In a case that appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), surgeons removed a tick attached to a 9-year-old boy’s tympanic membrane in his right eardrum, CTV News reports on its website.
The boy visited his doctor with symptoms of the sensation of a foreign body in his ear as well as buzzing sounds, according to CTV News. Doctors attempted to remove the tick in office, but eventually transferred him to a hospital. According to the article in NEJM, the boy recovered with no signs of tick-borne illness like fever or rash.
According to CTV News, the boy lived in Lyme, Conn. In the 1970s, researchers coined the term Lyme disease to describe a series of symptoms in a group of people that included rashes, chronic fatigue, headaches, and swollen joints. At the time, all patients reported being bitten by ticks in Old Lyme and Lyme, Conn. In the 1980s, Willy Burgdorfer, a scientist who studied tick-borne diseases like Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, discovered a spirochete—Borrelia burgdorferi—that was transmitted to humans through deer tick bites, causing Lyme disease.
To read the story in its entirety, please visit the CTV News website here.
Original Paper: Kasle D, Waldman E. Tick attached to the tympanic membrane. The New England Journal of Medicine. 2019;380:1761.
Source: CTV News, Bay Area Lyme Foundation
Image: © Melinda Fawver – Dreamstime.com
