Free Republic

The weather is warming up, which, for many parts of the country, means tick season is settling in. Unfortunately, we’re off to a less-than-ideal start this year.Emergency department visits for tick bites have reached the highest rate in nearly 10 years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last week.So far this month, 96 out of every 100,000 emergency department visits in the U.S. have been for tick bites. That’s roughly three times as many as were recorded in March, and well over the 68 out of 100,000 recorded in April 2025.

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...

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.."