United States: Tularemia, also called ‘rabbit fever,’ is an infectious disease that actually has been spreading more in the United States over the past ten years. A new report which has been released from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ultimately shows a rise in the number of cases. The disease which can be caused by contact with infected animals, mainly like rabbits, and can lead to very serious health issues if not treated properly.
The disease itself is acquired through contact with products of infected animals or bites of infected ticks and deer flies or through handling or skin contact with infected rabbits, hares, and rodents, the last of which are especially vulnerable to the bacterium.
But there are far gnarlier routes of transmission possible: mowing of lawns over the nests of animals infected with the disease has been documented to splatter the bacteria and infect the naive gardener.
'Rabbit Fever' in Humans Has Surged in The Last Decade, CDC Reportshttps://t.co/g0pbOdyvCP pic.twitter.com/zIK6auocjD
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As reported by the Sciencealert, this was discovered in 2000 at a vineyard in Massachusetts with the victim’s contracting tularemia which took six months to control and 15 people identified with the disease with one death reported.
One of another handful of cases reported in Colorado during 2014 and 2015 was also lawn mowing related at least.
This bacterium is followed by the CDC closely mainly because it is on the list of Tier 1 Select Agents recognized by the federal government as posing a potential for bioterrorism and secondly because if it is spread naturally, it can be life threatening if not treated.
A recent report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) highlights a notable increase in "rabbit fever," over the past decade. Here's all about it. #RabbitFever #US #Healthhttps://t.co/e9J3Sq00Mg
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According to the authors of the report, the case fatality rate of tularemia is usually below two percent and may rise dependent on clinical presentation and the strain that caused the infection.
Tularemia is relatively uncommon in the scheme of things: from the 47 states, 2462 were reported for the period 2011-2022. Instead, the CDC reports that about 1.35 million people experience food poisoning from the Salmonella bacterium each year, across the United States.
That 2,462 tularemia cases while far as rare as one case for every 200,000 people is 56 percent higher than reported from 2001-2010.
Some of this probably comes from improvements in the way we record cases: in late 2017, in order to provide better accuracy for public health, the CDC expanded the ‘probable case’ definition to include cases where F. tularensis was identified by PCR.