(CNN)Summer is nearly here, and it’s bringing fears of a rare tick-borne disease called Powassan. This potentially life-threatening virus is carried and transmitted by three types of ticks, including the deer tick that transmits Lyme disease.
Over the past decade, 75 cases have been reported in the northeastern states and the Great Lakes region, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Though no one can say how many infections will occur this year, warmer winters have led to an increased tick population, so experts predict rising tick-borne infections of many types.
Everyone is at risk for Powassan: Newborns, 20-somethings, the middle-aged, the elderly and the immunocompromised. Anyone bitten by an infected tick can get it, said Dr. Jennifer Lyons, chief of the Division of Neurological Infections and Inflammatory Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Infections are most likely during late spring, early summer and mid-fall, when ticks are most active.
“About 15% of patients who are infected and have symptoms are not going survive,” said Lyons, who is also an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. “Of the survivors, at least 50% will have long-term neurological damage that is not going to resolve.”
Although most infected people will never show symptoms, those who do become sick usually do so a few days to about a week after the tick bite, she said. The most common symptoms will be fever and headache.
‘Flu-like’ symptoms
“You basically feel nonspecific flu-like stuff,” Lyons said, including “muscle aches and pains; maybe you have a little rash on your skin, but almost certainly, you’ll have a fever and the headache.”
The unlucky few who develop a more serious illness will do so “very quickly over the next couple of days,” she said. “You start to develop difficulties with maintaining your consciousness and your cognition. … You may develop seizures. You may develop inability to breathe on your own.”
Just as there are no vaccines to prevent infection, there are also no treatments for Powassan.
“There are some experimental therapies we try when somebody comes in and they get here early enough and we get the therapy started early enough, but we have no idea if any of that works,” Lyons said…..more here