Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

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More Tickborne Diseases Other Than Lyme. Maybe Just Don't Go Outside.

August 23, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

source: L’Olio (CC), Flickr

I said in Monday’s post (about the CDC changing its estimate of Lyme disease diagnoses in the US, raising it 10-fold from 30,000 new cases per year to 300,000) that there has been a run of recent news about other tickborne diseases. If you are someone who loves the outdoors — or even, you know, your back garden — it’s important to pay attention to such research, because these diseases are just becoming known and thus are often not recognized by physicians. Which means, of course, that someone who has the misfortune to contract one might be misdiagnosed, might be given antibiotics that won’t work against the organism, or might even be dismissed as malingering.

The most recent and saddest piece of news: Joseph Osumbe Elone, a 17-year-old high school student from Poughkeepsie, NY, died earlier this month from what is believed to have been an infection with Powassan virus, one of these lesser-known tickborne diseases. According to his family, he had been mildly ill for several weeks, with a cough but no striking symptoms, and collapsed and died Aug. 4.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, Lyme, Science Blogs, tickborne, ticks

CDC: Lyme Disease May Be Diagnosed 10 Times More Than Estimated

August 19, 2013 By Maryn Leave a Comment

source: Cuatrok77 (CC), Flickr

Recently I visited a relative on the eastern end of Long Island, about 90 miles outside New York City. The heat was brutal, and the house had no air conditioning and wasn’t accommodating to breezes — so on the first night I arrived, I sat out on the deck as the sun sank and the air cooled. Just as it became too dim to see the far end of the garden, there was a thrashing noise, as though something had gotten caught in the hedge beyond the pool, and then a whffft as whatever had tangled itself sailed over the obstacle. A moment later, something spiny but soft-edged poked into the sliver of light from the window, and bobbed, and bowed toward the ground. The spiny bits were antlers; the intruders were two white-tailed bucks, at least a year old, come to munch on the unattended lawn.

Because I am a city kid, my first thought was, “Aww, that’s pretty.” And because I am me, my next one was: “I wonder what the Lyme disease situation is out here?”

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, Lyme, Science Blogs, tickborne, ticks

The Advance of Ticks: New Areas, New Diseases, and a Weird Allergy to Meat

December 28, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Following up on last week’s post about the advance of dengue: I’ve been keeping track of new news regarding other diseases transmitted by insects and arthropods, but haven’t had a chance to write them up. So here’s an end-of-year round-up. It’s not cheery (are my posts ever cheery?), but maybe it will prompt some New Year’s resolutions to wear repellents and long pants outdoors. These diseases are no fun.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: babesiosis, Lyme, Science Blogs, tickborne, ticks

An Old Disease Returns: Dengue Is in Florida and May Be Heading North

December 22, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

This month, Slate has been running an intermittent series on pandemics under the guidance of new science editor Laura Helmuth. The latest entry in the series is one that I wrote (my first time writing for Slate, which is exciting). It’s about the under-appreciated threat to the United States of a disease that we barely think about: the mosquito-borne illness called dengue, formerly known as “breakbone fever.”

Dengue was once endemic in the United States. When I started researching it for this piece, I discovered a whole series of historical outbreaks I knew nothing about: Charleston, SC, 1828; Savannah, Ga., 1850; Austin, 1885; Galveston, 1897; most of Louisiana, 1922; Miami, 1934. Dengue was not eliminated here until the government undertook mass mosquito-eradication programs in the 1940s, because mosquito-borne illnesses were making so many military members so sick that the toll was hampering the war effort. (Public-health history buffs: Those were the campaigns that gave rise to the CDC, which grew out of a government agency called the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas.)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: babesiosis, CDC, dengue, Lyme, mosquitoes, Science Blogs, tickborne, ticks, Who

The Outdoors Hates You: More New Tick-Borne Diseases (ICAAC 1)

September 10, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

This week I’m at ICAAC (the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy), a massive infectious-disease and drugs meeting that is sponsored every year by the American Society for Microbiology. ICAAC is an unabashed scary-disease geekgasm, the kind of meeting at which the editor of a major journal tweets from one room, “‘Modern medicine will come to a halt’ in India because of catastrophic multi-drug resistance” while a microbiologist alerts from another: “Rat lungworm traced to salads on a Caribbean cruise. Snails had apparently gotten to the greens.”

Good times.

Meanwhile, I was learning more about ticks.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: babesiosis, CDC, Lyme, Science Blogs, tickborne, ticks

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