Hanover hikers beware. This year, the Northeast is seeing one of the largest surges in tick bites in at least five years, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Dartmouth sat down with geography professor Jonathan Winter, who studies the spread of tickborne diseases, to discuss precautions to take.
What is your primary research focus?
JW: I work with the ticks that cause Lyme disease, which is the Ixodes scapularis species. I look at the relationships between climate, land use, tick populations and Lyme disease, both historically and how they might change in the future using models.
How vulnerable are Dartmouth and the Upper Valley region to ticks and tick-borne diseases this summer?
JW: Dartmouth is in the Northeast, which has a resident population of the ticks that cause Lyme disease. So, fairly vulnerable. The thing that works in our favor is that most hospitals around here are familiar with Lyme disease. The really difficult symptoms come if you leave it untreated for a long time which happened more in the past when medical professionals really did not know what was going on, and they did not have a good idea that Lyme disease had moved into the area.
How has the tick problem evolved over the years?
JW: New Hampshire didn’t have ticks when I was growing up in the 1990s. So the ticks have definitely spread and become a problem further north as time has gone on, and Lyme disease has spread with it. It is really difficult to figure out how much the cases of Lyme disease have grown because we weren’t diagnosing Lyme disease back in the day. But I think it’s safe to say that Lyme disease has grown in the Northeast over time.
What are the reasons for the growth and spread of ticks and Lyme disease?
JW: We have a couple different explanations. First is changes in land use: we have cut up the landscape in a way that makes an ideal habitat for both ticks and the hosts they live off of. Ticks have a couple different species that they preferably feed on — one is the white-footed mouse, and the other is the white-tailed deer. Those populations have both grown over time. Second, humans have moved into a kind of wildland interface: we’ve expanded our rural areas and live a little bit closer to nature than we used to. Third, the climate has warmed, and one of the things that can knock down populations of ticks is a really cold winter. We don’t really know the relative weight of the impact of each of those factors, however.
What can faculty and students do to protect themselves from tickborne diseases?
JW: It’s all the things that you can find from the CDC website. It’s light colored clothing; it’s tucking your pants into your socks. If you are out in the woods, that’s where you’ll pick up a black-legged tick, which are the smaller ones and the ones that transmit Lyme disease. You can use bug sprays; you can use permethrin. Cover your skin and check afterwards.
If you do get a tick bite, it takes about 24 hours before it transmits Lyme disease. So if you catch it before 24 hours, when you’re doing your tick check, you can use a pair of tweezers or slotted spoons to pull it off. If you have any kind of symptoms of Lyme disease and don’t know how long the tick has been on you, you should go see a health professional.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
