Researcher Studying Ticks’ Role in Fevers of Unknown Origin

Researchers will use samples from horses with fevers of unknown origin to look for tick-borne infections.
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Imagine the scenario: Your horse is sick and you don’t know why. He breathes normally but his temperature is rising, his eyes are jaundiced, he seems depressed, and he barely eats. The cause of the fever is unknown; even the most experienced animal health experts can offer no concrete answers. Eventually the fever fades, but is that the end of whatever caused it or is the source still lurking somewhere inside?

Horse owners across the states are facing this distressing scenario. At the Cornell University Animal Health Diagnostic Center (AHDC), located in Ithaca, N.Y., Linda Mittel, DVM, fields a growing number of calls about these mysterious fevers of unknown origins (FUOs). Many come from the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Great Lakes region, which are the nation’s topmost hotbeds of human tick-borne disease. This pattern led Mittel to suspect that the culprits of the fever caper could be ticks and the difficult-to-diagnose diseases they carry.

"Tick-borne diseases are some of the fastest growing emerging diseases in the United States right now," said Mittel. "As ticks continue expanding their numbers and geographic range these diseases may affect new areas. We get calls about fevers at broodmare operations, show barns, and farms where racehorses rest or layup, even in areas where they didn’t know they had ticks. But horses moving between states can move ticks with them, and the effects of this movement are starting to show."

Mittel and colleagues at the AHDC are embarking on a project to find just what diseases ticks in hotbed zones are carrying and whether they are behind the wash of mystery fevers in horses. The study will use samples from horses suffering FUOs to look for bacterial infections known to be transmitted by ticks (Anaplasma, Babesia, Borrelia, Ehrlichia, and Rickettsia) as well as other bacteria known to cause nonrespiratory infection in horses (Leptospira, Bartonella, and Neorickettsia

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