United States: As more cases of Lyme disease are becoming common, scientists are struggling to spot its symptoms.
According to a scientific report, ticks are blood-sucking parasites that, like mosquitos, transmit diseases to humans.
However, their bite comes with other potential risks of infection and dangerous illnesses, which are even hard to spot as a sign.
More about the Ticks
Ticks are spider-like creatures, secreting an anti-inflammatory substance to hide their feeding. This helps various disease-causing pathogens, which may have infected the tick earlier, to freeload a ride into a human’s bloodstream.

According to BBC News, the most well-known of these freeloaders is a spiral-shaped bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi, which causes Borreliosis or Lyme disease, as BBC News reported.
Lyme disease has many symptoms, which are more varied if treatment is not prompt. As Jack Lambert, a consultant in infectious diseases, professor of medicine at University College Dublin, and founder of the Lyme Resource Centre, stated, “It’s a type of bacteria that penetrates every tissue in the body.”
“It goes to the brain, it goes to the joints. It goes to the muscles, the nervous system, the peripheral nervous system, the bladder, and the gut,” he added.
More about Lyme disease
It causes several serious health problems, such as facial paralysis, heart problems, severe fatigue, and painful pins and needles in hands and feet.
According to Brian Fallon, director of the Lyme and Tick-Borne Diseases Research Center at Columbia University in New York, “Early in the days of Lyme disease, there was a big debate,” and “Are patients making it up? Are they hypochondriacs where they think they’re ill when they’re not? That’s what led to a lot of struggles in the early 1990s with how to treat these patients.”
As the scientists add more that Lyme is a rare and fatal disease, people who get infected also easily recover if treated quickly with antibiotics today.
Several medical practitioners are focusing on the initial presence of an expanding rash (erythema migrans) with red concentric “bullseye” rings resembling the center target of a dart board for its diagnosis.
Lambart added, “The bullseye rash is not always a bullseye,” and, “It can be elliptical. It could be a solid rash. It can be a blistering rash. It can be a bruise. Also, on dark skin, it doesn’t look like a bullseye at all. Even when you have a classic bullseye rash, the GP often diagnoses it as ringworm. But ringworm is only a rash. It doesn’t have joint pain or memory problems.”
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