Free Republic

The Asian longhorned tick is rapidly gaining a foothold in the United States and “poses a serious threat to livestock” according to the USDA. Since its discovery and proper identification in 2017, the coverage area of the tick has spread to 19 U.S. states, the USDA reported. The deadly consequence of their expansion was shared by Ohio State University researchers in the Journal of Medical Entomology: Two cows and one large bull died from exsanguination by the ticks, meaning drained of blood to the point of death. Each unfortunate cow likely endured tens of thousands of bites. While only the...

Three in 10 Americans believe the COVID-19 pandemic is worsening, while more than one in four worry about being infected, according to a new Gallup poll. The new poll, published Thursday, found that 30 percent of respondents said the ongoing pandemic is worsening, while 41 percent think its getting better and 30 percent said it has stayed the same. That marks a 25 percent increase from a similar poll published in May, where 5 percent of respondents said they believe the pandemic is getting worse. Along political party lines, 44 percent of Democrat respondents believe the ongoing pandemic is getting...

He became an involuntary vegan. A New Jersey man is now allergic to red meat after getting bitten by an invasive species of tick — which has left him unable to consume steak, pork or even dairy products without suffering a serious reaction. “It just flipped everything — turned my life upside down completely,” Craig Smith, 62, told NJ.com of his unwilling conversion to vegetarianism. “You get so frustrated. Food becomes an enemy to you.” The Cream Ridge retiree specifically suffers from Alpha-gal syndrome, a potentially life-threatening allergy that triggers an immune reaction to a sugar molecule (carbohydrate galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose) found...

You may just be one tick bite away from never being able to eat a ham sandwich again. The lone star tick is making its way into Massachusetts from the southeastern part of the United States. People will find them on Nantucket and the coast. The tick's bite can cause some people to develop an unexpected food allergy. "The reason we are seeing more coastal areas is because there is a substantial difference when it comes to temperature in coastal regions than inlands," explained Dr. Goudarz Molaei, Chief Scientist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. "In some municipalities it has...

More technically called Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, the tick-borne virus has been detected in some 120 people in Iraq since January — including 18 who have died from the disease — health officials have warned, fearing an escalating spread. The onset of illness causes rapid and severe internal and external bleeding in infected patients, including through the nose, hence its nickname “nose-bleed fever.” Though the virus is hosted in ticks, most individuals pick it up by coming in contact with infected animal blood — usually occurring among those who work with livestock and in slaughterhouses. The virus is not novel, but...

Flu cases are rising across much of the country, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Friday, though overall flu levels remain low. Weekly flu cases had been declining through most of January, but began rising nationally the week ending March 5, the CDC said. That increase has continued, albeit slowly.

Former U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan died Monday at age 66 — nearly three years after she was first hospitalized with what doctors later said was encephalitis. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes Powassan virus as an illness spread by the bite of infected ticks. Encephalitis is an inflammation of the brain often caused by an infection like the Powassan virus, according to the Mayo Clinic. "The recovery process for viral encephalitis varies by case with differing impacts on the brain, speech, vision, memory and muscle control.."

Three days after a 9-year-old Connecticut boy started to hear a strange buzzing sound in his ear, his parents took him to a doctor at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital. The boy reported that he had no pain in his ear, no hearing loss, and no ringing or signs of tinnitus. He said he’d been playing outdoors recently on school days. Then the doctor, Erik Waldman, looked into the boy’s ear and saw a true vision of horror—a brown arachnid burrowing into the epidermal layer of the eardrum and feasting on the child’s blood. The tick couldn’t be removed at...

"Two long running, Obama era, investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department. Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff......"

Who doesn't love a juicy burger? About 5,000 Americans. And not from dietary preference, but because a single bite could cause hives, shortness of breath, or even death. It's not something they were born with, it's something their body was taught to reject, by an uninvited little wilderness hitchhiker. The following is a transcript of the video. Imagine that you're a red-blooded carnivore. You love burgers, steak, pork chops, bacon. But one day, out of nowhere, red meat starts to make you physically sick to the stomach. It sounds like science fiction, but it's real, and it's spreading. It's spreading...

