CDC starts ticking as diseases increase



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March 27, 2019 – The CDC will monitor for the first time the country's tick population and the diseases that pests are likely to transmit.

This effort comes as the number of people diagnosed with serious diseases caused by factors such as ticks, fleas and mosquitoes has more than doubled in recent decades. Ticks have caused the vast majority of these diseases.

His goal is to find out where Americans are most likely to get tick-borne illness.

"For the first time this year, the CDC is funding states to conduct widespread surveillance for ticks and pathogens that they can transmit, in addition to funding surveillance, education and the prevention of human disease," he said. Anna Perea of ​​the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Diseases. Division of Infectious Diseases with Vector Transmission. "Taken together, the data can help define the areas of tick propagation, the infectious pathogens they carry, and the areas where the risk of tick-borne disease increases."


Richard S. Ostfeld, PhD, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, based in Millbrook, New York, described the CDC's approach as "good news".

"The CDC will be able to paint a picture of risk and provide us with more reliable data than ever before, with geographic coverage of ticks, their movement, and changes in prevalence of infection," he says.

In 2017, the number of tick-borne illness cases reported to CDCs increased by 22% to 59,349. But the number of Americans with tick-related diseases was probably much higher, approaching 300,000 to 400,000 because not all cases of Lyme disease are reported to the CDC, says John Aucott, MD, president of a national body for tick-borne disease control. group, supported by the US Department of Health and Human Services.

"It's hard to predict what will happen each year, but the long-term trends are obvious," says Aucott, also director of the Lyme Clinical Research Center Johns Hopkins. "There are more tick-borne diseases [cases] every year."

Lyme disease is the most common disease caused by a tick bite. In 2017, there were 42,743 cases of Lyme disease, up 17% from 2016, according to the CDC. Lyme disease accounted for 72% of all tick-borne diseases reported in 2017. Other diseases, such as anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis, Rocky Mountain fever, babesiosis, tularemia and the Powassan virus, are more common than Lyme disease.

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