A „particularly bad year” for Lyme disease, according to experts
Specialists think there will be a rise in Lyme disease cases this year, with ticks not being the only ones responsible.
The northeast region of the US will be hit especially hard, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that New York already has more cases of Lyme disease than any other state. It might get worse, according to CBS.
“We expect it to be a particularly bad year,” said Dr. Richard Ostfeld, Ph.D., who studies tick-borne diseases at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York.
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The reason Ostfeld is predicting an increasing number of human Lyme disease cases is that a bumper crop of acorns fell from oak trees nearly two years ago. She said that mice ate acorns in the fall of 2015.
“More acorns leads to more mice, leads to more infected ticks, leads to more Lyme disease in us,” he said. “They don’t have to go around foraging much in the winter where they might get nabbed by an owl or a fox, so they survive the winter well and start breeding really early the next spring.”
Afterwards, infected ticks use all those mice as hosts.
“There’s a delay between when the baby ticks bite the mice and when they come out as nymphs and bite us,” Ostfeld noted.
A lot of people might become infected with Lyme disease this summer. Officials from Maine said that tick-borne infections are increasing and they aren’t limited to Lyme disease. The state Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry observed that the number of cases of anaplasmosis, a disease caused by the bacterium Anaplasma phagocytophilium, went from 186 to 372 last year. The number of cases of babesiosis grew from 56 to 82, while Lyme disease cases reached an all-time high of 1,464 last year in Maine.
People are recommended to check daily for ticks, as they are most active in the warmer weather.
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