Lyme Disease Is The Last Thing You Need Right Now

Hospitals are overtaxed - you don’t want to go if you don’t have to, and they don’t want you if you don’t need urgent care. But unfortunately, ticks have not heard about the coronavirus pandemic, and they don’t stay home or give you social distance, and they most definitely do not take the spring off. Dangerous ticks have been getting dramatically worse, more prevalent and more geographically widespread year after year. Expect 2020 to be no different.

To make matters worse, symptoms of tick spread Lyme disease are the same symptoms no one wants to experience right now - fever, chills, headache, fatigue, muscle and joint aches. It’s especially bad in the Northeast, where I live, and a few days ago the last thin layer of snow melted off my lawn - and the next day I was taking the first ticks of the year off my dogs. This is about to become - or already is - a widespread problem or tens of millions of Americans. And if Lyme disease isn’t enough to worry about in these troubling times, there are lots of other tickborne and insect-borne diseases, from fast growing Anaplasmosis to Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever to Zika to Malaria. A recent Jeopardy answer I saw was something to the effect of “this has killed more people than anything else in history,“ and the question was “What is the mosquito?”

Read the full article from Larry Olmsted on Forbes' website here.