I’ve mentioned it here before but when I was a small child my dad and I went wading in a stream in rural Missouri. When we emerged from the stream we were both covered with ticks. In my case I had ticks from above my waist to just above my knees. Everywhere a tick attached itself a boil emerged. I had, quite literally, hundreds of boils and I became very, very sick. Ever since I’ve been subject to extreme fatigue and muscular and joint pain. It sort of waxes and wanes. Sometimes I barely notice it. At others I’m nearly incapacitated. It was hard in my teens, tolerable when I was from my twenties to forties, and for the last twenty years it’s been pretty hard. Most days I must force myself to rise and get about my business.
Whenever I read reports of tick-borne illness I go into a virtual frenzy of research. So, for example, there’s been an outbreak of a newly-identified tick-borne disease called “Bourbon virus” (after the Kansas county in which it was discovered):
CNN)The CDC has discovered a new virus that may have contributed to a Kansas man’s death, the agency announced Friday.
Named the Bourbon virus after the county where the patient lived, the virus is likely spread by tick or insect bites, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.
A 50-year-old man suffered multiple tick bites in the spring of 2014 while working outside on his property, the CDC said in an article published in the agency’s “Infectious Diseases” journal.
The man fell ill over the next two days, went to a doctor on the third day, was hospitalized and died of a heart attack 11 days after becoming sick, the CDC said.
That led me to learn about Heartland virus:
Heartland virus belongs to a family of viruses called Phleboviruses. Viruses in this family are found all over the world. Some of these viruses can cause people to get sick. Most of the phleboviruses that cause people to become ill are passed through the bite of a mosquito, tick, or sandfly.
It might be that I have what’s called “chronic Lyme disease”, basically an immune reaction to an earlier infection with Lyme disease. Or I may have some other condition related to one of these other diseases. I believe they’ve been around forever. They’re just being discovered now because our tools for doing so are better.
