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Recognizing and avoiding tick-borne illness.

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Recognizing and avoiding tick-borne illness

Most tick bites won't make you sick, but the ones that do can be serious.

June is here and the bugs are out * in yards and gardens, at the beach, and along hiking trails and pathways. Most are just an annoyance, but some are vectors, or transmitters, of disease.

In the United States, the chief culprits are ticks * in particular, the deer tick (also called the black-legged tick), which can carry and transmit the bacterium responsible for Lyme disease. Considered somewhat rare in the mid-1980s, Lyme disease is now the most common vector-borne illness in the United States. About 20,000 cases are reported annually to the CDC, and the agency says that's only 10% of the total.

We consulted tick expert Dr. Jonathan Edlow of Harvard Medical School and Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, whose book Bull's Eye: Unraveling the Medical Mystery of Lyme Disease, outlines the history of this emerging infectious disease. According to Dr. Edlow, there are several reasons for the rising incidence of Lyme disease. Its geographical range has expanded, mostly because of the growing deer population, which harbors the ticks. Also, land once cleared for farming has become reforested, attracting more deer (and other tick hosts) as well as suburban development. As a result, says Dr. Edlow, "people's day-to-day activities * their hobbies, their work, and where they live * put them in closer contact with wildlife than they were in the 1950s." Finally, both patients and clinicians recognize the disease more readily than ever before.

Lyme disease is the predominant tick-borne illness in the United States, but it's not the only one. Ticks can spread other bacterial and viral diseases, including babesiosis, anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis, tularemia, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, relapsing fever, Colorado tick fever, and southern tick-associated rash illness (STARI). Tick paralysis, another tick-borne disease, is caused not by an infectious organism but by a toxin that the tick itself produces. Most tick bites won't give you a disease, but some can, and there is no vaccine to protect you from the vast...