By Rosemary Ford and Melanie Matts, NH PBS

May 5, 2023

Tick season has officially begun. If you like going out into nature, then you’ve likely encountered them, and these tiny bugs can cause huge problems for both people and their pets. Where are the little critters in New Hampshire and what kind of trouble do they cause? 

On this week’s episode of The State We’re In, we speak with Concord Monitor science and tech reporter David Brooks, Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center infectious disease and tick-borne illness expert Dr. Jeffrey Parsonnet, and Dr. Kaitlyn Morse, founder and executive director of BeBop Labs, a nonprofit that, among other things, is collecting and testing ticks. Dr. Morse was a principal author of a recent study about ticks, called “Passive collection of ticks in New Hampshire reveals species-specific patterns of distribution and activity,” in the Journal of Medical Entomology.

Melanie Plenda:

Dr. Parsonette, let’s start with you. Why do ticks cause such concern and anxiety for so many? 

Dr. Jeffrey Parsonnet:

Well, there are two reasons. One is that they are abundant in our region, and so tick-borne illness is increasing in frequency. And also, there's a number of diseases that can be caused by tick bites. Some of them are treatable, but some of them are more difficult to treat and can be quite serious. So ticks are of concern because they're common, and tick borne illnesses are increasing in frequency in northern New England.

Melanie Plenda:

David, why did you decide to write about ticks? And what interested you about BeBop Lab’s research?

David Brooks:

I wrote about ticks because everybody's interested in ticks. Anytime I write about it I get tons of reader responses. I've actually talked to Dr. Morris several times over the years since she started the BeBop labs. It's a really interesting project, because it's a citizen science-based way of keeping track of these creepy pests. It's natural for journalism because people are interested in it, it is important, and it's very much a “news you can use” health item.

Melanie Plenda:

David, how does this fit into the Monitor’s ongoing environmental coverage?

David Brooks:

It's sort of a classic example of how climate change is affecting us. Part of the reason there's so many ticks here – not the only reason, but part of the reason – is that the weather here is more conducive to them living and populating. The snow cover isn't around as long, it isn't as cold, so they can survive all winter. This has been seen, even more than the ticks that you and I pick up or our dogs and cats pickup, you can see this most with a different species, the winter tick, which is surviving through the winter like it didn't used to. So it's a reflection of how the climate is changing, and sometimes bad things happen as a result.

Melanie Plenda:

Dr. Morse, can you tell us a little bit about how BeBop Labs works and your recent study?

Dr. Kaitlyn Morse:

We get ticks mailed to us along with the questionnaire on where they found it, what they were doing, if the tick was biting or crawling, and what day they found it – that's called community science. It's relatively common to track ticks using community science programs, and BeBob Labs has really shown how very successful that is and how we can do it on very limited dollars. Our recent study very much focused on the state of New Hampshire, and we removed all bias about what ticks are there, so we were able to focus on more than one tick. Usually studies like to focus on the black legged tick and Lyme disease in particular, but the study we did didn't want to focus on just one thing, we wanted to see what ticks were out there, what diseases they carry, when we find them, where they are. So that's what makes this study unique is that we focused on New Hampshire, we've got more than one tick that we followed – the black-legged tick and the dog tick – and we've gotten more ticks in our small little geographic area. Over 14,000 ticks is huge, and provides a very good method to have statistical satisfaction on the test and the conclusions that we make

Melanie Plenda:

According to the report, you didn’t get many ticks from the North Country. What does it mean, do you think? Are there fewer ticks there or fewer people to find them?

Dr. Kaitlyn Morse:

Thanks for asking that question, because that's definitely the paucity of information that we have for the ticks in New Hampshire, that shows the limitation of our project. We had a limited number of people who sent us ticks from the North Country, and thus we can't make any conclusions on whether or not there are ticks in the North Country. There are, we did find a few, but it's too little to really determine a pattern or presence, because sometimes ticks come in from travel patterns, they could have found a tick down south and then they drove up to go hiking and we just don't know that. That's the limitation of the crowdsourcing program that we have, because we don't have anyone really collecting and gathering ticks from up north, we just don't have the information we need in order to make conclusions about the North Country. So that's where BeBob Lab’s limitation is, and really where our focus should be on getting people to help gather ticks from the North Country more so than the previous years.

