How sick can you get from a tick? - AU SBS Insight 25-10-2016

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• published: 25 Oct 2016
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As debate rages in Australia about tick-borne illnesses, this week's Insight asks: how much can a bite from one of these critters affect our health? In September 2015, Vivianne Vandenberg went bushwalking with friends on the picturesque NSW South Coast. When they returned back to the house they were renting, she found a tick had lodged itself into her upper leg. The women debated what to do, before settling on a method of extraction and pulling the critter fully free from Vivianne’s body. “Julie got the whole tick out and we were very pleased with that because we thought great, we've got the head out, fine,” recalls Vivianne. But three minutes later, she began to feel oddly warm. Her vision went next, and the last thing she remembers is falling to the ground and vomiting. Her friends, two of whom were nurses, briefly lost her pulse before Vivianne came to with slurred speech waiting for an ambulance to arrive. She’d been bitten by a paralysis tick: a species responsible for 95 per cent of all human tick bites on Australia’s eastern seaboard and thought to be the most likely vector of illness-causing pathogens. Of the 70 – 75 tick species in the country – 65 of which are uniquely Australian – only 10 are thought to bite humans. The bite to Vivianne had triggered an anaphylactic reaction and now even a nibble from a baby tick is potentially fatal to the 58 year-old. So extreme is her reaction, she is concerned about living on Australia’s east coast where the paralysis tick is endemic. Vivianne is part of a growing number of Australians whose health has been severely impacted by the humble bite of a tick. Around 1000 people in Sydney’s Northern Beaches currently suffer from a mammalian meat allergy, brought about by the bite of a tick in their leafy surrounds. Others, meanwhile, have developed what appears to be a tick-borne illness whose symptoms resemble Lyme disease found overseas. The latter’s experience can be crippling. Elite Australian tennis player Samantha Stosur knows the full effect of Classical Lyme disease, when she was bitten by a tick, in Paris she suspects, around the time she was training for Wimbledon in 2007. Her glands swelled, a rash spread across her body, and she developed extreme tiredness, headaches and body aches. A few weeks later and back in the US, she had developed viral meningitis. Many weeks and four doctors later, Stosur was finally diagnosed with Lyme disease. With two months of oral and IV antibiotics she was on her way to recover, but it would be a long journey. “Eventually when the doctors told me it was okay for me to come home, I came home and started really slowly with my training again which was about a twenty minute walk,” she tells Insight’s Jenny Brockie. “So that was quite, you know, a different scope of what I was used to.” If Stosur had sought diagnosis in Australia, she may have run into some scepticism. While doctors here do recognise the existence of Lyme disease from tick bites contracted overseas, such a diagnosis does not extend to Australians who present with symptoms resembling Lyme disease from a bite the country. A couple of years ago, Jesse Chadwick was on the NSW Central Coast with his family bushwalking among sand dunes and marshland. Bugs and sand flies were everywhere, but they brushed them away without much notice. After flying to New Zealand for a holiday not long after, Jesse was hit with a wave of illness: fevers, chills, fatigue. “They started subsiding after about ten days,” says Jesse, “and then when I got back to Australia, I could never actually really shake it. It was just always something coming towards me.” The fatigue increased and he developed headaches, muscle and joint pains, and digestion problems. He thinks he visited more than 16 doctors before finally finding one who specialised in chronic fatigue syndrome willing to see him. “The chronic fatigue doctor said: ‘I don't think you've got chronic fatigue, I think you've got a Lyme-like illness.” Read full article here: http://www.sbs.com.au/news/insight/article/2016/10/24/how-sick-can-you-get-tick Read: If I die on your watch.....is that doing no harm? In response to Tuesday nights SBS INSIGHT show on ticks, The Lyme Disease Association of Australia has issued the following Press Release. http://www.lymedisease.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/20161027-LDAA-MR-If-I-die-on-your-watch-FINAL-c.pdf?platform=hootsuite See more video's and information about Lyme Disease here on Lyme Channel: http://bit.ly/1VRWk2j