Climate
warming leads to earlier tick season
Cary
Institute of Ecosystem Studies
The month of May brings many things, among them Mother’s Day, tulips, and Lyme Disease Awareness campaigns. But according to Dr. Richard S. Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY, if we want to get a leg up on tick-borne illness we need to become vigilant earlier in the season.
In New York State, the blacklegged ticks that carry Lyme disease
and other pathogens are already active in late April. Ostfeld explains: “For
more than two decades, we’ve been monitoring tick activity in the Hudson Valley
region and beyond. It’s clear that climate warming is leading to earlier spring
feeding by nymphal ticks, sometimes by as much as three weeks. While peak nymph
activity occurs in May, in some years it’s at the beginning of
the month.”
Paying attention to nymphal tick activity is essential to protecting public health. This tick life stage poses the greatest threat to people. Nymphs are both extremely small – about the size of a poppy seed – and often infected with the bacterium that causes Lyme disease.
This stage is also the main carrier of
the agents of babesiosis and anaplasmosis. In contrast, larval ticks are
born free of these tick-borne pathogens, while feeding adult ticks are often
large enough to detect.
Results on the trend toward advanced spring
emergence were published this February in the journal Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society B. Among the paper’s findings:
nymphal ticks peak in the spring, larval ticks peak in the summer, and both
emerge nearly three weeks earlier in warmer years.
As a result, Ostfeld is advocating moving Lyme Disease Awareness
month to April. “By encouraging safe behavior, public education campaigns play
a real role in reducing the number of people that suffer from Lyme disease and
other debilitating tick-borne illnesses. In New York State – and likely
throughout the Northeast – we need to begin taking preventative measures before
May, as potentially infected nymphal ticks are already on the move.”
Research conducted in Nantucket, Massachusetts suggests that
educational interventions can lower the incidence of Lyme disease between 20%
and 60% depending on the length of time people spend outdoors in areas where
ticks are active.
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Institute of Ecosystem Studies.