When in the woods, watch out for ticks
People in Connecticut have been dealing with, and cursing, black-legged ticks — and the diseases they carry — for decades.
Increasingly, more of those ticks are carrying a mix of bacteria and parasites that can make people ill in several ways.
And there are now three new ticks — the lone star tick, the Gulf Coast tick and the Asian longhorned tick — that have established beachheads in Fairfield and New Haven counties.
Which is why health officials are urging people to pay attention when they go for a hike in the woods.
“It’s very important for people to get outside and exercise. We want them to do it,” said Laura Vasile, Bethel’s health director, “But we don’t want them to end up sick.”
Because of the increasingly complex nature of the state’s tick predicament, the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment
Station sponsored a daylong symposium on vector-borne diseases last week.
The idea of the program, said Dr. Goudarz Molaei of the Station’s Center for Vector Biology and Zoonotic Diseases, is to get the word out — to repeat warnings that people preoccupied with surviving COVID may neglect.
“COVID may do that,” said Karen Guadian, one of the leaders of Ridgefield’s Lyme Connection. It will hold a talk on ticks and the diseases they carry — including the rare but very dangerous Powassan virus — at 7 p.m. May at the Ridgefield Library.
Both Vasile and Fernanda Carvalho, associate director of community health at the Danbury Health Department said, despite COVID, people are looking for ticks and bringing them in for identification.
Here’s the most important bad news: more black-legged ticks are carrying the bacteria that causes Lyme disease — Borrelia burgdorferi. And more are co-infected with the parasite that causes babesiosis and the bacteria that causes ehrlichiosis.
That makes it more likely that people bitten by a black-legged tick will get infected, or co-infected, as well.
Molaei said climate change may be driving some of this increase. So is host availability — if there are good acorn and
nut crops, there will be more white-footed mice, the prime reservoirs for the Lyme bacteria.
Neeta Connally, professor of biology at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury and director of Western’s Tickborne Disease Prevention Laboratory said the nature of ticks themselves is responsible.
“Ticks are full of living organisms,” Connally said in an email. “Some of these organisms are known to cause disease on humans or pets, and others may not.”
The latest scary organism back-legged tick carry is the Powassan virus.
It’s rare in the state and not everyone who gets infected by the virus gets
sick from it. There have been 12 cases reported in the state from 2017 to 2021, with a new case in Windham County reported this month.
But Molaei said that of those who show symptoms, 10 percent die and 50 percent are left with long-term neurological damage.
And there are new tick risks.
Molaei said lone star ticks — first identified in the state in 2017 and named after the white dot on females — may have lived in the state in the past. But in the 19th century, when farm-minded settlers deforested Connecticut to create pastureland, these ticks lost their habitat and hosts and departed.
Now, with the return of the woods, they’re returning too, with their own set of disease-carrying vectors, including a sugar molecule that when passed on to humans, can cause a severe allergy to red meat.
The two newest tick arrivals are Gulf Coast ticks, which was discovered in Fairfield County in 2020, and which can spread spotted fever and the Asian long-horned tick which Connally’s lab at Western first identified in the state in 2018.
Molaei said while Asian long-horned ticks carry the disease vectors that make black-legged ticks infamous, it’s not clear they infect humans. They seem to bother livestock more than people.
What’s remarkable about them is that each female can lay hundreds of eggs without mating. Each of those eggs will be females and each can lay hundreds more.
“We did a tick-collecting sweep,” Molaei said. “In less than an hour, we collected over 800 Asianlong-horned ticks.”
Because ticks are part of the environment, people have to both live with them and be on guard against them. Which may take a tick bite to make them take notice.
“People don’t understand unless they’ve had Lyme disease or have had a relative with it,” Gaudian of Ridgefield said.