For several years now, the Czech Republic has had one of the highest incidence of tick-borne diseases in Europe, including tick-borne encephalitis. Now, a Czech-American team of scientists has come up with effective antibodies against the potentially fatal disease, which could work both as immediate prevention and a cure.
TBE is a mild to fatal viral infection which affects the central nervous system. Every year, doctors register around 500 cases of the disease in the Czech Republic and the figure has been slowly, but persistently increasing.
Despite the high incidence of TBE, only around a quarter of Czechs are vaccinated against the disease, which is significantly less than for instance in the neighbouring Austria, where the inoculation rate is around 80 percent.