A classic example is the Asian semi-slug Parmarion martensi. Ever since it was first identified on Oahu in 1996, on the Big Island in 2004, and on Maui in 2017, P. martensi has often entered human habitats bearing heavy larval loads. Once inside humans, those same larvae head for the central nervous system where they typically grow and die, sometimes leaving deadly inflammation and neurologic harm in their wake.

Standard treatment is an anti-helminthic drug called albendazole (Albenza). But it needs starting right away and often there is a delay in diagnosis. Many illnesses due to A. cantonensis go undiagnosed or are never reported. Even so, in 2019, there were 9 cases identified among local residents and visitors to the Big Island of Hawaii.

The bad news is that, every year, millions of people visit Hawaii (including Vivien and me!), most knowing nothing about rat lungworm, including answers to such basic questions as: How can I avoid it? How is it eradicated? What are the early symptoms, to alert me to trouble, and allow me to receive prompt, effective treatment before developing nasty complications?

Most doctors are pretty ignorant of these issues too! 

Angiostrongylus cantonensis is a nematode or flatworm.

Illustrative Case

As an example of how subtle and sneaky parasites can be (they invade when tiny and invisible and then grow!) a 56-year old woman from Seattle who, after nearly 2 years of COVID restrictions and being shut away, couldn’t wait to enjoy some warm sun and the balmy trade winds in Hawaii. Unaware of any possible danger, she ate several salads and a veggie wrap during her 8-day stay on Hawaii Island in December 2021.

Her early symptoms—a strange tightness in her chest and sporadic tingling—began even before she left Hawaii. Back home she began suffering myalgias (muscle pain), burning pains, and a rash on her body. It got worse. Shortly afterwards she began experiencing altered vision and unsteady balance.

Not surprisingly, it was several weeks before the doctors’ index of suspicion was sufficiently high that they did a spinal tap and sent a small sample of her cerebrospinal fluid to the Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases at NIH. There, an ultra-sensitive test for A. cantonensis DNA proved she had contracted the “rat lungworm”. Unfortunately, her brain was already injured. Even 3 months later—despite 2 weeks of albendazole and ongoing treatment with another drug, Decadron—the once-athletic social worker still had double vision and an unsteady gait.

Brain damage is celebrated with the wonderful expression “neuroangiostrongyliasis” and symptoms may include severe, unremitting headaches, migrating numbness and even paralysis, bowel and bladder dysfunction due to inflammation in the spinal cord, hydrocephalus (fluid pressure inside the skull), and, eventually, coma and even death.

How Does This Hideous Thing Even Exist?

All parasites have a growth sequence called the “life cycle”. Rat lungworm’s revolting life cycle was first clarified in the 1950s and 1960s. In summary: adult A. cantonensis worms live and mate in rats’ pulmonary arteries, fertilized eggs hatch in the rats’ lungs, and baby larvae travel upwards to the back of the mouth, are duly swallowed, and thus pass in rats’ feces. After snails and slugs eat those feces and their larvae mature, the cycle begins anew when a new gang of rats eat the mollusks.

Ironically, humans are of no use to this parasite: it can’t complete its life cycle in us. We are just a side line, as you can see (in blue) from the CDC chart. Nevertheless, this is a dangerous pathogen.

So when did people enter the picture? In the first few decades following rat lungworm’s discovery, most human cases (often presenting as eosinophilic meningitis) were linked to eating raw or undercooked freshwater snails or prawns. In the 1960s, however, research in Hawaii and Polynesia suggested that fresh leafy greens, hiding snails or flatworms, could also transmit infection.

A famous outbreak in 2000, in which 12 medical students from Chicago suffered rat lungworm meningitis after sharing a large Caesar salad in Jamaica, left no further doubt that uncooked produce could also transmit the neuro-invasive nematode.

A New Global Parasite

This needs taking on board. There’s a new nasty kid on the black… and I do mean NASTY.

Rat lungworm has spread to most parts of the globe, almost unopposed (today, the parasite happily thrives in Southeast Asia, the Pacific islands, Japan, Australia, South America, the Caribbean, and the southeastern U.S. as well as parts of Africa and the Canary and Balearic Islands). We all know the importance of eating fresh greens, salads and fruits. But you must be careful from now on. Be alert to what may be on, in, or under your food! There is a need to balance healthy eating against genuine foodborne hazard now prevalent in these and other endemic countries.

