Rocky Mountain spotted fever is a severe infectious disease with chills, fever, prostration, and a hemorrhagic rash. It is caused by a Rickettsial organism and is transmitted by wood ticks. A disease called Brazilian typhus is identical, as are Mediterranean fever, South African tick-bite fever and Kenya fever.

Rocky Mountain spotted fever is largely a rural disease; it has been found in every state in the United States except Maine and Vermont. It occurs chiefly during the warm months of the year when the ticks are active. Indeed the only insects known to spread the disease are the ticks. These include the wood tick, the dog tick, the lone star tick, and the rabbit tick. The tick attaches itself to an infected animal and transfers the infection to man.

Two to fourteen days after being bitten, the illness comes on abruptly with chills, fever, severe frontal or occipital headache, pains in the muscles and joints and sensitivity of the eyes to pressure and to light. Nausea, vomiting, constipation, nosebleed, a mild cough and similar symptoms appear, along with a fever which will rise rapidly from 103 to 105 degrees.

A rash is characteristic. It develops two to six days after the onset of the illness, usually first around the wrists and ankles and then spreading to involve the entire body surface. Several crops of the rash may appear, one after the other. Sometimes the rashes become hemorrhagic. The damage may be so great that gangrenous changes occur in the skin on the tips of the fingers, the toes, the earlobes and even on the soft palate. Secondary to these infections may be pneumonias, hemorrhages of the stomach and intestines and kidneys and serious inflammations of the eyes.

Vaccines have been prepared which are used to immunize people against Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Fortunately, chloromycetin, aureomycin, terramycin and para-amino benzoic acid have proved to be beneficial in Rocky Mountain spotted fever. The condition was formerly much more severe than since the new antibiotics have been developed. Once from 12 to 25 per cent of those infected died of the condition but it seems likely that with the new antibiotic drugs something less than 5 per cent of deaths will occur.

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