Ticks carry nasty diseases like lyme disease and the bacteria causing the deadly disease Rocky Mountain spotted fever, with variants of this disease found all over the world, including the Mediterranean and Middle East.

As the world warms from climate change, researchers find that the ticks that normally feed on dogs, actually prefer humans, when temperatures rise. This is sign that climate change could expand and intensify human disease risks, according to a new study out of the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. 

“Our work indicates that when the weather gets hot, we should be much more vigilant for infections of Rocky Mountain spotted fever in humans,” said veterinarian Laura Backus, who led the study: “We found that when temperatures rose from about 74 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, brown dog ticks that carry the disease were 2.5 times more likely to prefer humans over dogs.”

Cases of Rocky Mountain spotted fever and related diseases, collectively known as spotted fever rickettsiosis, have risen dramatically over the last 20 years.

Rickettsia conorii, a variant of the disease, is responsible for Mediterranean spotted fever in the Middle East and parts of Africa and Europe, including in Tunisia, Libya, Israel, Sardinia-Italy, Portugal and Algeria.

The brown dog tick which goes by a Latin name Rhipicephalus sanguineus is the main vector for R. conorii, which is responsible for Mediterranean spotted fever in the Middle East.

In addition to ticks, rickettsiae diseases can also be transmitted by fleas.

Spotted fever rickettsiosis is treatable with antibiotics if detected in the first week of infection, but once an infection takes hold, the fatality rate for spotted fever rickettsiosis victims can exceed 20%. Complications can include damaged blood vessels; inflammation of the heart, lungs or brain; and kidney failure. And we thought Covid was bad? 

Backus said there have been indications from earlier work that brown dog ticks, which are found throughout the world, may be more aggressive toward humans in hot weather.

And scientists warn that climate change is greatly expanding areas of the country experiencing multiple days when temperatures top 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 38 degrees Celsius. Backus and her colleagues at UC-Davis wanted to gain more definitive insights into how rising temperatures might elevate the risk of tick-borne infections.

Girl grad student in a box

For their experiment, they constructed two large wooden boxes measuring about 3 feet tall and 2 feet wide, which were then connected to each other by a clear plastic tube. They conducted a series of tests that involved putting a human in one box, a dog in the other and ticks in the clear plastic tube between them.

The researchers then observed, over 20-minute intervals, whether the ticks, which seek out hosts to feed on based on smell, preferred dogs or grad student humans –first at temperatures of around 74 degrees Fahrenheit (23.3 degrees Celsius) and then at 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 degrees Celsius).

Backus said that at the higher temperature, one type of brown dog tick, known as the tropical lineage tick, was especially decisive in shifting its preferences from dogs to humans. 

“We believe that this decreased preference for dogs–combined with a slight increase in preference for humans–suggests that hot temperatures may also elevate risks of Rocky Mountain spotted fever in areas where the temperate ticks are more common,” Backus said.

Does climate change worry you? Some things you can do today: 

• Buy less 
• Try low-impact travel and lifestyle. The Moneyless Man is an extreme
• Switch to renewables and solar power in your home/work
• Work for companies that lessen harm, or help your company evolve. See Estee Lauder going climate neutral

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Polio,or Poliomyelitis has not been a serious medical issue ever since the first wide scale vaccines were developed by Dr. Jonas Salk in the early 1950s.  Within the past few years, however, the often debilitating virus has began to return to epidemic proportions in many parts of the world. This includes the Middle East.

The disease, which can cause permanent paralysis of the central nervous system and debilitation of the muscular and skeletal system, has appeared recently in Egypt, Israel, and particularly in Syria, where a severe breakdown in the county’s sanitation systems due to the ongoing civil war resulted in the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF embarking on a massive campaign to immunize millions of young children in that country as well as in other parts of the Middle East.  

Most of the vaccinations given are the oral polio vaccine or OPV, which was developed by Albert Sabin in the late 1950s and came into general use in 1962.

Israel recently conducted a mass immunization campaign on young children after the polio virus was found in sewers in Jerusalem for the first time in more than 12 years.

The virus was also found last June in raw sewage in the Bedouin town of Rahat in Israel’s Negev region. At that time, the World Health Organization issued an alert about the virus, which had been feared to have spread to Israel from African countries.