Fortunately, thorough washing of produce removes infected A. cantonensis-infected mollusks, even though they may be very tiny; cooking and freezing outright kill larvae; and early treatment mitigates illness. But you must be cautious and aware if you are travelling to these areas. And do help by sharing this knowledge with others who may travel there, or who are at risk. If nobody warns them, how will they know?

Here is a summary of possible symptoms but remember, ANYTHING is possible with parasite disease. These guys are eating you alive and it depends on which bit of you they start with!

Fatigue
Skin rash
Nausea
Itching
Low grade fever
Diarrhea

The liver, the heart and lungs are attacked. The worms are moving around inside YOU. They walk through you, like your body is a highway to them. Very creepy.

But it’s when they get to your brain and spinal cord that really bad problems start. The worms nibble on parts of the brain and nervous system. The results are varying degrees of neurological damage, such as headache, weakness, stiff neck (like meningitis), bladder dysfunction, sensitivity to light and even loss of consciousness. Your brain feels like it has just been hit in a bad motor smash.

This may lead easily to the need for intensive medical support. The patients can be incapacitated, non-compos mentis, unable to move or speak and needing respiratory support.

Often the patient is left permanently disabled; they cannot work again; and financial ruin awaits; or at least dependency on community support. Lives are altered forever.

COVID? What a joke. This rat lungworm misery is real and is under-reported, not blown up with inflated false statistics!

And you know what? Nematode worms are not going away. It’s been said that if you removed everything on earth except nematode worms, you would still be able to recognize forests, hills, rivers and ocean shores, animals and plants; even human habitations.

To learn more about parasites and how to protect yourself against possible harm, get my book.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE PARASITES HANDBOOK!

To your good health,

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

I am indebted to Dr. Claire Panosian Dunavan, MD, professor of infectious diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, for much of this knowledge. She has recently produced a documentary about rat lungworm disease, called “Accidental Host—The Story of Rat Lungworm Disease,” which will air later this year.

A 20-year-old man, who lives in New Delhi, went to the emergency room after experiencing abdominal pain, diarrhea and vomiting for a day, according to the report, published Saturday (Nov. 21, 2020) in The New England Journal of Medicine.¹ The man had previously been healthy with no known medical conditions.

Tests showed that he had high levels of white blood cells, which can indicate an infection. He also had elevated levels of hemoglobin, a protein in the blood that carries oxygen. This latter result can indicate a number of conditions, from dehydration to leukemia.

Doctors performed an ultrasound of the inferior vena cava, a large vein in the abdomen, to check fluid levels in his blood vessels. But during this process, they observed a “tubular … structure that moved with a curling motion” inside his stomach. 

NOTE THE OLD DOCTOR’S SAYING: If you hear the sound of hooves, think “Horse”, not “Zebra”. Why the hell are they asking to penetrate his vena cava, when they could just take a blood draw and ask for a stool or saliva sample? Parasitic competition for food, leading to anemia, is still the “horse”. 

Nightmare ultrasound reveals parasitic worms squirming around inside man’s stomach

Anyway, not even a half-literate medical student could miss this diagnosis. You can see it moving on the ultrasound! It’s a wriggling worm, not a “tubular structure moving with a circular motion”! I wonder if the doctors were really so inexperienced as to not actually recognize what they were seeing?

[see remark below about the use of ultrasound]

Doctors then asked the man for a stool sample and found that his stool contained eggs from the roundworm Ascaris lumbricoides, a very widespread type of intestinal parasite.

Now, Stay Level With Me Here:

This guy did NOT swallow a ton of 10-inch worms. He swallowed invisible eggs, probably a couple of weeks before. The worms had hatched and were on the way up to his mouth and OUT, which is why they made him retch!

Puke Alert: I wrote in my anti-parasite book that one of the horrors of treating live parasites is that they try to bail out backwards, up to the mouth. It is not rare to have worms, or parts of half dead worms still wriggling, come into the back of the mouth or even—God forbid—coming down the nostrils, when treatment has been administered.

Another bunch of Ascaris, taken from a woman’s bile duct!²

A. lumbricoides is one of the most common human parasitic worms worldwide and can grow up to as much as 14 inches. An estimated 800 million to 1.2 billion people have A. lumbricoides in their intestinal tracts, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). If correct, that’s 15% of the population!

Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, described Ascaris as “one of the most common agents of human disease in the world.”

The CDC, which almost nobody believes any more, claims Ascaris is “relatively rare” in the United States. That’s misleading. It’s terrifyingly common in the USA, in fact. It is only “relatively” rare when you compare it to some of the world’s worst hit-spots, such as India. Not the same thing as “rare”, at all.

True, Ascaris is most often found in tropical and subtropical areas with poor sanitation systems and lack of access to hygiene supplies. People become infected with the worm when they ingest eggs from the parasite, and this can happen when people eat fruits or vegetables that have been grown in contaminated soil. 

Soil can become contaminated if human feces are used as fertilizer or if infected people defecate outside. People can also become infected if their hands become contaminated with this soil and they don’t wash their hands.

Treatment

The best treatment is always DON’T GET INFECTED in the first place.

Ascaris can be treated with a number of antiparasitic drugs. In this case, the man received a drug called albendazole, and he was released from the hospital after one day. At a follow-up visit two weeks later, the man said he felt well and had passed worms in his stool.

Ways to prevent Ascaris infection include washing your hands with soap and water before handling food; washing, peeling or cooking raw vegetables before eating them; and, as the CDC says, avoid contact with foods from soil that may be contaminated with human feces.

Yeah, right. Well this is the bit you Americans are not going to enjoy: MOST of your fruit and veggies are grown in shit-infected soil. Large amounts of produce consumed in the USA comes from Mexico, Central America and China (for China, read Walmart and Albertson’s). Even farmer’s markets sell fruits and veggies from over the border in Mexico. 

Food grown in remote and less hygienic territories can be flown in, within hours of picking. All the creepy-crawlies that were present on the food where it was grown are still alive and still capable of making you and your family sick by the time you buy them “fresh”.

In my parasite-busting book The Parasites Handbook, I described in detail the problem of the infamous Cyclospora cayetanensis outbreaks which take place regularly.

For example, in one instance a large number of anesthesiologists were knocked out over three counties in California; they had all been to a symposium where Cyclospora-contaminated raspberries from Guatemala were served for the lunch. The infestation made them so severely ill, most could not work, and for several days there was a crisis of no anesthetists. Think what a problem that would be!

This is the FDA’s description of the Cyclospora infection: “It is caused by the Cyclospora parasite, which causes a variety of debilitating symptoms, including diarrhea, loss of appetite, substantial weight loss, stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting, muscle aches, low-grade fever and fatigue.” 

Other outbreaks have occurred in Illinois and Texas. Salad mixes may also be to blame; not just fruits. In spring, in Central American countries, the rains often overload the drains. Sewage may escape and flood the local countryside, including food crop fields. Then too, farm workers may be forced to defecate in the open fields, because no proper facilities are provided for pickers…

I don’t think I need to paint the whole picture for you here. I’ll just join you in a quick YUCK!

The CDC goes on “Cyclospora infection can be successfully treated with appropriate antibiotic therapy.” Well, that may have been true once. But in this day and age it is stupid to go on believing antibiotics will pull us out of any crisis. THE GOLDEN AGE OF ANTIBIOTICS IS OVER! Better by far to know what you are up against and take proper precautions…

Get my book The Parasites Handbook; it will never go out of fashion!

[PLEASE: look at my writings on the very great dangers of ultrasound and get Jeanice Barcelo’s book on the same theme.]

To your good health,

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby

References:

1. Chaurasia & Bhoi, NEJM, 2020

2. https://www.livescience.com/62461-roundworms-bile-ducts.html

She accidentally spilled 2 drops of dimethyl mercury on her gloved hand… and subsequently died in agony.

Now it’s important you take note this is dimethyl mercury, which is NOTORIOUSLY dangerous. Methyl mercury, which caused the outbreak of Minamata Disease in Japan in the 1960s and 70s was METHYL mercury, not DIMETHYL mercury. We all saw the horrible picture of young kids from the city if Minamata, twitching and jerking in wheelchairs, as they slowly died.

Well, dimethyl mercury is ten times as deadly.* It’s horrible!

KW turned up in ER five months after her accidental exposure. She was sure that she had not touched the chemical. She apparently followed the full detox procedure at the time (she was a professional, after all). But…

This is what happened to her: she noticed progressive deterioration in balance, gait, and speech; she has lost 15 pounds in the 2 months leading up to her admission, and experienced several brief episodes of nausea and abdominal discomfort.

