Ticks and the diseases they carry are a growing problem nationwide. As tick season ends, a closer look at what researchers are learning about how ticks survive and spread disease.
Transcript
JOEL ROSE, HOST:
Tomorrow is Labor Day, also known as the unofficial end of summer. And it marks the end of the high season for tick bites, with some caveats. NPR’s Pien Huang is here to tell us more. So can we all breathe a giant sigh of relief now that tick season is over?
PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: Well, as you mentioned, Joel, the high season is over, but ticks are still biting. That’s according to Alison Hinckley, who tracks tick bites for the CDC. I’ve been following her team’s data through the season, and this year, she says people started reporting a lot of bites in April, which was unusually early.
ALISON HINCKLEY: The risky season was potentially longer because it started earlier, but all in all, it looked pretty similar to what we’ve seen these past few years in terms of peaks.
HUANG: Now, what we’ve seen in the past few years is unfortunately, quite high. Around 31 million people in the U.S. get tick bites each year. And this year, in particular, she says the Midwest and the Southeast posted some of the highest weekly rates of tick bites they have seen since they started tracking this about a decade ago. Hinckley also says that people in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic and upper Midwest, in particular, should be keeping – should keep looking out for those black-legged ticks that transmit Lyme disease through the fall.
ROSE: I know that in several areas, there’s been a push to reduce the population of white-tailed deer in order to reduce the spread of ticks. Do you have a sense – like, is that working?
HUANG: It’s hard to say because ticks do feed on deer, so the thinking is that reducing populations of deer can help. But a recent study did show that it’s probably not going to do enough, and that’s because ticks can also just switch to feed on other mammals that they come across. I learned that from Richard Ostfeld. He’s a researcher at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, and he and his colleagues recently published a 35-year study looking at ticks and Lyme disease bacteria in Upstate New York. What’s really interesting is he told me that some animals actually help control ticks.
RICHARD OSTFELD: The ones that kill ticks by grooming them, the ones that fail to infect the ticks that actually do feed on them successfully, they’re reducing our risk.
HUANG: Ostfeld said that opossum do this and possibly some raccoons and skunks and squirrels, too.
ROSE: OK. That sounds mildly promising. Are scientists making any progress in reducing our vulnerability to ticks?
HUANG: Well, there is a lot of research going on. Some are trying innovative ways to kill ticks with robots that roam people’s yards or use a specific type of fungus that can destroy the tick shell. Scientists are also trying to breed mice whose blood, when drunk, would cure ticks of Lyme disease bacteria, and some are also working on vaccines for animals and humans against various tick-borne diseases.
Now, none of these have been proven to work yet, so the best tools that we have right now are in preventing tick bites. So health authorities recommend that you wear long pants and sleeves when you go outside and that you treat your clothes with a tick-killing chemical called Permethrin. And if you do find a tick on you, you should remove the whole thing, especially including the head, as soon as possible. All of that can help you reduce your risk of a tick-borne disease.
ROSE: That is NPR science correspondent Pien Huang. Thank you very much, Pien.
HUANG: You’re welcome.
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