TICK BITE IN BRITISH COLUMBIA.

VERY fatal disease, with symptoms closely resembling those of typhus fever, occurs in some parts of Montana. The disease is known locally as spotted fever, or tick fever. It is called tick fever because it is transmitted by the bites of a tick. When it became known that this tick, Dermacentor venuslus, exists in Southern British Columbia, inquiries were instituted wnth the object of learning whether the disease which it transmits in Montaua also exists in Canada. With this object, letters were sent out in the middle of April of this year to a number of doctors practising in Southern British Columbia. The replies received from them were so interesting that more letters were sent out to medical men in -British Columbia and in the neighbourng states and provinces. Altogether two hundred and ten letters were sent out to ask physicians if instances of ill effects folowing t-ick bites, or of a disease resembling spotted fever, had occured in their practices. In all, forty replies were received. Many of those who replied had seen cases in which infection of the wound caused by a tick bite had been followed by local inflammation that was sometimes very severe. Six letters mentioned instances in which the bites of ticks had been followed by paresis, or paralysis, and, sometimes, by death. The symptoms reported in these cases are quite unlike those which occur in the tick fever of Montana.