a vaccine against Lyme disease soon?

In nature, while small creatures don’t eat big ones, the smallest ones still pose the biggest health risks—from invisible noroviruses in your water bottle to disease-carrying mosquitoes. And if you’re hiking, ticks are likely to be your number one enemy. Tick-borne Lyme disease is one of the most debilitating infections, but a cure may be on the horizon. Lyme disease infections are skyrocketing Ticks cause more illnesses than all other parasites combined, and the most common of these is by far Lyme disease. Lyme disease, named after the eponymous city in Connecticut, USA, where it was first identified, infects half a million people a year in the United States, more than the number of annual malaria infections in all of Latin America. In France, about 50,000 new cases of Lyme disease are reported each year, according to Santé Publique France, the organization that monitors the progression of the disease and the most affected areas. Lyme disease used to be limited to certain geographic areas, and the number of infections remained limited. But for reasons that are still poorly understood—perhaps climate change or the significant increase in deer populations in recent decades—the evolution of Lyme disease in France since the 1990s shows a steady increase in cases. The Mysterious Ticks Lyme disease is transmitted only by the deer tick (sometimes called the blacklegged tick), a secretive brown parasite with no eyes, a tiny head, and a literal thirst for blood. These ticks wait on the tips of leaves or blades of grass for weeks, frantically waving their front legs…