Melanie Plenda:

Dr. Morse, can you tell us about some of the highlights of the recent paper on ticks? What were some of the conclusions drawn from the research?

Dr. Kaitlyn Morse:

The paper was focused on two species of ticks: the black-legged tick, Ixodes scapularis, and the dog tick,  dermacentor variabilis. With focusing on those, we were able to find patterns of when they come out every year, the diseases that they carry, where in the state we found them, we did some climate change modeling to predict where ticks would be in the future based on the data that we had. So the conclusions would be centered around each one of those topics: where, when, and diseases. There were different conclusions about what time of year we found black-legged ticks and dog ticks. Black-legged ticks, people would send those in every single month of the year, so that means that ticks are out all year round. But they do have two peaks, one in May and one in September/October. That peak happened earlier every year and had a more exponential increase, earlier every year, for the black-legged tick. That earliness could be due to the numbers of ticks increasing or climate change, it could even have something to do with the squirrel population or a bloom of acorns. We didn't study that in the publication, but any of those could be a reason. And that's just one of the observations we have. The other observation we had is about the dog tick season. It overlaps with black-legged tick season – they peak in June, but they overlap with the spring season of the black-legged tick. And we saw an increase every other year for the dog tick, representing their two year lifecycle. So that would mean we would probably have an increased number of dog ticks this year because we had a down year last year.

Melanie Plenda:

Ticks can carry certain diseases. Let’s talk about those. Dr. Parsonnet, can you tell us about Lyme disease? How prevalent are these conditions, and how often are you seeing patients with these conditions?

Dr. Jeffrey Parsonnet:

There are five things that we see in New England caused by ticks; some of them are bacterial, one is a parasite, and one is a virus. The bacterial ones are Lyme disease, and then there's a related infection called Borrelia miyamotoi, and there's a bacteria called Anaplasmosis. These are all bacterial infections which means they can be treated with antibiotics. Lyme disease is the one we're most familiar with. It typically starts with a rash, which people often call the bullseye but we just think of it as a spreading red rash. And then days to weeks later, the bacteria can spread throughout the body and cause involvement of multiple organs in the body. It's treated with a variety of different antibiotics, the one we use most often is doxycycline and it responds well. Borrelia miyamotoi, which is very much like Lyme disease, is also treated with doxycycline, as is the third one Anaplasmosis. As an infectious disease specialist we don't see Lyme disease cases very often because it's really a primary care disease. If a patient presents to their primary care physician with a characteristic rash, consultation with infectious disease is certainly not necessary, and if a person has more established Lyme disease there's well-established guidelines for treatment. So as a specialist, we really only see patients where the diagnosis is in question or if someone has sort of a more advanced complication of Lyme disease.

Melanie Plenda:

Dr. Parsonnet and Dr. Morse, what can people do about that? Are there treatments and vaccines? Is there a way to reduce ticks that won't cause more harm?

Dr. Jeffrey Parsonnet:

There's a number of things you can do to prevent tick bites: wearing long clothing, tucking your pants into your socks, and then there are a variety of insect repellents that are effective. DEET is one, but for those people who don't want to use DEET the CDC has a good website for other insect repellents. I think one of the most important things is to do good tick checks. When you've been outside, it's recommended to take a shower right away and really do a good tick check. And certainly checking your children, and if you have someone with you to have them check in parts of the body that you don't see very well. The second thing is that disease can be largely prevented by taking prophylactic antibiotic. So if you find a tick that's been engorged and in place for a day or two, then an antibiotic can be taken to prevent the emergence of these diseases. 

Dr. Kaitlyn Morse:

I would definitely reiterate what Dr. Parsonnet said about tick checks – daily tick checks we find are very important. And I'd like to add a little bit about the diseases. For the black-legged tick, they carry a disease about 40% of the time: 37% Lyme disease, 1% Borrelia miyamotoi, 6% Babesiosis, 7% Anaplasmosis, and about 7% of the ticks are co-infected with multiple diseases. Only 1% of the dog ticks that come carry disease, so it's actually very important to know how to identify your tick as well.

The State We’re in a weekly digital public affairs show is produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communications. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members.