Word: ticks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bigger than a freckle, the tiny deer tick has sown panic from Montauk to Minneapolis as a carrier of Lyme disease -- an illness that has struck more than 71,000 Americans and left hundreds permanently disabled. Now the minuscule pest is causing even greater alarm. Scientists say deer ticks harbor yet another pathogen, which, unlike the one responsible for Lyme disease, can-in rare cases-actually kill a person in a matter of days...
...worried should Americans be? Plenty, suggests David Quinn, 41, who lives in Briarcliff Manor, New York. An avid jogger, Quinn was stretching in his backyard when he spotted a little black dot on his leg. Once he realized that it was a tick, he quickly removed it with a pair of tweezers. But not quickly enough. Four days later, Quinn fell violently ill. "I had a fever of 102 degrees, and it felt like a hammer was banging in my head," he recalls. "I couldn't keep my head up, but I couldn't lie down either because my back...
Convinced that he had Lyme disease, Quinn dragged himself to the Westchester County Medical Center. After examining him, however, doctors concluded that Quinn didn't have Lyme disease at all. Instead he had contracted human granulocytic Ehrlichiosis, or HGE -- a newly discovered tick-borne disease that has stricken at least 90 people in New York, Minnesota, Wisconsin and a few other states since 1990, resulting in four deaths. The infection is caused by the Ehrlichia bacterium, a distant cousin of the microbe responsible for Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Fortunately, Quinn had gone to specialists who recognized the infection and cured...
...past two months, nearly a dozen cases of HGE have been reported in the tick-infested suburbs north of New York City and eight in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Most victims recover completely when given doxycycline. Of the four who died, two were already seriously ill. And one, a 44-year-old man, didn't get the right treatment in time. Researchers fear that many more cases will turn up. "This disease could be as big as Lyme disease," says Dr. Darland Fish, an epidemiologist at Yale who in 1994 helped isolate the bacterium that causes hge. "I expect...
...women have died and suffered lifelong trauma because of his incompetent leadership while serving as the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War. As a 45-year-old non-veteran it irritates me that McNamara will become even richer by promoting his book while others still suffer with every tick of the clock...