She started walking into walls and assumed she had not been paying proper attention. Then, one day, she almost got into a car accident. She started asking her husband to drive her to university. Maybe she hadn’t slept well, she thought.

When examined, she had a condition called “dysmetria” (“dys-” meaning wrong, and “-metria” meaning length). She was mis-estimating distances and how close or far away things were, which made her extremely clumsy.

Similarly, she had ataxic gait, meaning her walk was awkward, imbalanced, and disorderly. Both of these were combined with lousy handwriting and slurred speech, all of which amounted to severe neurodegeneration, with mercury as the likely culprit.

She was a skilled professional and she knew what all this meant. She was right to be concerned about her condition.

As the days continued, KW reports that she has a tingling in her fingers that’s getting stronger. She sees brief flashes of light in both eyes. She introduces the concept of white background noise that begins to wash away her normal hearing in both ears. Her gait becomes even more ataxic. Her speech becomes more slurred; her field of vision, more narrow.

A blood test revealed that her blood mercury levels were over 4,000 mcg/L. Thats 4,000 times greater than the upper limit of normal. Obviously, mercury poisoning was THE cause of her condition.

But the sad part of the story is that she did not show any signs of recovery, many weeks after leaving the lab. Where was the mercury hiding? It was clearly not being excreted. 95% of her “dose” was unaccounted for.

In fact it ended up in the nervous system. Remember, she was not poisoned by mercury metal but the dimethyl form, which has a strong affinity for fatty tissue. What’s the fattiest organ in the body?

The brain! it’s over . 60% fat.

So a near-lethal dose of organic mercury is transferred to her brain and nervous tissues. She was in big trouble.

The problem with dimethlymercury is that, in the liver, it’s broken down to methylmecury, which still dissolved strongly in fatty tissue (hence Minamata Disease). Even worse, it’s known to bing to tissue and cause free radical damage and oxidative stress, and form complexes that accelerate cell death.

The best solution here is to trap the mercury inside a molecule that’s water-soluble on the outside, so that it will grab the mercury but still dissolve in water and be excreted by the kidneys. We call this “chelation”, from the Latin word for a crab’s claw!

But it was too late. A week later a neuropsychiatric consultant found severe cognitive deficits. She’s losing touch. Her husband tries to speak to her, but she would stare blankly into a void.

At 3 weeks’ time after initially presenting to the emergency room, KW becomes unresponsive to verbal, visual, and touch stimuli. From the depths of her coma, she is sometimes found yawning spontaneously with brief episodes of agitation, screaming, crying, and unpromted sudden, jerky limb movements. There’s someone inside, but that person is trapped in a prison of her own comatose body.

There continued to be some debate whether her condition was caused by steady accumulation of mercury from her work. But a hair analysis showed that was not the case.

The amount of free mercury found in her body halved every 75 days, with a maximum excretion recorded roughly 150 days before presenting to the emergency room: the time she was subject to the spill in the lab.

Working, backwards, it became obvious that she had absorbed a MASSIVE quantity of demethylmercury, four times the lethal dose. She was as good as dead from the moment of the spill. In fact at one point her blood mercury levels were likely to be 16,000 times the upper limit of normal, it was calculated.

It was discovered later the dimethylmercury does, in fact, diffuse through the type of disposable latex gloves KW wore that day, and it does so within seconds. The small exposure, equivalent to a few drops absorbed into her skin, embedded into her body and caused delayed onset of cerebral disease.

In view of the dismal prognosis and after more than three months of trying everything they could do to saver her, the patient’s advance directives were followed, and she was left to die peacefully on June 8, 1997, 298 days after exposure.

Before she lapsed into a vegetative state, the patient requested that her case be presented to the general medical community, to scientists working with mercury, and to toxicologists, in the hope of improving the recognition, treatment, and prevention of future cases of mercury poisoning.

Only three other cases of dimethylmercury poisoning have been documented in history. In 1865, two lab assistants who were synthesizing it for the first time passed away several weeks after doing so. In the 1960s, another lab worker was exposed to it and he too suffered a delayed neurologic decline in the same fashion as KW.

In general, it’s a good rule to not touch things if you don’t know what they are. Be cognizant of what comes in contact with your skin. Unless you’re a chemist, you probably won’t come into direct contact with dimethylmercury the way that KW did. And don’t worry, you would have to eat 65,000kg of fresh Atlantic salmon in one sitting to get you to where she was.

