My brother -in-law, who just had a liver transplant (at UCLA) a year ago got a couple tick bites and wound up in UMMC in Jackson for a week with 104 fever and flu like symptoms. They were freaking out because they couldn't figure out whether it was the tick bites or rejection or what. He was on every kind of high powered antibiotics and every test they could think of last week, just to deduce that he was suffering from the tick bites, and had a severe reaction to them. And this guy is a well respected surgeon too.