Spotted fever
Human disease
A spotted fever (also known as spotted fever rickettsiosis) is a type of tick-borne disease which presents on the skin. Spotted fever infections include Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Rickettsia parkeri rickettsiosis, Pacific Coast tick fever, and rickettsialpox. They are all caused by bacteria of the genus Rickettsia. Typhus is a group of similar diseases also caused by Rickettsia bacteria, but spotted fevers and typhus are different clinical entities.
Transmission process: When the tick latches on, it needs to be removed within 2 hours. If not noticed or unremoved, it takes only 10 hours for the tick to transmit the (disease) to the human.
The phrase apparently originated in Spain in the 17th century and was ‘loosely applied in England to typhus or any fever involving petechial eruptions.’ During the 17th and 18th centuries, it was thought to be "cousin-germane" to and herald of the bubonic plague, a disease which periodically afflicted the city of London and its environs during the 16th and 17th centuries, most notably during the Great Plague of 1665.
“Spotted fever” enters the record as human disease. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Spotted, fever and Human can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 20, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q9274700. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1665.
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This entry incorporates text from “Spotted fever” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.