Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever
Tick season officially began Friday night when I pulled a tick out of Molly’s ruff. Saturday morning I snapped the tip off a plastic vial of FrontLine and gave her the treatment. From now through October we’ll all share a little bit of poison in an effort to keep most of the ticks out of the house and off our bodies.
Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever are two of the more dramatic illnesses carried by ticks. But they’re filthy little critters with a whole lot more potential for ickiness than we generally think about. Take Babesiosis… Like Lyme disease, Babesiosis emerged as a concern in the mid-sixties when germ warfare experiments in the US got totally out of control and before the NIH implemented safe standards for laboratory biohazard containment. Babesiosis is fatal of course, but most interestingly, the word itself has a certain Beavis and Butthead appeal. Let’s not explore that right now.
Rather, let’s take a closer look at the sad death of an American pop-cultural hero and ask whether it was somehow perhaps connected to improper handling of biohazardous material… in this case, the Oscar Mayer hotdog. No, not really. The guy was 82 years old and he lived a full life and there is no indication that tick born spirochetes or mad cow disease did him in. Science is not all easy answers. Sometimes the most compelling results of our research are in the negative findings.
In the early 70s I was chatting with a friend who had finished up a postdoc that summer at Woods Hole. The stories he shared about flushing recombinant material from the lab into the environment were spooky at best. His work had to do with e. coli. "What’s to fear from e. coli?" we thought then. It’s ubiquitous. One wonders whether the lab work of the seventies hasn’t put a permanent crimp in our future enjoyment of steak tartare.
The CBO today informs us regarding the outbreak of haemorrhagic fever (Marburg) in Angola. In the good old days, when Golby and I used to swiftly and silently make our way up the Congo, soldiers in the never-ending battle against eco-terrorism, we were mainly concerned with Dengue. Dengue fever is mosquito borne, like the West Nile virus. What worked for Leftenant Golby was ereplacing the gin in the gin and tonic with deet. The tonic water of course conveys the anti-malarial prophylaxis, while the deet - taken orally at 100% concentration makes it literally impossible for a mosquito to land near you without falling over and dying.
The CBO offers an interesting insight regarding the appearance and subesequent spread of West Nile virus in North America. Maybe ten years ago I was visiting family in Woods Hole and the concern about West Nile was obvious. The kitties weren’t allowed outside, the family practically bathed in deet before venturing out. I assumed it was just another local oopsie daisy like the recombinant e. coli adventure. Based on what I read today at the CBO’s site, it seems that the source point was farther down the coast, Plum Island to be exact. Sad to say, those CDC biohazard lab safeguards weren’t implemented to withstand hurricanes, tornadoes, or earthquakes. Seems it was a hurricane that let the West Nile virus loose, but this could all be elaborate BushCo disinformation too.
We journalists have to examine every possibility.