Find a tick? In Pa., you can get it tested — for free
EAST STROUDSBURG, Pa. — Each day, an office building by the Delaware River in the Poconos is inundated with blood-sucking ticks, plucked from people and their pets, double-wrapped in plastic and shipped first-class from all over Pennsylvania.
Ticks come into the Pennsylvania Tick Research Lab at East Stroudsburg University from other states, too, even other countries, and the people who send them wait, sometimes nervously, for answers. On Monday alone, 300 ticks arrived, and all of them would be crushed up by lab technicians so that their DNA could be examined and the results sent back to their hosts.
“Within three business days, you’ll get results as to what type of things the tick was carrying,” said lab director Nicole Chinnici. “That’s typically before symptoms are occurring, so you can take those results to your physician or your veterinarian to help them determine what they should be looking out for. It gives them a peace of mind when it comes back negative.”
The bad news, Ms. Chinnici said, is that more than 50% of the ticks tested at the lab are carrying some type of disease.
Most of the ticks that come into the lab are dead, but some aren’t. Ticks are hard to squish. Sometimes people send in critters that aren’t even close to being a tick, though.
“Beetles, spiders, sometimes lice, bedbugs, various other things, even scabs,” Ms. Chinnici said.
Lyme disease is the most common disease the ESU lab is finding in its ticks. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Pennsylvania has had the highest number of Lyme disease cases in the U.S since 2000. The CDC found there were 7,457 reported cases in 2014.
If you’ve been bitten by a tick in Pennsylvania and want to get it tested, you can find more information here: https://www.ticklab.org/.