Ticks Are Migrating, Raising Disease Risks if They Can’t Be Tracked Quickly Enough

The biologist Grant Hokit came to this small meadow in the mountains outside of Condon, Montana, to look for ticks. A hiking trail crossed the extent of long herbs and berries.

While Hokit crossed the path, he wore a handmade plastic pipes stuck together to contain a large rectangle of white flannel fabric.

He had fun with this “sophisticated” device, but the scientific investigation was quite serious: he swept the fabric on shrubs and grass, hoping that the ticks “of quest” would be seen.

Along the summer path, ticks hang grass blades, escape their legs and await a passing mammal.

“We had one,” said Hokit.

“So that came out of this hiding place here,” he said. “Just take them with our fingers. We have a bottle in which we do them.”

All captured ticks would return to the Hokit laboratory in Helena for identification. Most of them would probably be identified as rocky mountain wood ticks.

But Hokit also wanted to know if new species go to the state.

While climate change focused on humans makes the winters shorter, ticks spend less time hibernating and have more active months when they can take walks on animals and people. Sometimes ticks behave – and diseases – to new parts of the country.

Hokit found deer ticks for the first time in northeast Montana earlier this year. Cerfs ticks are sadly famous for transmitting Lyme disease and can infect people with other pathogens.

Knowing a new species such as deer tick has arrived in Montana or other states is important for doctors.

Neil Ku is a specialist in infectious diseases at the Billings clinic in eastern Montana. He said most patients do not come just after being bitten by a tick. They generally appear later, when they start to feel sick with a disease transmitted by ticks.

“Fever, some chills, they can feel bad, like many infections that we could encounter throughout the year,” he said.

It is rare that patients connect a tick bite to these symptoms, and even rarer than they capture and maintain the tick that has bitten them. Sorting if someone could have a tick -transmitted disease can be complicated.

Knowing what types of ticks are in the region will help doctors knowing that they could start meeting patients infected with new diseases after a tick bite, Ku said.

This is partly why the state is looking for new species of ticks.

“The more we know about what is in Montana, the better we can inform our doctors, the better you can receive,” said Devon Cozart, a zoonotic disease and an epidemiologist of the disease transmitted by vectors in Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services.

Cozart collects and tests the ticks of the field surveys in Montana to see if they transport pathogens.

The question of whether a tick can obtain a human disease depends on the species, but the type of mammal on which it feeds also plays a role.

“Usually, it is a rodent who could be transported, for example, Rocky Mountain stated with fever,” she said. “Thus, the tick will feed on this rodent, then will also get the pathogen.”

Because the prevalence of a particular disease can vary in mammalian populations, ticks in a part of the state could be more or less likely to make you sick. This is also important information for medical suppliers, said Cozart.

This type of surveillance and tests does not occur in each county or state. A survey in 2023 in nearly 500 health services across the country revealed that around a quarter, made a kind of tick surveillance.

All surveillance efforts are not equal, said Chelsea Gridley-Smith, director of environmental health at the National Association of City and County Health Offiners.

Field surveys can be expensive. For many local and state health services, tick monitoring is based on a less expensive and more passive approach: patients concerned, veterinarians and doctors must collect and send ticks for identification.

“It provides some information on ticks that really interact with people and animals, but that does not embark on weeds of the way the ticks are common in this area and how often these ticks transport pathogens,” said Gridley-Smith.

She said that more health services wanted to start monitoring ticks, but that obtaining funding is difficult – and could become more difficult as federal agency public health subsidies such as Centers for Disease Control and dry prevention.

Montana receives about $ 60,000 from a federal subsidy each year, but most of this funding goes to monitoring mosquitoes, which is more intensive and costly. What remains of the funds moves on the ground to look for ticks.

Hokit said he didn’t have enough funding for his small team to question wherever he would like in a state as big as Montana. This means that he is unable to monitor the emerging populations of deer ticks as closely as he wishes.

He found these new deer ticks in two counties in Montana, but he does not have enough data to determine if they started to reproduce there, establishing a local population.

In the meantime, Hokit uses data on climate and vegetation to make predictions on the place where deer ticks could prosper in the state. He has an eye on special areas from western Montana, such as the Flathead valley.

He said that it will help him and his team, to restrict where to look at then so that they can let the public know when the deer ticks – and the diseases they can wear – arrive.

This article is part of a partnership with NPR And Montana public radio