MYSTERIOUS bug bites have left several soccer players with baseball-sized swelling, sore joints, and headaches. Doctors are searching for answers to the mosquito-like bites that devolved into painful symptoms. For weeks, community soccer teams have been playing at Lightning Creek Park in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma , without issues.
But at the beginning of October, after practice, coach Laney Singleton noticed a searing pain in her hand and watched in horror as a softball-sized welt ballooned out. A jaw-dropping picture of the bite shows her right hand deeply reddened and burning with bee-sting-like pain. "It leaves a feeling of almost like a flu shot after you get a flu shot," she told NBC affiliate KFOR .
read more health news She later learned that girls on her team went home with similar bites across their bodies that swelled to the size of golf balls or baseballs. Some girls had headaches after the stings, Singleton said. The coach and her team are all from Oklahoma, so they're used to being outside with the mosquitos.
This left them wondering why they suddenly started having such an intense reaction. Most read in Health Dr. Melinda Cail, a physician in Oklahoma City, looked at the picture of the swollen sores and said they didn't look at all like mosquito bites.
"Usually, people will get a little bit of swelling and maybe some redness," she told KFOR . "But if people are consistently having a big reaction to it, it makes me think it's probably something else." Dr.
Cail spec.