Once bitten

By Bob Grant Once bitten An SEM of the tick Ixodes scapularis, carrier of Lyme disease. © David Scharf / Science Faction / Corbis 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—o

Written byBob Grant

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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 ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
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From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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