"As populations of ticks increase in endemic areas, there are more ticks to be dispersed outward, like cups of ticks spilling over," Tsao explains. "Deer have a particularly high capacity to spread ticks because they can carry adult females that can lay 1,000 to 3,000 eggs. Similarly, though one bird might not carry many ticks, it's possible that thousands of migrating birds could pick up ticks from one area and drop them off in another." Climate change might also be helping some tick species move northward, she adds, as warming causes summers to grow longer. As soon as you feel your first symptoms of a tick infection, the clock starts: Getting treated quickly with the right antibiotics or antiparasitics can be critical to preventing symptoms from escalating. Half of the deaths from Rocky Mountain spotted fever in kids, for example, occur within nine days of when the symptoms started.
You might wait a few days, at least, before seeing a doctor And when you do, it could take even more time for you to get a precise diagnosis: There are no reliable rapid tests that can indicate every important tick-related infection; the lab assays that confirm the diseases may take days to deliver a result, if doctors even think to order them in the first place.
Further complicating matters, a tick often picks up multiple pathogens as it hitchhikes from animal to animal — and when it bites a human, it might transmit more than one. It may be that people with these coinfections—for example, Lyme plus ehrlichiosis or babesiosis — are sicker when symptoms surface and take longer to recover, says Dr. Wormser, who was the lead author of clinical guidelines for treating tickborne disease issued by the Infectious Diseases Society of America
And among people who develop symptoms of babesiosis, 5 percent to 10 percent will die. The death rate reaches 20 percent in those whose immune system is compromised — like Moore, whose spleen was removed because of a tumor when she was 14.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41973641/ns/health-infectious_diseases/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountain_spotted_fever
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrlichiosis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babesiosis