It is important to understand that methyl and dimethylmercury are ORGANIC forms of mercury, not the same as thiomersol at all (mis-spelled by Americans as thimersal).

I don’t think it is appropriate to illustrate this story with an image of the patient. But if you want to watch a YouTube video about this famous case, go here:

A gloomy story, And of course it poses the obvious question: why would they want to put ANY form of mercury into babies? Teething powders resulted in deadly “pink disease”, back in the 1940s and 50s. Then it was used in vaccines. Duh! now we have to worry about polluted fish (from coal burning and other industrial waste). As a general rule, smaller fish, like squid, scallops, sardines, contain less mercury than larger varieties such as tune and swordfish, which are higher up the food chain.

Also- a good idea: get yourself a copy of the Monterey Aquarium phone app. Check the quality of fish you are eating!

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby 

The Official Alternative Doctor

• A figure of speech only.

Sources:

1. Medpage Today

2. June 4, 1998. N Engl J Med 1998; 338:1672-1676 doi: 10.1056/NEJM199806043382305

Now orthodox doctors are asking the same question…. And coming up with the same answer.

The parasite in question is Toxoplasmosis (toxo for short) and is caused by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii.

Toxo could well cause behavior disturbance in humans and be a menacing cause of unforeseen suicide.

Humans can become chronically infected by eating undercooked meat or unwashed vegetables or by handling cat litter, as the parasite is known to multiply in the gut of infected cats. Even just messing around with your infected cat puts you in danger. NEVER let kids cuddle and slurp with cats or dogs.

Some studies have linked the parasite to a higher chance of developing schizophrenia, and researchers believe because the T. gondii parasite lives in the brain, it could have an effect on emotions and behavior. It could trigger suicidal thoughts. It does in cats and rats!!

For the new report, Dr. Teodor Postolache from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore and his colleagues used Danish medical registries to track 45,788 women who were originally included in a study that screened newborn babies for toxoplasmosis.

Just over one-quarter of the babies were positive for T. gondii antibodies, which would have come from the mother’s blood, meaning their mothers likely had a chronic, underlying toxoplasmosis infection.

What was really startling is that, over the next decade or more, the infected women were about 50 percent more likely to cut, burn or otherwise hurt themselves and 80 percent more likely to attempt suicide.

In total, 488 women hurt themselves for the first time during the study – or eight out of every 10,000 annually – and 78 tried to kill themselves.

That toxo could cause this is a pretty sobering thought.

It means parasites are a danger from all sides. Yet people know so little about how they interact with us humans.

Parasites are deadly and have killed more people in history than wars combined. They are NOT confined to 3^rd world countries. Scores of millions of Americans are infected. They penetrate every corner of the developed world.

You need to learn about parasites and how to stop them killing you (that’s what they do).

Read about my super-handbook on parasites:

http://www.parasites911.com

Go there now.

[REFERENCE: Archives of General Psychiatry, online July 2, 2012]

It’s carried by so-called “kissing bugs”, which bite you round the mouth while you sleep and infects you with the Chagas disease creepy parasite: the American trypanosome.

More than 8 million people have been infected by potentially fatal Chagas disease, most of them in Latin and Central America. But more than 300,000 live in the United States.

An editorial, published the Public Library of Science’s Neglected Tropical Diseases journal, said the spread of the disease is reminiscent of the early years of HIV.

The US’s Centers for Disease Control has branded Chagas as one of five serious and “neglected” parasite diseases. The journal editorial called Chagas, “the new AIDS of the Americas.”

Both diseases disproportionately affect people living in poverty, both are chronic conditions requiring prolonged, expensive treatment, and as with patients in the first two decades of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, most patients with Chagas disease do not have access to health care facilities.

However, Chagas is not a sexually-transmitted disease: it’s spread by “Kissing bugs” (Family Reduviidae), which bite the unsuspecting victims around the lips, usually at night. It’s hard to stop and this pest has now spread to California, Arizona and other parts of the Southern USA.

Chagas, kills about 20,000 people per year. It’s difficult to cure (unless you get my book) and around 20 percent of those infected with Chagas will develop a life-threatening form of the disease.

About a quarter of its victims eventually will develop enlarged hearts or intestines, which can fail or burst, causing sudden death. Treatment involves harsh drugs taken for up to three months and works only if the disease is caught early.

