Our tick nightmare
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How widespread and dangerous are tick-borne diseases in the U.S.?
Every summer we accept that we're going to get bit by mosquitoes. We bleed, we scratch, we kill, we complain. But in the end, we laugh it off and we head towards winter. But ticks are a much more serious concern. Let me just remind you how many tick-borne diseases there are. Lyme, you know, shout out to Connecticut. Then there's alpha-gal syndrome, which can make you allergic to red meat for the rest of your life, also dairy. But there's so much more. Should we go alphabetical? And I apologize in advance for my pronunciations here. Symptoms of all these range from nausea, vomiting, and bleeding, to seizures, organ failure, facial paralysis, and of course, our old friend, death. For those of you who are like, NBD, that's just a Northeast thing.
Well, not anymore. Our national tick nightmare on Today Explained from Vox.
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Sean Romstrom, Today Explained covered ticks and Lyme disease on the show way back in 2018, when the word on the trail was that this was getting much worse. We asked science writer Jonathan Mingle, who recently wrote about ticks for the New York Times newspaper, how much worse this has gotten since then. You know, some experts I talk to use the word exponential. I mean, so what's happening is that Some of these tick species are spreading into areas where people aren't familiar with them, doctors aren't familiar with them. In the last 15 years, the Lone Star tick has gone from non-existent on the island to fully abundant and everywhere.
The tick is present in at least 21 states and is rapidly spreading across the eastern U.S. Emergency room visits for bites are the highest in nearly a decade as ticks spread into new parts of the country.
thanks to warmer winters, climate change, ticks are expanding their hunting season. You know, you may have a day that's like 40 degrees in January, ticks are out looking for you, waiting for you to walk by and grab on and grab a meal.
A newborn baby is suspected of contracting a rare tick-borne virus. It's called Powassan virus. Lyme's disease has been an ongoing fight on this island. I've had it. This morning, a New Jersey man is the first known person to die after a tick bite triggered a severe meat allergy.
So in 2024, a pilot named Brian Waitzel, father of three in northern New Jersey, he had a hamburger. had a barbecue, went home to mow his lawn, and a few hours later was unresponsive on the floor, and he died that night. And his family was left in shock, of course, trying to figure out why he had died. And it turned out that he had likely been bitten by the Lone Star tick and had developed an allergy to red meat. And so this is referred to as alpha-gal syndrome. And alpha-gal syndrome is just the latest entrant into the files of all the many ways in which tick bites can make us sick. And the most familiar one, of course, is Lyme disease. Each year, about half a million people are treated for Lyme disease.
It's 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. And the thing is, both of these ticks and many other ticks that are also marching northward and westward and just 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?
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