This year’s tick season is expected to be the worst in a decade. Numbers are already increasing for emergency room visits due to bites and cases of Lyme Disease.
In fact, 71 out of every 100,000 emergency room visits were for tick bites, according to CDC data. That’s a 25% increase over last year, and it doesn’t include visits to urgent care facilities or doctors’ offices.
Risks of Contracting a Tick-Borne Disease
About 500,000 Americans contract Lyme Disease from tick bites each year. Most people fully recover from the bacterial infection if it’s detected early and treated with an antibiotic. About 20 percent of those infections, however, evade early detection, which can result in severe joint pain, vision problems, neurological issues, and hospitalization or even death.
Johns Hopkins infectious disease microbiologist Thomas M. Hart, PhD, issued a warning to the American public.
“Definitely it’s a big year for ticks and a big year for tick-borne diseases,” he said.
Hart and fellow Johns Hopkins scientist, Nicole Baumgarth, DVM, PhD, who leads efforts to eliminate threats from tick-borne diseases, advises taking precautions against not only Lyme Disease, but also from a number of other diseases that begin with a tick bite.
“I’m thinking about Babesiosis, an increasing disease of a small parasite that infects red blood cells and threatens the safety of our blood supply,” she said, “Or Alpha-Gal syndrome, an allergic reaction to eating red meat.”
Other tick-borne diseases include Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Powassan Virus, Anaplasmosis, and more.
Ways To Prevent Tick Bites
Experts recommend avoiding tick bites by covering up when in tall grass or wooded areas and even tucking pants into socks. Consider bug spray and wearing light clothes to help easily see a tick and pluck it off before it bites.
“When you come inside from doing high-risk activities, so these are going to be things like hiking, golfing, gardening, do a thorough tick check, and then shower immediately to wash off any ticks that might have sort of caught a ride,” Hart said.
Since ticks can’t fly or jump, a tick-free border near the home can prove to be an effective barrier.
“Ticks love forest edges. So if you have a forest edge up to your yard or in your neighborhood, you can try to rim this edge with a couple of feet, two or three feet of mulch or gravel, just because this will be a difficult place for ticks to crawl through,” Hart said.
Deer and mice often carry ticks, so taking measures to get rid of rodents and fencing out deer can mitigate the risk of tick bites.
“You can also finally spray your lawn or your neighborhood as well. Many pest control companies will make formulations to spray for ticks, but also, there’s some work showing that spraying for mosquitoes might be effective against ticks as well.”
What to Do If You’re Bitten by a Tick
Many people don’t realize that after a tick bites, it can remain implanted in the skin for days.
” What I would suggest is that you pull out the tick and if you can, put it in a Ziploc bag and put it in your freezer, the only way to kill a tick,” Baumgarth said, “So you have it available in case you do develop symptoms.”
It helps to know what type of tick bit a person because different ticks carry different diseases.
“Unfortunately, many of the tick-borne illnesses start with very non-specific symptoms. We call them flu-like illnesses. So you might have a slight temperature, you feel fatigued, but there isn’t really anything that allows you to differentiate one disease from the other,” Baumgarth said.
One exception is Lyme Disease, which produces a tell-tale bull’s-eye rash, yet that’s missing in a third of all cases, so doctors often struggle to diagnose tick-borne illnesses.
“And the diagnostics that we currently have are really not great, and they don’t work at the point of care, so they are not giving you an immediate answer. So often the doctor will treat with a broad-spectrum antibiotic, thinking it might be Lyme and hoping that if it’s not, that the antibiotic will work.”
An important thing to remember is that by removing a tick infected with Lyme Disease within two days after it bites, you’re likely not yet infected. That’s because it usually takes that long for the bacteria in the tick’s gut to travel through its saliva and into its human host.
Lyme Disease Vaccine
Scientists have just completed a Phase 3 clinical trial for a Lyme disease vaccine, yielding promising results. It could become available by the spring of 2027. However, it requires three shots plus a yearly booster.
“And so it’s unlikely that the broad communities, all but the most enthusiastic outdoors people, are going to pick up this, and have this vaccine given to them,” Baumgarth said.
So while many tick bites can often prove harmless, others can lead to serious illness, even death. That’s why experts stress prevention and early detection, especially in the spring and summer months, when tick activity is at its peak.
