Viruses have caused mass deaths, epidemics and disasters many times in world history. We are going through one of the most difficult processes in the history of humanity with the pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus we live today. While it is thought that viruses occur spontaneously in natural life, there are also those who think that they are produced in a laboratory environment.

There was a great concern at the time when it was determined that ticks caused deaths in our country. Tick ​​cases, which normalized in the following years, can still cause loss of life today. Ticks can be fatal, causing CCHF disease due to their bites. While the death rate worldwide due to this disease is around 30 percent, it is below 5 percent in our country. The new virus type detected by researchers in Japan and transmitted by tick bites seems to take the concerns about ticks to a different dimension.

It is thought to have been since 2014

Researchers at Hokkaido University in Japan have identified a new virus that is transmitted by tick bites and infects humans, causing symptoms such as fever, reduction in blood platelets and white blood cells. The virus was first discovered in 2019 in a 41-year-old man who was hospitalized with a high fever, loss of appetite and leg pain after being bitten by a tick while walking in the Hokkaido jungle. The young man, who was treated for two weeks and discharged, tested negative for tick-borne viruses, but another patient who was bitten by a tick presented to the hospital with similar symptoms the following year.

Scientists in Japan say that this previously undiscovered virus spread by ticks has been making people in the country sick since at least 2014. Keita Matsuno, the scientist involved in the study, said in a statement that at least seven people have been infected with this new virus in Japan since 2014, but no deaths have been encountered so far. “We need to investigate immediately,” he said.