The PCR test suffers from not having established acceptable primers of bacterial DNA to initiate the reaction. One orange cap and one red cap vacuum tube of blood and six unstained blood smears. The bacteria is intracytoplasmic and forms aggregations or clumps called morulae. Washburn and Sawyer Counties most prevalent, with 80 and 71 cases per 100,000 population respectively. This makes HGE highly endemic and the fastest growing tick illness in the country.
Most patients have seizures.
Four deaths were associated with a pneumonia infiltrate. The organism which causes HGE is one base pair different from E. chaffeensis, and three base pairs different from E. equis, and is probably closely related. This organism may have jumped from infected animals to man. Wood ticks test negative for Ehrlichia. The Deer ticks are not born infected.