Co-published by Inside Climate News and WebMD, Sept. 14, 2017:

by Phil McKenna

The fever started on a Monday morning in June. By Friday, I woke up in a bed at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with yellow skin, an inflamed liver, a dull pain in my stomach and a doctor offering me morphine.

A rotating cast of specialists, residents and medical students began streaming past my bedside as I cowered under a mass of towels and blankets trying to hide from sunlight that was causing my head to throb….

…Follow-up tests later confirmed what [my doctor] suspected; I was indeed suffering from babesiosis. It is a potentially fatal parasitic infection carried by the blacklegged tick (more commonly known as a “deer tick”). READ MORE.