One morning about three weeks ago, my wife and co-CEO Cheryl looked down at my leg and said, “How did that happen?” “That” was a huge red rash on my left leg. There was no pain, and I hadn’t even noticed it. But we both knew it wasn’t good. I figured I’d been bitten by a spider. But when I went to the local doctor, Dr. Petra, she immediately says, “Oh, that’s Lyme Disease. You were bitten by a tick.”
When we think of global warming, we tend to think of melting ice caps and rising seas. Climate change is still an abstraction for most people. But I can assure you the real and present danger is the spread of tiny little parasites that spread diseases from hot climes to cold.
All things considered, I was lucky … people often don’t have any outward signs they’ve been bitten by tiny little seed ticks and never realize they have the Lyme Disease, or Lyme borreliosis bacterium, until weeks or months later, when Stage 2 symptoms set in. Those manifestations including pain, swelling joints, long-term heart and vision issues, facial palsy, arthritis, nerve pain, dizziness and more.
You really don’t want to get this disease.
Even the treatment is no fun because this powerful antibiotic doxycycline made me feel sluggish and nauseous. But if you start your antibiotic regemin quickly enough after you see the warning signs, the chances that you’ll get really ill drop to near zero. I hope ….
That’s the good news.
The bad news is, you can get reinfected from another tick bite.
Tick heaven
Avoiding ticks and Lyme Disease is getting more difficult in Europe because the warmer temperatures have expanded the range. Lyme Disease used to be a problem in Central Europe. Now, it’s moving north into Scandinavia, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.
According to Santé Publique France, the number of Lyme borreliosis cases is increasing significantly. The incidence rate rose from around 40 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in 2009 to 90 cases per 100,000 in 2020, with variations depending on the year.
Your odds of contracting Lyme Disease come down to the increasing percentage of ticks in your area that have the bacterium.
I think I was bitten when I took our dog Sebastian on a walk along a overgrown path along a water feature outside our rural village. It was one of the rare warm days we’ve had, so I was out walking through the weeds in shorts. Well, walking through the tick-infested weeds.
Dumb.
Overall, our weather this year has been extreme – relatively warm, with crazy amounts of rain – so the vegetation is especially dense. We live in tick heaven, with abundant wildlife hosting ticks, including fox, deer, birds and who knows what. That’s not to mention all the dogs, cats and horses.
But the ticks here are tiny and very hard to find. So I never even saw the little blood-sucing varmint that got me.
Precautions
What I should have done to avoid the ticks?
Well, using common sense would have been a good start:
• If you go hiking in the wilds of the Netherlands (and trust me, there’s way more protected woodlands, heaths and swamps here in the south than you might think), don’t wear shorts. Long pants are a must if you get into the tall grass. And even then, the little critters can get at our ankles, so wear socks.
Double check your skin and scalp after a walk.
• Apparently, DEET and other insect repellants are a barrier to ticks.
• Check your dog. They’re like Uber for ticks. And a flea and tick collar is a must.
• If you find ticks, remove them immediately. Apparently I hosted my attacker for quite awhile without realizing it. A tick has to stay attached for 36 to 48 hours or more before the Lyme disease bacterium can be transmitted. If you remove it within 24 hours, the risk is greatly reduced, according to the U.S. Federal Drug Administration literature I read.
• Though they can save your life, antibiotics themselves are a problem because they wipe out your beneficial gut bacteria that keep you healthy. And they can lead to risk to infection with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The literature I’ve seen says eating fresh veggies and avoiding processed foods will restore the healthy bacteria faster.
Sadly, Lyme Disease is just the beginning. Again due to climate change, there are more and more deadly vector-transmitted diseases popping up in Europe, including mosquitos spreading dengue fever and malaria, according to the Guardian.
But we are lucky to be expats living in the Netherlands where healthcare is excellent (thanks, Petra!), drugs are plentiful and effective and doctors and researchers have a pretty good understanding of the disease.
But get this: Lyme Disease was first diagnosed as a separate condition for the first time in 1975. With the wonders of modern science, this is a great time to be alive, though it’s getting harder to stay that way.
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See more about avoiding ticks and diseases here in Dispatches’ archives.
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.
