We're thrilled to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Tick Talk, our monthly newsletter dedicated to keeping you informed about all things ticks—from tick activity and safety tips to the latest news on tick-borne diseases. Over the past year, we've grown to over 180 subscribers, and we're deeply grateful for your continued interest and trust. We hope you've found the content valuable and insightful, helping you stay protected and enjoy more time outside. Here's to many more months of sharing knowledge and keeping our communities safe, naturally!
What We Can Learn About Ticks From Their Spit
- Ticks are common disease carriers for illnesses like Lyme, a condition that is common in the Northeastern United States. Rocky Mountain Laboratories, a National Institutes of Health laboratory in Montana, offers opportunities for students to intern there for the summer. This is the lab where the pathogen responsible for Lyme Disease was discovered. The current lab's focus is understanding how the salivary glands of ticks interact with their hosts, allowing them to feed and spread pathogens.
- Andrei Abarientos, a?pathobiology and veterinary science?major from the University of Connecticut, has been purifying and characterizing enzymes called kallikreins. These enzymes are crucial for humans to heal their wounds, but certain proteins in tick saliva interfere with their activity. This means that when a tick attaches itself to a human to feed, the proteins in their saliva limit the usual healing of a wound. This causes the wound to be left open, allowing the tick to feed more effectively and for longer. This also gives pathogens the tick may be carrying a greater opportunity to infect the host. Abarientos is looking to identify which cellular substrates are responsible for enabling these enzymes.
Lack of Symptoms in People with Powassan
- Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst-based?New England Center of Excellence in Vector-Borne Diseases have published new findings related to the emerging tick-borne illness known as Powassan. This illness can cause life-threatening encephalitis and meningitis. The study reports that people bitten by deer ticks or black-legged ticks that tested positive for Powassan virus, did not show signs or symptoms of disease. Based on the findings of their research, led by Stephen Rich, NEWVEC executive director and professor of microbiology, few cases of Powassan virus have been reported despite an increase in populations of ticks that carry the virus. Without specific symptoms presenting that would cause a person to seek medical care or testing, Powassan cases are going undetected, and under-reported.
- The researchers looked at data from?TickReport,?a tick testing service in Massachusetts, to describe the escalating presence of Powassan virus in the Northeast. Using this data, researchers estimate between 3,000-5,000 people are exposed to ticks that carry Powassan virus in the United States annually. Over the past decade, the number of human Powassan cases reported to the CDC has quadrupled. This is a serious public health concern as Powassan can be transmitted in less than an 15 minutes, whereas Lyme transmission takes atleast 36 hours.
- Between 2015 and 2023, 14,730 deer ticks were tested by Tick Report, with Powassan virus identified in 42. During follow-up conversations with people who had bitten by ticks that tested positive for Powassan, none of them reported symptoms of the virus. For the reported bite location of the 38 ticks with Powassan, 27 where in Massachusetts, three in Connecticut, two in New York, two in New Jersey, and one in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin.?The ticks that tested positive for Powassan virus were found to have up to four other co-infecting pathogens: Borrelia burgdorferi (60%), Babesia microti (17%), Anaplasma phagocytophilum (5%) and Borrelia miyamotoi (2%). There is future research to be done on these co-infections, diagnosis of tick-borne illnesses, and the clinical severity of Powassan.
Fire Management for Ticks
- Ph.D. student Samuel Gilvarg and interns from the State University of New York's College of Environmental Science and Forestry are collecting data on the local?tick?population. Every morning before heading out into the field, they spray their clothing, shoes and gear with Permethrin. This a great tick prevention tip you can do before heading out into wooded areas where ticks live. Gilvarg stated, "These students are what some call passionate and others call crazy enough to want to go work with ticks for an entire summer." For intern Melanie Costello, the research topic is personal. "Part of the reason I really wanted to do this internship is because my mom had Lyme disease for over 20 years," she said.
- Gilvarg has spent the past two summers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory researching how tick populations react to?naturally-fueled vegetation fires, both classic wildfires or prescribed burning. Researching the relationship between ticks and wildfires?might offer new tick management techniques. Tick populations and tick-borne illness cases are both increasing in the United States.
- Tick larvae feed on small rodents and pick up diseases they carry. Then, they molt to the nymph stage and find a blood meal from another host to molt to an adult. As adults, they mate, and the female has another blood meal before laying eggs. A tick that bites a human at any one of these stages could pass on bacteria that cause the tick-related illnesses. This is why it is important to study how ticks interact with other animals and the whole ecosystem around them during their reproductive cycle.
- By collecting ticks from different burn locations, Gilvarg and his interns have been assessing the impact of wild-land fire on the tick populations.Past evidence suggests that, right after a forest burns, leaf litter that has been charred black holds heat, leaving ticks with nowhere to hide. By sampling multiple sites with different burn histories, variation helps Gilvarg's team better understand the relationship between fire management and tick population density.
- The scientists must also account for weather during their tick-sampling studies, as an ideal tick habitat may return no ticks at all on a hot and dry day or an empty tick habitat could still be full on a wet and cloudy day. To collect the relevant weather data, the team carries devices called Kestrel Drops—sensors that sample temperature, relative humidity, heat index, and dew point.
- To account for the long, multistage lifecycle of the ticks and their relationship with deer and rodents, Gilvarg suggests the prescribed burn solution must be long-term and occur every 3-5 years. "We're never going to completely eliminate ticks," Gilvarg said. Instead, "Our goal is to reduce tick populations and disease risk."
