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Great, Here Come The Ticks
By
David Colon
Published Jul 25, 2017
Modified Jul 25, 2017
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By
David Colon
Published Jul 25, 2017
Modified Jul 25, 2017
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If you thought nature was only working on killing you with flooding or with extreme heat, don't forget that there are other ways, like the increased spread of ticks, a consequence of suburbanization and attempts to conserve wooded areas at the same time.
The Times reports that with deer and mice populations going up in suburbs, both the lone star tick and the black legged tick are expanding into areas where they used to be scarce. That includes Southampton and Westchester in New York. In Westchester, an increase in the tick population has led to 21 cases of the malaria-like babeiosis in the past year alone, after the disease hadn't been seen before 2001.
In Southampton, an immunologist has treated 380 cases of alpha-gal syndrome, a tick-borne disease that causes an allergy to read meat, since 2010. Residents of the town are spraying their entire lawns for ticks, instead of just bushes, because the lone star tick is more willing to leave wooded areas in search of things to bite.
And those diseases, of course, aren't even the ones usually associated with ticks. Lyme disease, a common disease spread by ticks, could potentially explode around the country according to modeling on tick populations done by scientist Rick Ostfeld. And when that happens, we won't have a vaccine for it, since, as New Scientist reports, lawsuits from anti-vaccination activists killed an earlier Lyme disease vaccine, and a new one is at least six years away.
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David Colon
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