacteria that use the critter as an Uber to reach our body. Parasites normally have a specific host to came aboard. Some need a tick, and don’t affect mosquitoes, or vice-versa, others need a specific species to do the job.
ticks can carry several diseases; lyme disease (borrelia) being the most common, bartonella (aka cat scratch fever), anaplasmorsis, babesiosis, etc etc etc. there’s a bunch.
not every tick carries diseases, and not every disease carrying tick carries them all.
when you get bitten by a tick there is a potential for you to get one of these tick born diseases – if you see yourself get bit, and you can keep the tick in a container and bring it to your doctor for testing, that is the best way to know if your tick carries diseases. and if they do, you can immediately get treated.
if you DO NOT get immediately treated, you have a higher risk of becoming chronically ill with whatever the tick gave you.
this is due to several reasons:
1. tick born illnesses are very serious and their symptoms can be disabling and sometimes fatal
2. the longer it takes to figure out that you have a tick born illness, the more tick the illness has to hide in your body
3. tick born illnesses are very very sneaky. they don’t want anyone to find them, they hide in your cells and in your tissue deep enough that even when the doctors run blood tests to try and find it, they often do not.
(it’s like when you’re playing hide and seek and you find a really really good spot, and the seeker searches the room you are in and still can’t find you, so you kind of hold your breath and try not to giggle until they leave)
4. because tick born illnesses are so sneaky, a lot of people who have them do not know they have them, even if they are very very sick.
5. doctors still do not have a good understanding of tick born illnesses, so unless you are seeing a specialist (which is often an out of pocket cost and quite expensive) you could be sick your whole life and never know why
6. if you do manage to find out you have a tick born illness, they are still very hard to treat. because they are so sneaky and can hide from blood test, they often also can hide from the medicine that is trying to get rid of it.
7. if the medicine does manage to find them, they get really really mad. and you get really really sick. often sicker than you were before, and if you are already sick, sometimes you get so sick you have to stop treatment.
8. in the US we only JUST started recognizing chronic lyme disease (due to its similarity to long covid). so it’s very very hard to get treatment in the first place, normal doctors and hospitals are not equipped to handle it. seeing specialists is expensive and not accessible to most people. (there are grants and non profits that help people with financial aid for testing and treatment though, worth looking up if you need this!)
some other reasons they are especially dangerous:
1. tick born illnesses penetrate your blood, and therefor can be transmitted by blood, through sexual intercourse, or in utero if you have parents with these illnesses.
2. often people do not know they have them. and therefor cannot know not to spread them.
3. when people do know they have them, not a lot of people know that they can be spread in these ways.
4. if people do not know they have a tick born illness they also could donate blood, and have that passed along to other people, infecting them, without them ever knowing.
5. tick born illnesses penetrate the inside of your body so effectively that they can impact pretty much every bodily system; people can have widely different symptoms but common ones are extreme cognitive dysfunction due to brain inflammation, joint degeneration, cardiac and other major organ based issues, high fevers, extreme psychological symptoms, etc.
there needs to be more widespread education on this, because it really is a dangerous epidemic. the numbers are getting higher because it can be spread, and because we don’t have the medical tools to effectively be stopping it yet.
it’s always worth checking yourself and your kids for ticks if you’ve been playing outside or in tall grassy areas.
i tried to break this down as simple as possible, im happy to answer more questions if this doesn’t make sense; i have had chronic lyme disease as well as several other tick born illnesses for many years now: i am 100% disabled, very medically sick, have done years and years of treatments (with varying results), and have symptoms that effect every single aspect of my existence.
i have a lot of thoughts on the matter and wish other people were able to know more so they can protect themselves and get the right care too!
Latest Answers