Via NPR's Goats and Soda blog: Unwelcome Surprise: The Chiggers That Spread Scrub Typhus Are Not Just In Asia And Australia. Excerpt:
Nobody wants to be attacked by a chigger. These six-legged mite larva — so small they're invisible to the naked eye — have a powerful bite that causes severe itching. They also transmit a disease called scrub typhus, named for the forest undergrowth, or scrub, that is home to the chiggers.
Up until now, scrub typhus has been a regional problem. The chiggers, officially called Orientia tsutsugamushi, that spread that disease were thought to live in East and Southeast Asia as well as Northern Australia. The countries where scrub typhus shows up, including Pakistan and parts of Russia, form a long and wide geographic area called "the tsutsugamushi triangle."
Within that triangle, when people come to clinics with complaints of rash, headache, high fever and muscle pain, scrub typhus is on the radar screen of possible diagnoses. With the correct diagnosis, the illness is highly treatable.
But now scrub typhus has made an appearance in the Western hemisphere: Three patients were diagnosed between January 2015 and February 2016 in Chiloe Island off the coast of southern Chile, almost 7,500 miles away from where the disease is typically found.
"It's a big surprise," says Dr. David Walker, pathologist and director of the Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
Discovering scrub typhus in Chile, of course, has implications for the people in the rural area where it turned up. "But it also has global significance," says Dr. Thomas Weitzel, an author of a study in the September 8 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. "It means it might also exist in other countries in South America or even in Africa," says Weitzel. "Worldwide, we have to rewrite all the chapters of this disease and think wider."