(Related: What You Should Know About Polio, posted two years ago in Green Prophet.)

While the present vaccines are effective against the spread of the disease the question may be for how long the vaccinations will be effective until the virus strains build up a resistance to them. In regards to finding solutions to the sanitation issues that may be causing the virus strains to reoccur, this could be very difficult in countries where much of the populations live in grinding poverty.

In the case of Syria, the ongoing war has resulted in an almost complete collapse of the country’s sanitation systems.

“This is a race against time,” The UN’s relief head Valerie Amos was quoted as saying; regarding WHO’s effort to vaccine more than 2.5 million Syrian children.

More articles about Polio and other serious contagious diseases in the Middle East:

What You Should Know About Polio

Bats Blamed for Deadly Middle East MERS Respiratory Virus

Swine Flu Death Toll in Middle East Region

Photo of UNICEF health workers in Za’atari Syria  Children of Syria; Photo of Child Receiving Oral Vaccine: Haaretz/AP

The post Polio in Syria, Israel and Egypt Puts Middle East on Edge appeared first on Green Prophet.

I know women in Israel who were unsure about vaccinating their kids against polio. The nurse practitioners there said that polio is still “alive” in northern Israel. Getting a vaccine is very recommended. But new research by Tel Aviv University which warns about avoiding the “live” version of the vaccine, questions what kind of vaccine should be given to prevent the crippling disease which 60 years ago affected one of my husband’s family members.

The research done by Dr. Lester Shulman of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Israeli Ministry of Health spent years tracking isolated cases of live poliovirus infections, often discovered in countries that are supposedly polio-free, he reports. When the live-virus version of the vaccine, called Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV) evolves, he says, it can act like wild poliovirus and continue the threat of contagion.

(Here is a story of an Arab Gulf man who suffers from Polio, riding a solar golf cart).

While health professionals and researchers across the globe believe they are on the verge of eradicating polio, this devastating virus can still lead to paralysis and death.

Despite successful eradication in most countries, there are still four countries where the virus is considered endemic — and many more in which the virus still lurks. Medical professionals widely believe that after the wild virus is eradicated, resources dedicated to polio immunization can be redirected.

But this isn’t so, Dr. Shulman says.

He recommends that public health agencies take a three-pronged approach:

Vaccination policies to maintain “herd immunity”(at least 95%)

Environmental surveillance of sewage systems should continue

A switch to Inactivated Polio Vaccine (IPV) instead of OPV should be implemented.

Dr. Shulman’s research was recently published in PLoS ONE. He has also been invited as an informal expert to the World Health Organization’s annual meeting on polio this fall.

Israel is among the few countries that practice environmental surveillance for polio, beginning in 1989. It is known to still exist in Israel. Checking designated sites along sewage systems every month for evidence of the virus allows for early detection before there are paralytic cases. For the past decade, the researchers have been trying to trace the origin of the strain that infected two individuals in Central Israel.

They tracked the strains to the sewage system, and have been working to pinpoint the origin. Fortunately, because Israel maintains herd immunity for the disease, the wider population has not been threatened.

From Gaza to Egypt

Dr. Shulman says that in the lab, each strain of the virus can be identified from its genomic structure and traced back to the region from which it originated.

“From the sequence of the genome, you can match it with known sequences reported by labs throughout the world,” he explains. For example, he and his colleagues traced a wild poliovirus discovered in sewage from the Gaza District to a village in Egypt.

New hope for curing persistent infections

Convinced by the efficacy of Israel’s environmental surveillance program, many other countries are starting to develop tracking programs of their own. As a result, they are finding evidence of vaccine-derived polio cases in humans.

Paradoxically, Dr. Shulman sees a beacon of hope in these discoveries. As labs across the world report more cases, researchers gain a better understanding of how polioviruses establish persistent infections and can then develop effective measures to eliminate them.

The fellow researchers are now working to develop compounds that can effectively fight these rare cases of persistent poliovirus infections. So far, they have seen promising results, noting that the mutants strains have not become resistant to the drugs under investigation.

But for now, Dr. Shulman recommends that health authorities continue immunization using inactivated vaccines (IPV) to keep their populations safe.

Image via coda

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