**2. History**

Historically the first mention of the TBE existence dates back to the eighteenth century in Scandinavian church records from Åland Islands. However, the first medical description of disease was given and published in 1931 by the Austrian physician H. Schneider [2]. Six years later, an expedition headed by Zilber in the Russian Far East isolated for the first time the causative agent (TBEV) from humans, mice, and *Ixodes persulcatus* ticks; they determined the etiology of TBE and its vector [3]. In 1939, Pavlovsky confirmed the preliminary hypothesis on the transmission of the TBEV in nature (between ticks and mammals) and proposed the theory of natural foci [4]. In Europe, TBEV was first isolated, from humans and *Ixodes ricinus* ticks, in Czechoslovakia in 1948 by Gallia and colleagues [5]. In the following years, the disease and/or the virus has been identified in many other European countries and, later, also in the north of China and northern Japan [6].
