[Severe and prognostically unfavourable forms of tick-borne encephalitis (early-summer meningo-encephalitis) in Freiburg (author's transl)].

Eight patients with proven tick-borne encephalitis (early-summer meningo-encephalitis; central European encephalitis) were treated in 1979. The disease ran a severe course in four: one died after six weeks of coma and pneumonia with right-heart failure. Another patient is in coma for more than 40 weeks. A third patient had severe flaccid tetraplegia more than 10 weeks after initial coma. The fourth patient still had leg paresis after nine weeks, her left arm also being largely paralysed. This high incidence of severe forms of the disease differs from other published reports.