How bad will ticks be this summer?

If you end up becoming one of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers expected to get bitten by a tick this summer, don’t be surprised.

Some experts warn that tick season could be particularly bad.

For decades, the primary public health threat from ticks in New York City has been Lyme disease, transmitted by the blacklegged tick, often called the “deer tick,” which typically picks up the pathogen from rodents. But new tick-borne pathogens — with names like Bourbon and Heartland virus — have been detected in New York State in recent years, and rare diseases transmitted by ticks as babesiosis infects more people year by year.

Other tick species are also increasingly prevalent; new species have become established in the Bronx and Staten Island.

Developments – new ticks, new pathogens and rising cases of rare diseases – are causing experts to rethink their advice for avoiding tick bites. A new species of tick, for example, appears to prefer manicured lawns to shady wooded areas, surprising experts.

Where do all ticks come from?

You may not remember all the acorns underfoot in the fall of 2021, but that year the oaks produced a bumper crop. It was a feast for white-footed mice and chipmunks. Their populations flourished, making it easier for newly hatched ticks to find a rodent for their first blood meal.

And that, in turn, meant more of those tick larvae survived last year, said Dr. Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist who studies ticks at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies.

Now these ticks are ready for their second blood meal. Since April, they have been waiting on blades of grass and leaves, their two upper legs in the air – ready to climb aboard the next passing creature.

“This year we are seeing a very high number of nymphs,” said Dr Ostfeld, referring to the second phase of a tick’s life.

Tissue streaks and new ticks

To calculate tick population data, tick researchers periodically drag a square of white cloth along the forest floor and count the number of ticks clinging to it.

Lately, these trails have spawned new species of ticks, such as the common Gulf Coast ticks. across the south. How these ticks got to New York is unclear, but they likely hitched a ride on migrating birds, said Dr. Waheed Bajwa, who leads the city’s health department’s efforts to control the ticks. diseases caused by insects and ticks.

Over the past five years, health department investigators have found increasing numbers of Gulf Coast ticks at Fresh Kills, once the largest landfill in the world It’s soon become a park in staten island.

Researchers found that many ticks on the Gulf Coast of Staten Island to carry a pathogen which causes a form of spotted fever. Fortunately, it is a milder form than Rocky Mountain spotted fever, a sometimes fatal disease transmitted by ticks. (Although most common in a few southern states, New Yorkers were infected in small numbers.)

So far, the Gulf Coast tick doesn’t appear to have transmitted the milder form to any New Yorkers, but Dr. Bajwa expects that won’t last.

“We might see cases in the future,” he said.

In June 2018, a Yonkers man removed a tick from his right leg and saved it to take to his doctor. It was not a typical New York tickbut rather the Asian long-horned tick, whose arrival in the United States had not been detected until the previous year.

When health investigators inspected the man’s property, they found other Asian long-horned ticks on his lawn. Unlike other ticks, this species is not deterred by mowed grass or direct sunlight.

It is also multiplying at an alarming rate; the female can reproduce asexually, creating offspring on her own.

In parts of Staten Island and the Bronx, it is already found in “extremely high densities” and appears “move blacklegged ticks,according to a 2022 health department bulletin.

This species of tick, which is reddish-brown in color, has not so far been associated with the spread of any human disease in the United States. But in East Asiahe can transmit fatal hemorrhagic fever.

Tick ​​populations have long been in flux

The lone star tick, known for the distinctive white patch on the female’s backmade its way from the southeastern United States to Long Island maybe 50 years ago. It is now the dominant tick in parts of Suffolk County and expands its line across New Jersey.

He is also relatively fierce.

“Lone ticks don’t even wait for you to pass by,” said Professor Rafal Tokarz, an epidemiologist and tick researcher at Columbia University. “I saw them crawling towards me, crawling towards my boots.”

In the northeast, blacklegged ticks were once rare, outside of Long Island and some islands off Massachusetts where deer thrived, according to Durland Fish, a tick expert and retired Yale professor. As the region’s deer population increased, the dramatic inland expansion of this tick began.

But when the deer go away, the blacklegged ticks go down, Prof Fish said. The reason is simple: although blacklegged ticks feed on rodents when young, adult ticks often feed and find their mates on deer hides.

A recent deer vasectomy program on Staten Island seems to have led to less Lyme case there, said Dr. Bajwa.

How bad will ticks be this year?

As tick populations change, experts say it’s too early to know which tick-borne diseases are likely to become major health threats. Or how Lyme disease rates will change.

Most tick bites do not cause illness. In New York, less than half of blacklegged ticks in the nymph stage carry the pathogen that causes Lyme disease.

“Some people at the start of a Lyme season predict ticks will be like crazy, but that’s just guesswork,” said Dr. Gary Wormser, chief of infectious diseases at New York Medical College and an expert on the disease. of Lyme.

Nevertheless, the state health department decided that a tick check after a day out was no longer enough:Perform a full body check multiple times during the day,” read a recent bulletin from the state health department. This change was prompted by an increase in a rare tick-borne disease called Powassan virus. There are still only 20 to 45 recorded cases per year nationally, but this is an increase from ten years ago.

“Powassan is a game-changer for us,” said Jennifer White, who leads the state health department unit that studies tick-borne diseases. She noted that the virus – which often causes permanent neurological damage – can be transmitted if a tick is attached for even just 15 minutes, unlike other tick-borne diseases, such as Lyme, which can take 36 hours.