Ticks Are Spreading in the US?and Taking New Diseases With Them

And in an echo of the Covid pandemic, the US relies on individuals to take actions to keep themselves safe, even though political jurisdictions take on the task of preventing similar diseases such as ones caused by mosquitoes.“We have no national tick-monitoring network set up, though people have been quietly screaming for one for years,” says Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist, tick expert, and senior scientist at the independent Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies in New York state. Their species are regional—limited to specific areas, though those lines are blurring—which means the pathogens they carry are regionalized too.But they account for abundant amounts of disease: 16 different illnesses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which estimated in 2018 that the occurrence of illness caused by ticks and insects tripled between 2004 and 2016. That’s more than 13 times the reported number of cases.For the unreported tick-borne diseases, “we don’t know exactly the extent of infection in humans,” says Saravanan Thangamani, a vector biologist and professor of microbiology and immunology at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. Which makes almost all of those discoveries lagging indicators, uncovered anywhere from months to decades after a tick-borne virus arrived in an area to put people at risk.Last year, a group of researchers from five universities and the CDC tried to quantify the state of tick-borne disease surveillance in the US, looking at public health resources for sounding an alarm when ticks and their pathogens move. Erin Staples, a physician and epidemiologist at the CDC who led the original investigation into Heartland virus.But the big goal, for researchers immersed in the problem of ticks, is building systems that can detect and predict problems before people are ever at risk—as soon as a tick arrives in a new area, carrying a pathogen never before seen in that place.