Tick Talk: June 2024
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States with Disease Carrying Ticks
Of the 700 species of ticks in the world, the United States is home to nearly?50 species, according to the National Institutes of Health. A few of these tick species can transmit diseases to people, and unfortunately they are growing in numbers and reach.
Only Black-legged and Western black-legged ticks can spread Lyme disease, the most prevalent tick-borne illness transmitted to humans in the United States. Most Lyme disease cases have been reported in the upper Midwest, Northeast and mid-Atlantic states.
The?CDC?revised the guidelines for Lyme disease reporting in 2022 in an effort to streamline the process across states. States with the highest infection rates are Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia. West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Lyme disease isn't the only tick-borne disease in the U.S. Hundreds of people each year are infected with a variety of illnesses, including?Rocky Mountain spotted fever?from the Rocky Mountain wood tick,?Rickettsia parkeri?from the Gulf Coast tick, and?Alpha-gal syndrome?from the Lone Star tick. Keep reading to learn more about Lone Star ticks!
Lone Star Ticks
The most distinctive feature of Lone Star ticks are the star-shaped white splotch on the backs of adult females. These ticks do not spread Lyme disease, but they can transmit other serious diseases including bacterial infections, viral infections, and potentially trigger a red meat allergy.?Lone star ticks used to be found mostly in the Southeastern U.S., but they are on the move North and their numbers are growing.
Holly Gaff, PhD, a professor of biological sciences at Old Dominion University in Virginia says that, “When you find one, you usually make, I always jokingly say, 500 new best friends crawling up your leg.” This is because larval lone star ticks hunt in packs, eerily referred to as "tick bombs".
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Lone star ticks are the main vector for a few types of bacteria that can cause the disease ehrlichiosis, tularemia, or southern tick-associated rash illness. A?bite from a lone star tick can trigger an allergy to a protein in red meat, called alpha-gal. And though different people who develop the allergy will experience different levels of sensitivity to the protein, alpha-gal can also be found in other products made from mammals, including dairy products, gelatin, and even some medications.
Lone Star ticks are also thought to be the main vector of an emerging tick-borne virus known as the Heartland virus. Vazquez-Prokopec and other researchers are trying to solve which animals are the “reservoir” for Heartland virus. They are working to discover what animal a ticks pick up the pathogen from before spreading it to humans, similar to the role the white-footed mice serve as the reservoir for Lyme disease in nature. Knowing this helps researchers predict how the disease will spread.
Tick Disease Dashboard
The Pennsylvania Health Department recently launched a tick-borne disease dashboard, something more states should begin creating as well. The dashboard tracks?Lyme disease, anaplasmosis, babesiosis and ehrlichiosis. The data shows case counts across the state and cases per 100,000 people in each county. "So that Pennsylvanians can be a little bit more aware of their risk in real-time," Lind said. The dashboard was also designed for Pennsylvanians to be aware of their risk, and for doctors to gain a sense of what's circulating in their area and what to test patients for.
The dashboard shows in the first full week of March 2024 that there was a significant spike in tick-bite-related emergency room visits in the state, three times higher than the average in the prior three years. "At this point, it's looking like a typically bad tick year," said Leah Lind, the Lyme and tick-borne disease coordinator within the Bureau of Epidemiology at the Pennsylvania Department of Health.
Some Ticks Prefer Humans over Dog Hosts
Scientists in the United States set up a series of temperature-controlled experiments in which a human and a dog were put in separate wooden boxes, linked by a clear plastic tube of?ticks. This test allowed researchers to observe that the brown dog tick, was two and a half times more likely to choose the human over the dog when the temperature rose. These ticks carry the bacteria which causes the Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF), an illness whose fatality rate can exceed one in five people if an infection is not spotted in the first week.
Laura Backus, who led the study at the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine , said "Our work indicates that when the weather gets hot, we should be much more vigilant for infections of RMSF in humans." Joel Breman, president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, where the research was presented on Monday, said the experiment “adds to the growing evidence of the increasing connection between climate change and its impact on health. Climate change is moving so quickly that it is critical to keep pace with the many ways it may alter and intensify the risk of a wide range of infectious diseases so we are better prepared to diagnose, treat and prevent them."
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