The fever kicked in during the long plane journey home to Philadelphia from Africa. An intense heat washed over my body, my head throbbed, my neck muscles ached, and I tried desperately to stretch the flimsy airline blanket over my chill-wracked arms and legs. All because of a South African tick—one of an ilk that has been gifting an increasing number of inadvertent souvenirs to visitors to sub-Saharan Africa over the past couple of decades.
I hadn’t thought much of the tiny tick I pulled from my ankle and flicked into the bush more than a week earlier. My wife and I had started our South African vacation with a couple nights of camping in the majestic and remote Drakensburg Mountains on the border of Lesotho. Ticks, I figured, were par for the course. But that little arachnid carried Rickettsia africae, a dastardly bacterium that eventually gave rise to a ...
