Can Ticks Spread Hepatitis C Virus?
In an unusual case in Connecticut, doctors say they can’t find any other reason why a woman got the liver disease. By Adam Marcus WEDNESDAY, Nov. 20, 2002 (HealthScoutNews) — Everyone knows that ticks spread Lyme disease. But hepatitis C virus? Scientists at the American Red Cross say they’ve made a circumstantial case for a tick passing the infection to a Connecticut woman who had no other obvious means of contracting the liver-damaging malady. “Ticks obviously ingest a fair amount of host blood and re-inject blood into the next animal or person they bite. They at least could act like little syringes,” says Dr. Ritchard Cable, medical director for the Red Cross’s blood services center in Farmington, Conn. He and his colleagues describe the case in a research letter in tomorrow’s issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. Cable admits the connection could be coincidence. He has seen no other evidence of ticks ferrying hepatitis C from one person to another, nor to a person from an
