Exercise caution to prevent Lyme disease

It’s a summertime issue that’s as small as a sesame seed, but leaves its wounded with big problems if not discovered early on. A bite from the deer tick — becoming extra common on Staten Island as more deer call it home — can cause Lyme disease, a typically treatable and preventable ailment.

The city Health Department reports hundreds of New Yorkers are impure with tick-borne diseases each year, with Lyme being the most common. Ticks composed from Clay Pit Ponds State Park in Charleston recently tested positive for the bacterium so as to causes the disease. It’s also common for residents to become infected even as traveling to endemic areas such as the Hudson Valley, Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut.

About four years back, Eric Brown, a 12-year-old who lives a stone’s fling from Clay Pit Ponds, began having bad headaches, followed by flu-like symptoms as well as ear aches, dizziness and stiff neck, as well as lower back and leg pain.

Medical Minute: Tick season brings Lyme disease

Lyme disease can be complicated to diagnose in its early stages as symptoms can vary commonly from person to person and look like the flu and other ailments. The disease can cause a trait rash that can start at the bite site, or appear somewhere else. It can appear three to 30 days after a tick bite or not at all. Other general symptoms consist of fever, chills, headaches, muscle aches, stiff neck, joint pain and low energy. The blood test for Lyme disease can be unenthusiastic in the early stages of the infection. Only about 30 percent of patients with Lyme disease remember the tick bite.

Lyme disease can be treated efficiently with antibiotics, mainly if treated early. If left untreated, the sickness can cause arthritis, heart problems, muscle fault, loss of memory or Bell's palsy, a paralysis and drooping of the facial muscles.Ehrlichiosis is another familiar disease also carry by deer ticks, but is much less common than Lyme disease. Its most normal symptoms include a sudden high fever, fatigue, severe headaches and muscle aches and, at times, a rash.

Symptoms usually become visible one to two weeks after a tick bite and differ from mild, self-limiting sickness to severe or hardly ever life-threatening disease. In severe cases, patients can increase low blood cell counts and kidney crash. Ehrlichiosis is complicated to diagnose, even when it is severe, because it resembles so various other diseases. Like Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis can be treating with antibiotics. About 600 cases of ehrlichiosis have been established nationwide, but no one knows how many cases have gone untouched or misdiagnosed.