The English press repeats Spain’s decisive plan to combat the alarming summer plague.

Last Thursday, the Ministry of Health presented the third part of its “Plan for surveillance, prevention and control of vector-borne diseases”, dedicated to diseases transmitted ticks.

In particular, this part focuses on two specific diseases transmitted by these insects: Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF), which is considered “developing” in Spain, and Lyme diseasewhich can have a “significant” rate of complications in infected people.

The impact of this news was so great that it reached the United Kingdom, where media outlets such as Mirror, Wales Online or Daily record They confirmed this news. “Spain is tracking two new diseases that are spreading across the country after a rise in cases” – British media headlines.

“There is growing concern that these diseases will continue to spread throughout Spain,” they note in Mirror. However, the CCAES indicated in the presentation of the plan that from 2005 to 2019 a rate of 0.3 per 100,000 hospitalizations per year due to this pathology was recorded, representing three cases per million people in Spain, and that similar figures were expected for this year.

In the above media the words Lucia Garcia San Miguel, Head of the Coordination Center for Health and Emergency Alerts (CCAES) about Lyme disease: “It is not an infection that can be cured and that’s it, but over the months, manifestations can continue to occur and can leave serious and disabling consequences for life, but it is extremely difficult to diagnose because there are no appropriate methods.”

Mirror warns that Lyme disease “predominantly occurs in the northern regions of Spain, especially Asturias and Galicia.“Although cases of FCHF are mainly observed in Salamanca and Extremadura,” they note, they also recall that in recent years “Spain has seen a significant increase in the number of tick bites.”

As noted in the presentation, the purpose of the new document is to observe the behavior of ticks carrying Lyme disease in areas that have not yet been considered endemic, in order to create a surveillance system to work correctly in these conditions, since this pathology has not yet been observed in Spain .