Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons by Newby Kris

Author:Newby, Kris [Newby, Kris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, Health, History, Politics
ISBN: 9780062932709
Goodreads: 42117387
Publisher: HarperAudio
Published: 2019-05-07T07:00:00+00:00

The lone star tick is a “vicious biter, attacking man readily and voraciously,” said Glen Kohls, the tick zookeeper who worked with Willy when he first arrived in Montana.5 The Rocky Mountain Lab occasionally sent batches of lone star ticks to Fort Detrick. “The immature stages are particularly annoying, since the intense itching produced by their bite may persist for two to three weeks. The adult, with its long, piercing mouth parts, is capable of producing a severe and sometimes painful lesion, which may require several months to heal.”

Lone star ticks have several survival advantages over their deer tick cousins. They don’t wait patiently on a stalk of grass for passing prey; they are active hunters that crawl toward any carbon dioxide–emitting animal, including birds. They swarm. And unlike deer ticks, they have primitive eyes that help them creep toward prospective prey. All three life stages of the lone star tick feed on foraging deer, which can carry them several miles a day to new wooded areas.

Another tick expert from Old Dominion University, Holly Gaff, PhD, recently conducted experiments on lone star ticks and was surprised at their resilience.6 One batch survived seven days in a zero-degree Celsius freezer. Other batches lived after being submerged in freshwater for seventy days and brackish water for sixty-four days.

Lone star ticks carry several serious human diseases, including Rocky Mountain spotted fever, tularemia, Heartland virus disease, and two species of ehrlichia, a close bacterial relative of the rickettsias. And more recently, some people bitten by lone star ticks have suffered from a delayed-reaction, long-lasting meat allergy caused by immune system hypersensitivity to the alpha-gal sugar molecule found in lone star tick saliva.

Even more worrisome, lone star ticks are on the move, replacing long-standing native tick populations. After World War II, lone stars were fairly concentrated in a region south of the Mason-Dixon line, bounded on the west by Texas and on the east by the Atlantic coast. But in the 1970s, these ticks began rapidly expanding their range.7 The first lone star tick observed on Montauk, Long Island, was in 1971, and as of 2018, established populations have been observed as far north as Maine.8

All this begs the question: What is driving this mass migration of the lone star tick and its disease-causing hitchhikers northward? Climate change? A rise in the deer population? The movement of humans into tick habitats? The release of ticks into new areas by scientists? Radiation-induced tick mutations? Or some combination of all these?

No one knows for sure. In short, it’s complicated.

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