Every year billions of ticks creep through wooded areas across Massachusetts and New England, feeding vampirically off the blood of wildlife, pets and humans. With ticks comes the most obvious fear: Lyme disease. But how much of what seems like common knowledge about ticks is really true? Do cold winters or mild winters affect tick populations? Is it really the smallest ticks that carry diseases most of time?
“They’re always abundant, generally speaking. The threats are real,” said Stephen Rich, a professor of microbiology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the director of the Laboratory of Medical Zoology, said. “You can get bitten by a tick anywhere in the state of Massachusetts — virtually every 351 towns in the state have ticks. “The number of ticks are no more or less on average across all those sites this year than they were last year,” Rich added.
The Laboratory of Medical Zoology at UMass Amherst analyses ticks for diseases by looking for the ribonucleic acid (RNA) of seven pathogens associated with the arachnid, he said.
Developing vaccines for tick-borne diseases is one of the primary missions for the laboratory, which started its research in 1992. Since 2006, the lab has also provided the public service of analyzing ticks submitted by people who’ve been hosts to the ectoparasite to learn about how long the tick has fed, its species, and whether it carries any diseases.
Ticks, in their larval form, are generally immune to heat or cold, Rich said, debunking the myth that a mild winter would lead to greater numbers of ticks.
Another myth is that smaller ticks are associated with Lyme disease — “You can’t go purely on size, because there are some ticks that are associated with a disease that are pretty big and then there are some that are really small that aren’t associated with disease,” he said.
Adult deer ticks are prevalent in early spring as the winter snows melt and the ground begins to dry out, he said. About half of all adult deer ticks are infected with a pathogen that causes Lyme disease, and about 2 to 5 percent of them also carry anaplasmosis, which causes a fever, severe headaches, muscle aches, chills and shaking as well as less frequent symptoms such as weight loss, aching joints, diarrhea, and a change in mental status.
The prime season for ticks is typically from the beginning of April to the end of July. If you’re doing any outdoor activities such as gardening or hiking, make sure to be prepared to check yourself, your kids, and pets for ticks, Rich said.
“If you find a tick on your body — either on your clothing or attached to you — then just use a fine pair of forceps and get the place where the tick is attached to you, then just pull up with steady pressure,” he said. “Don’t do any of the folk remedies of touching it with a match or adding nail polish.”
If you remove a tick within 24 hours, it is less likely it will pass along disease, according to Rich.
Some of the symptoms of Lyme disease include a bull’s eye rash or fever, but in some cases they are more severe and or chronic, including loss of memory and cardiac failures. Even some deaths have been attributed to Lyme, Rich said.
The conventional treatment is a course of antibiotics.
In the medical community, there is a debate surrounding how to diagnose Lyme disease. Some believe blood tests are the best method to determine a diagnosis, while others prefer a clinical diagnosis, which involves looking at the symptoms and asking patients if they’ve been in any areas where ticks might be prevalent.
“It’s gotten to the point where people don’t trust the medical community and they don’t trust the scientists because they don’t feel they’ve been responsive to what people are experiencing — especially people that feel they’re experiencing chronic symptoms associated with Lyme disease,” Rich said.
Dogs are most susceptible to Lyme, while cats rarely contract the disease from ticks, said Robert Sidorsky, a veterinarian with the Mobile Vet of Western Mass.
“If a dog has ticks on him, eventually in our area he’ll get Lyme disease,” he said.
Maria Malaguti, executive director of the Lyme Disease Resource Center in Northampton, has suffered from Lyme disease ever since she went hiking in New Hampshire in 1997. She thought she was bitten by a spider and came down with what appeared to be the flu a few days later. She went undiagnosed with Lyme disease for a year — ruling out Lupus, cancer, and a stroke as possible causes for her chronic condition.
At one point, she went to an emergency room and one of the doctors treating her thought she was “making it all up,” she says. She was bedridden for two years due to Lyme disease symptoms.
One of the biggest challenges for Malaguti is the extreme level of fatigue and brain fog, which she battles day after day when she has a resurgence of Lyme.
Malaguti founded the nonprofit resource center in 2011 to help others who struggle with Lyme disease. The center offers a program of free holistic services to Lyme patients and their care partners, such as acupuncture and emotional freedom technique tapping in additions to regular support groups.
“I think the disease itself teaches you to keep better care of your body,” she said.
Chris Goudreau can be reached at cgoudreau@valleyadvocate.com.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst Laboratory of Medical Zoology (LMZ) tests ticks to determine whether or not they carry the pathogens that cause Lyme Disease and 10 other tick-borne pathogens. All species of ticks do not carry all of these pathogens. For information helpful in idenfifying ticks visit http://www.tickencounter.org/tick_identification.
The Laboratory of Medical Zoology’s Tick Report website https://www.tickreport.com/ has further information. For specific questions, contact: 545-1057 or info@tickreport.com