Tick. Tick. Tick. The U.S. is facing a ticking time bomb. The growing problem is ticks—more and more of them, spreading further and further, staying active for longer and longer throughout the year. And for the week of June 27, the Fordham University Tri-State Tick Risk Index is at the highest it can be: a 10 out of 10. What’s listed next to that score is the following: “If you’re thinking of taking a hike, consider going to a movie instead.” Yep, the tick situation in the tri-state area, encompassing southern New York, Connecticut, and northern New Jersey, really sucks now.
The Fordham Tick Index Measures Tick Activity In The Tri-State Area
When the index indicates, “Consider going to a movie instead,” it’s not telling you that watching a movie like Frankenhooker is favorable over all other possible activities. Instead, the focus is more on what not to do, that you shouldn’t be outdoors amongst nature where your chances of being bitten by ticks is “high.” Any score on the index from seven to 10 would fall into this “high” level.
Each week researchers from the Louis Calder Center, Fordham University’s Biological Field Station in Westchester County, NY, update this Fordham Tick Index. It’s based on measurements of tick nymphs and full grown ticks in sample areas. Therefore, different parts of the tri-state area may have more or less tick activity.
It’s also a relative index, meaning the score is indicative of the current tick activity compared to the rest of the year. A score of four to six is considered “moderate,” associated with the following piece of advice: “Ticks are fairly abundant. Use caution.” The “low” range is one to three, accompanied with this recommendation, “Enjoy the outdoors. But take precaution.” So, even the lowest possible score of one doesn’t mean that you should fee free to run around the woods naked, hugging any deer your can find.
Ticks Can Carry Different Diseases
The primary reason for the Fordham Tick Index is that ticks can be quite dangerous. Not all of them, though. In fact, the Fordham University website emphasizes that the “vast majority of their 900 or so species are benign, living quiet lives of hematophagy.”
Now, “hematophagy” is probably not something you want to do on your spare time. It is the practice of feeding on blood. Ticks may look like insects. But don’t call them insects. They are actually tiny eight-legged arachnids, making them related to spiders. They are also considered parasites became they live off different host animals, including humans, biting the host and sucking on the host’s blood for sustenance.
Tick hematophagy alone is not the threat. They aren’t large enough to drain you of significant amount of blood, assuming that you are much taller than 10 mm. The problem is the disease-causing microbes that certain species of ticks may carry and transmit to you, while they bite and suck on your blood. And it could really bite and suck to get a disease like Lyme disease, Anaplasmosis, Babesiosis, Ehrlichiosis, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever or Powassan virus disease. I’ve already detailed in Forbes the badness that Lyme Disease, Babesiosis and POW can bring.
Climate Change Is Contributing To The Tick Problem
Now, if you are wondering “weather” the tick situation is getting worse, you’d probably be right. Climate change with the associated changing weather patterns is contributing to increasing tick activity. Since tick activity tends to subside in the cold and increase with increasing temperatures, warmer winters mean that many ticks can remain active for longer parts of the year. For example, the deer tick (Ixodes scapularis), the hard bodied tick that can carry the Lyme Disease-causing bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi are most active when temperatures exceed 45˚F.
Rising temperatures everywhere throughout the year have expanded the geographic regions where ticks can live and flourish as well. Just look at how the deer tick has been extending its habitat by more than 20 miles per year, an estimate that Catherine Bouchard, a research scientist at the Public Health Agency of Canada provided in article by Maggie Astor for The New York Times. So places where you previously didn’t have to worry much about disease-carrying ticks now are places with tick problems.
How To Prevent Tick Bites
The best way to prevent tick bites is to avoid going where ticks tend to be. Ticks are more likely to be in wooded, brushy, and grassy areas. So, while it may be nice to go off the beaten track when it comes to your career and life in general, this does not apply when preventing tick bites. If you must walk in areas that are close to natural vegetation and potentially wild animals, try instead to walk in the middle of well-trodden and even paved paths. Keep your yard well-manicured so that it’s not favorable for ticks or animals that can carry ticks like deer. Otherwise, you may end up exclaiming, “Oh deer.”
Cover as much as your body as possible with clothing, especially your arms and lower extremities. This is not the time to go gardening in just your thong in the tri-state area. Wearing light colored clothing can make ticks easier to spot.
Insect repellants can help. Just make sure that it contains components like DEET and picaridin that can actually repel ticks. You can use permethrin-based repellents on clothing and other types of gear.
Finally, conduct tick checks regularly every time you are outdoors. You can do such checks to each other. Make you carefully check easy-to-miss areas such as behind the knees and the groin. Make sure that you ask before checking someone for ticks, especially if you are on a first date.
The U.S. Needs A More Organized Plan On How To Deal With Ticks
This certainly isn’t the first time that I have written about the growing tick problem in the U.S. I’ve been warning about the tick problem for nearly a decade now. Yet, where’s the organized plan on how to address it? Where’s the comprehensive strategy on how to deal with climate change and the impact of climate change like the very sucky one of more ticks? The longer the U.S. waits to deal with these problems, the more entrenched and harder to solve these problems will be. Then clock is ticking.
