The Ticks Are Winning
Ticks are expanding their territory and infecting more people than ever due to climate change, changing land use, and an explosion in the deer population. They carry pathogens that cause Lyme disease, Alpha-gal syndrome, and other illnesses.
Intelligence analysis by Llama
Ticks are taking over the United States, and their bites can be fatal. The tick surge is catching public health officials off guard, and emergency room visits due to tick bites are the highest they've been since 2017.
Ticks are tiny bugs that live in the grass and can bite people, making them sick. They're getting worse because of climate change and are spreading to new areas. We need to fight back against the ticks and find new ways to control them.
Analysis
The Ticks Are Winning: A Growing Problem in the United States
Ticks are taking over the United States, and their bites can be fatal. The tick surge is catching public health officials off guard, and emergency room visits due to tick bites are the highest they've been since 2017. In some cases, tick bites can be fatal, and the most familiar tick-borne disease is Lyme disease, which is the fastest-growing vector-borne disease in the US. Cases have more than doubled over the past decade, and those cases are mostly as a result of getting bitten by the black-legged tick or the deer tick.
The thing is, both of these ticks — and many other ticks that are also marching northward and westward and expanding their empires rapidly across North America — they can deliver all kinds of pathogens. They're claiming more and more of the map, and they're claiming more and more of our psychic map right? I tell people I'm not a tick expert, although I've talked to a bunch of them, but I've become a tick expert in the sense that I am very familiar with tick paranoia and how it can keep you from venturing out into the places you love: hiking paths or picnic grounds or parks.
And so that was part of the story I wanted to write about, too — Why are we letting the ticks keep us, if not out of these places that we need and love, why aren't we fighting back? Not really. I mean, this is one of the surprising takeaways from my reporting is that we're barely even trying. One way of understanding that is to think about two numbers. One number is 90 percent. 90 percent of vector-borne disease cases in the US are from ticks. 90 percent? Yeah. And yet despite the fact that 90 percent of cases of vector-borne illness come from tick bites, if you look at what local city, county health agencies do in terms of vector control, 80 percent of what they do is mosquito control, and only about 10 or 11 percent of these local health agencies around the country do any kind of tick control.
So why is that? It's a familiar story in the public health world. It's not enough funding or policy support for trying out, testing, deploying new approaches to controlling ticks. Even though people are dying? We're just kind of taking for granted that, 'Oh, well, what can you do? You just tuck your pants in and spray some insecticide on your legs.'
Key points
- Ticks are expanding their territory and infecting more people than ever due to climate change, changing land use, and an explosion in the deer population.
- Ticks carry pathogens that cause Lyme disease, Alpha-gal syndrome, and other illnesses.
- Emergency room visits due to tick bites are the highest they've been since 2017.
- Public health officials are not doing enough to control ticks and prevent tick bites.
- We need to find new ways to control ticks and prevent tick bites to reduce the number of people getting sick from tick-borne diseases.
If we work together to find new ways to control ticks and prevent tick bites, we can reduce the number of people getting sick from tick-borne diseases. This can be achieved by increasing funding for tick control and supporting public health officials in their efforts to combat the tick surge.
If we don't take action to control ticks and prevent tick bites, the number of people getting sick from tick-borne diseases will continue to rise, and more people will die from tick-borne illnesses.
