Stopping A Deadly Disease On Apache Lands
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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, short wavers. Emily Kwong here with health correspondent Ping Huang and NPR producer Megan Lim. Hi, you both. Hey, hey.
And you're here to tell us some good news. Yes. Megan and I are here to tell you a public health success story. It's got puppies and it's got ticks and winning. And they're winning against Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, which is one of the deadliest tick-borne diseases in the U.S., Oh, are we going to Colorado? Are we going to the Rocky Mountains? Not quite. Not quite. So for this story, we're actually going to take you out to a corner of southeast Arizona to the San Carlos Apache tribal lands.
It's remote. It's beautiful. You know, purple mountains and mesas. And they're covered in these creosote bushes and these spiky saguaro cactuses a bit east of Phoenix. And the people in these tribal lands in Arizona have been battling Rocky Mountain spotted fever for about 20 years.
Yeah, at one point, they had rates that were 150 times that of the national average. But by the time that Megan and I visited, they were reaching a huge milestone. No deaths from the disease in five years.
That's amazing. All right, well, I want to hear about how they did it. Today on the show, the long battle against Rocky Mountain spotted fever on Arizona tribal lands. Ping and Megan are going to take us around the San Carlos Apache Reservation. and show you how the tribe is winning against the ticks. I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Okay, so...
To be totally honest, I am unfamiliar with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. What does that disease involve, Ping?
Yeah, I didn't know a whole lot about this disease before I started digging into this myself. It's caused by a bacteria called Rickettsia rickettsii, carried around by ticks, spread to people and other mammals like dogs and cows through tick bites. And in the U.S., it was first seen in the late 1800s in an area called the Bitterroot Valley in western Montana.
Yeah, people called it the Black Measles then, and it was very deadly. Four out of five people who caught it died.
Wow, that sounds really bad. And did they call it Black Measles because it cause like dark splotches or something?
Yeah, classics, body rash. And in the early 1900s, a young doctor named Howard Ricketts discovered it was spread by ticks. But by the way, this has nothing to do with the medical condition called Ricketts, which is a bone disease related to not enough nutrition.
Even back then, there were some early attempts to get rid of ticks. One of these involved creating these giant vats of arsenic solution, getting cattle to swim through them. But the solution burned the cattle's skin and udders, caused a lot of resentment from the ranchers.
Yeah, no kidding.
And then in the 1920s, government researchers built a research lab to better study this disease. The Rocky Mountain Laboratories is now part of the National Institutes of Health. But Since those early days, Rocky Mountain spotted fever has been found all over the U.S. in most of the continental states.
Okay, so that's kind of the history of the disease, how it got to have such a big range. Megan, what does it do? to those who get bitten?
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