We don’t yet know how the long-horned tick came to the United States, how it’s spreading, or what it’s capable of doing. All we know is that it’s here. There’s a new tick crawling around the Eastern half of the United States: the long-horned tick, an invasive species from Eastern Asia that’s been spotted increasingly in urban areas like Staten Island in New York, along with New Jersey, Virginia, and all the way down to Arkansas. This new tick, however, is a mystery. Its cousins, most notably the black-legged tick, currently inhabit most of the eastern half of the United...

A tick species that's native to Asia has now spread to the United States, and it's popping up in numerous places along the East Coast, according to U.S. officials. Females can reproduce asexually and lay thousands of eggs. Female longhorned ticks don't need a male to reproduce. They can spawn asexually using a process known as parthenogenesis. After feeding, a single female can lay around 2,000 eggs, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Health. That's enough to establish a tick population in a new location, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) says. They suck so much blood, it can cause...

HUNTERDON COUNTY, N.J. (CBSNewYork) – A tiny parasite could become a big problem this year in New Jersey. It’s an exotic tick that’s never been seen before in the United States. It was first spotted on a sheep in Hunterdon County, and efforts to wipe it out have failed. New Jersey has always been home to different species of ticks – five to be exact. But a new variety of the bloodsucking bug is now in the mix. It’s the East Asian tick, sometimes called a longhorned or bush tick. Originally found in Asia, thousands of them are now in...

Conservative powerhouse Sean Hannity fired off a ‘Tick Tock’ warning to his millions of Twitter followers Monday and told everybody to “stay tuned”.

WASHINGTON – The Centers for Disease Control is warning of the emergence of a far deadlier tick-related virus than Lyme Disease – one that kills 10 percent of those infected and permanently disables the other 50 percent. It’s called POW for short, or Powassan, and it, like Lyme, is carried by deer. Recent cases have been noted in the Northeast U.S. and the Great Lakes states. The virus can cause inflammation of the brain, leading to death in 10 percent of cases and permanent disability in 50 percent of cases. Signs and symptoms of infection can include fever, headache, vomiting,...

2017 could be a record year for ticks and tick-borne illnesses according to one researcher who studies the arachnids in Alabama. "I would say this is going to be a very bad tick year because it was a very mild winter," said Tim Sellati, chair of Southern Research's Infectious Diseases Department. In addition, Sellati said a warming climate has let certain species of ticks expand their range and those changes are reflected in tick surveys in Alabama and other parts of the United States. "The winters are warmer and the ticks recognize this, they sense this change in their environment,"...

Moose calves across northern New England are dying at alarming rates, and scientists believe that deadly parasites benefiting from shorter winters are the primary culprits. Winter ticks have taken a toll on moose across Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, killing about 70 percent of moose calves. Winter ticks attach themselves to a single moose by the tens of thousands. “It’s just off the charts; this should not happen with such frequency,” said Pete Pekins, chairman of the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of New Hampshire (UNH). “This is about a calf carrying 75,000 ticks that...

In the '70s, a cluster of adults and children in Lyme, Old Lyme, and East Haddam, Connecticut, began to develop fevers, swollen joints, and, most mysterious, an angry rash, especially after playing or hiking near rivers. The cases were most prevalent in deer-heavy areas, and scientists quickly discovered a common link: black-legged ticks that jump from deer to humans. Lyme disease was first identified by a medical entomologist in 1982. Though recovery is usually speedy if you’re promptly treated with antibiotics, Lyme disease is a notoriously slippery condition to diagnose, especially outside the Midwest or Northeast, where it’s most common....

The discovery of a new virus implicated in the death of a Kansas farmer this past June raises many questions about its host, prevalence, spectrum of disease, and ultimately its treatment and prevention, according to an infectious disease expert who treated the patient. Yesterday, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment announced the first known case of the so-called Bourbon virus, named after the Kansas county where the unidentified patient had lived. His symptoms — fever, low red and white blood cell counts, elevated liver enzymes, and loss of appetite — suggested a tick-borne illness such as ehrlichiosis or the...