The context you need, when you need it

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our own.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

Ticks are spreading Lyme disease across America, but we can beat them. Here’s how.

What if we had a universal tick vaccine?

Ticks are one of humanity’s most dastardly adversaries: tiny, at times nigh-invisible arthropods that burrow into your skin, leech your blood, and sometimes transfer debilitating disease before they vanish, without you ever knowing they were there. It can be only months or weeks later, when Lyme disease’s harrowing symptoms begin to take hold, that you realize the stealth attack even occurred.

These days, it seems like there are more reasons than ever to fear ticks. Their range is spreading into cities and entirely new geographic regions in the US. Their arsenal extends beyond Lyme disease: alpha-gal syndrome, a condition caused by tick bites that creates alarming allergies to meat, has become a serious concern for public health authorities this year.

Nearly half a million people are estimated to contract Lyme disease annually — and those numbers will continue growing. This year’s tick season is off to an especially rough start: Tick bites have been sending the residents of the Northeast to the emergency room at a higher rate than they have in almost a decade. The CDC reported an unusually high number of tick-bite ER visits in late April in almost all regions of the US, and they continued to rise through May and into June.

Ticks are, of course, not a new adversary. They have been around much longer than humans. “Ticks bit dinosaurs,” Rick Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies who studies tick-borne diseases, told me.

They have, unfortunately, been evolutionarily optimized to transmit diseases: they attach themselves to a host for days at a time, emit analgesics that mean bites might not be felt, deploy anti-inflammatories and antihistamines to escape detection, and secrete proteins that prevent the bacteria that they transfer into a host from being detected by the host’s immune system, allowing an infection to fester for a while before there is an immune response. They are also surprisingly hard to kill, capable of going into a state of suspended animation that allows them to survive in, for example, extremely cold conditions.

Something has changed recently, however. “The ticks are on the move. They are spreading,” Ostfeld said. “They’re entering more populous areas outside the regions where they were just 10 or 20 years ago, 30 years ago.”

Both the black-legged ticks (which primarily transmit Lyme disease) and lone star ticks (which are responsible for alpha-gal) are heading northward. But scientists only partially understand why. Climate change is clearly a factor: As northern climes warm, the ticks are moving in. But they are also heading south — to the Carolinas and Virginia for example — to areas where it........

© Vox