The problem is once the heart symptoms start, which is the most dreaded complication, the medicines no longer work very well, and they are extremely toxic.

You need the holistic approach, that’s for sure.

And 11 percent of pregnant women in Latin America are infected with Chagas, the journal said.

Here’s where to get my Parasites Handbook:

http://www.parasites911.com

Parasites are probably the most diverse of all biological forms and yet, by definition, they remain implacably hostile to humans.

Of the 7.8 billion acres of potential arable land on Earth, only 3.4 billion acres can be farmed; most of the rest cannot be developed because of parasites (malaria, trypanosomiasis, schistosomiasis and onchocerciasis).

That’s more than half the farmable land of our planet unavailable to us, because of these critters, at a time when humans need food resources like never before.

In Africa alone, an area the size of the USA cannot be farmed because of trypanosomes and many millions in South America have never had a healthy day in their lives because of this fiendish parasite.

But are parasites a curse of the undeveloped Third World? Not a bit of it…

Dr. Frank Nova, Chief of the Laboratory for Parasitic Diseases at the National Institute of Health, states, “In terms of numbers, there are more parasitic infections acquired in the US than in Africa.”

Even if countries in the Northern hemisphere were somehow protected in the past, all that is coming to an end. With climate change, parasite vectors are now moving north into tropical zones. A version of Trypanosomiasis (referred to above) is now endemic in the “kissing bugs” of Arizona and California.

Wake up! You need to know more—a LOT more than you do. Go here:

http://www.parasites911.com

One of the things I most need to teach Westerners is that parasites are very common at home. It is not just a problem for the “Great Unwashed” in far off lands. We have plenty of our own!

Americans I have found are particular prone to the naive belief that “they” don’t have parasites. Yet some areas of the Unites States are so heavily infested I would joke about warning foreigners from Europe to take special precautions to protect themselves when visiting these states!

If you learn nothing else from me, learn this: we all have parasites in our bodies, permanently or from time to time. Those with stronger immune systems have less problems, that’s all…

Regular readers will know my life long maxim: the commonest cause of death is ignorance.

You can’t afford to go on sharing half your life and resources with critters running around, unhindered, inside you. It’s time to start hindering them!

Learn more about how to get to grips with this health issue, by visiting this page:

http://www.parasites911.com

Yes, I gave it the name “911”, to commemorate the fateful events of Sept 2001. It’s appropriate: it’s a killer situation in which the world and its issues landed dangerously on the US doorstep.

There is no escaping the problem of parasites today; we are truly a global village. We share the Earth’s dangers, wherever we go—and even if we stay at home!

Thanks for reading,

You probably thought I meant Lyme disease there, didn’tcha? Well no, I mean something far deadlier.

Deer ticks also carry babesiosis. It’s one of the parasites diseases I covered in my groundbreaking Parasites Handbook.

Move over, Lyme disease: Another tick-borne illness is on the rise in various parts of the country, and this one can kill.

Known as babesiosis, the disease is caused by a microscopic parasite that attacks blood cells, causing flu-like symptoms that can make it difficult to accurately diagnose. Like Lyme disease, which is caused by bacteria, babesia microti parasites are carried by deer ticks.

First documented in Massachusetts in 1969, the once-obscure babesiosis has surfaced as a significant public health threat in parts of the Northeast and Upper Midwest over the last several years.

A recent study in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, revealed that between 2001 and 2008 cases climbed from 6 to 119 in New York’s Lower Hudson Valley — a 20-fold regional increase.

And many cases may be escaping detection, experts say. It’s being under-reported.

About 1,000 cases are reported annually in affected locales, Krause said, but many people with babesiosis have no symptoms and never know they’re harboring the parasite. For others, symptoms can include high fever, severe headache, fatigue, chills, and muscle aches and pains. It is treated with antimicrobial drugs, such as antibiotics.

Unfortunately, many cases are symptom free. If they donate blood and the babesiosis isn’t picked up, the results can be severe. About 30% of compromised transfusion recipients die.

To help prevent babesiosis, the CDC advises people with compromised immune systems or other vulnerabilities to avoid tick-infested wooded areas, particularly during warm months. It’s not such a big deal out here in the dry deserts of the West, where I live. But it IS spreading.

Normal tick advisories apply.

May 2011, Emerging Infectious Diseases