According to the medical director of the Clinical Hospital for Infectious and Tropical Diseases “Dr. Victor Babes” from Bucharest, Dr. Simin Aysel Florescu, on average, approximately 20-30 patients arrive at this medical unit weekly after being bitten by ticks.
In the case of ticks, although not all stings cause infection, they can transmit Lyme disease to humans, a serious condition that affects the entire body.
Due to non-specific symptoms (flu-like manifestations, severe fatigue, headache and joint pain, sleep disorders), Lyme disease, also called borreliosis, is not easy to detect and can be confused with other conditions.
This is why the condition is also called “1000-girl disease”. The distinguishing symptom is a large spot on the skin, instead of a tick bite, a migratory erythema on the basis of which the doctor can give a first diagnosis of the disease in the first stage of infection.
The data of the National Center for Surveillance and Control of Communicable Diseases (CNSCBT), Romanian Institute of Public Health show that in 2015, in Romania, 762 suspected cases of Lyme disease were notified, of which 320 were confirmed.
What do you do when you discover a tick on your body
According to the doctors, if we detect a tick on the body, it is recommended to remove the insect as quickly as possible with a pair of tweezers, without waiting for spontaneous detachment. If he cannot remove the tick on his own, the patient must urgently go to the family doctor or to the emergency room of a hospital for its extraction.
The infection doctor is the one who establishes the prophylaxis. In the first stage, the diagnosis is clinical, by observing the migratory erythema (large spot). Serological testing is done only at least 4 weeks after the tick bite, because the antibodies appear late, Lyme disease being a condition that could occur about a month after the bite.
And mosquitoes are dangerous
And local species of mosquitoes they can also spread a number of viruses, such as West Nile, the virus responsible for triggering acute meningoencephalitis. If not treated promptly and properly, it can cause death. In 2015, 125 suspicions of West Nile virus infection were reported, of which 19 cases were confirmed and 13 were classified as probable, according to CNSCBT data.
According to the same report, only one death from the West Nile virus was recorded last year.
At the moment we do not have to worry about it Zika virus, which is transmitted to humans by the sting of the Aedes Albopictus mosquito, also known as the tiger mosquito.
“Although the tiger mosquito is present in Romania, being adapted to the urban environment, the Zika virus is not currently found in our country as a local transmission,” said Dr. Simin-Aysel Florescu.
Unlike other species, the tiger mosquito stings quite aggressively during the day, but there are no significant medical differences from native mosquito species in terms of the appearance of the sting.
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