Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to The Guardian global warming is bringing increased risk of attack from the killer ticks. But like most global warming threats this one is seriously overblown.
Disease-bearing ticks thrive as climate change heats up US
Blood-sucking ticks can spread Lyme disease and are extending beyond their traditional north-eastern range
Oliver Milman @olliemilman
Tue 11 Aug 2020 19.30 AESTGrowing up in north-eastern Ohio, Kimberly Byce spent much of her childhood running around in the woods, with the greatest threat being mosquito bites or sunburn. She can’t remember her parents ever uttering the word “tick”. And yet, in adulthood, disease-laden ticks now blight her family’s life.
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The family has been ravaged by the tiny black-legged, or deer, ticks, a creature the size of a pinhead that can carry Lyme disease and other maladies. Byce picked two of the ticks off her body last week, part of a regime that has become a constant worry in the family’s semi-rural household, located about 30 miles north-east of Columbus, Ohio’s capital.
“It’s really wearing on the kids, when they are in the back yard I’m spraying them like a maniac which is kind of putting a lot of fear into them,” Byce said. “I feel like some of their carefree childhood is being taken away but there’s the threat of a lot of damage. What’s scary is that I am the most diligent person with spraying, keeping to trails, being careful, checking for ticks. If I can get them on me, anyone can.”
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The clearing of forest for housing and other infrastructure is bringing humans into closer contact with animals that carry disease, such as ticks. Meanwhile, rising temperatures are allowing ticks to become active earlier in the year and then feed deep into autumn, giving them a better chance of surviving winter. While ticks usually target animals such as deer and chipmunks, humans can unwittingly become hosts for their blood meal.Advertisement
“It’s a nightmare scenario,” said Felicia Keesing, a professor of biology at Bard College who has co-authored research linking the heat of the climate crisis to greater tick activity. “We are seeing more tick-borne diseases in more places. Wherever you find ticks, they are spreading.”
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/11/ticks-lyme-disease-climate-change-us
In Australia we have some nasty ticks. Pretty much everything in Australia wants to kill you, ranging from deadly bees to an almost invisible jellyfish the size of the end of your pinky, a slight brush from which 20 minutes later leads to paralysis and weeks of screaming agony. Even our most common ticks carry deadly neurotoxin and horrible diseases – you know you’ve been bitten when your entire limb goes numb.
I feel sorry for the handful of people who suffer medical consequences, but the reality is serious medical complications from a tick bite are rare. Usually you just end up with a small red bump the size of a mosquito bite, which disappears after a month, even if you are bitten by a nasty neurotoxic Australian tick.
For people who suffer an actual infestation in their area, like the Byce family described by the Guardian, spraying the area with DDT would be a more certain solution to their problem than building more wind turbines. But DDT is no longer available for solving large scale pest infestations, thanks to a baseless long term green fear campaign.
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One point not mentioned in the article is good old fashioned ascertainment bias. Until about 10-15 years ago our provincial government insisted Manitoba had no Lyme disease and any doctor who diagnosed Lyme disease and treated someone for it could lose his license to practice. (Exceptions were made for people who had traveled to Lyme Massachusetts.) Sufferers were labeled as psychologically unbalanced malingerers who had to go to the USA for diagnosis and treatment. Meanwhile vets all over Manitoba were using a standard antibody test for heart worm that included testing for exposure to the bacteria that causes Lyme. And all over the province dogs and cats were testing positive for exposure to Borellia and an occasional sick animal needed to be treated for it. (My cat was one of them.) Eventually, the stubborn stupidity of the government on the topic could no longer be ignored in the face of the veterinary results. Testing began of both ticks and sick humans and Lyme disease was basically everywhere. The reason given for the change in government position on Lyme disease? It simply cannot be that the Almighty Government Bureaucracy was wrong. It must be climate change.
The government’s actions were all about MONEY! This is what you get with a government controlled and funded health care system. You can not have the disease because it will cost us (the government) money that has not been budgeted.
In the US, that is not the case as of yet. If Biden wins, with the almost guaranteed Democrat senate takeover for that electoral outcome, the US will have the same system as the UK and Canada.
I know of a Canadian citizen who could not get bypass surgery due to Canadian health care quotas and would need to wait almost a year to get the procedure done. He flew to Las Vegas, laid down on the floor of a casino complaining of shortness of breath and was taken to the emergency room. He was in the OR within hours. The blockages were considered an emergency here.
Where are smart Canadians going to go when the US system is as bad as the Canadian system?
BTW: Relatives in the Montreal area of Quebec don’t seem to have the same difficulty, being treated much more quickly it seems. Is this a result of Quebec being subsidized by the rest of Canada?
Google “ghost moose” I saw my first one several years ago . It looked like
a pinto horse. I didn’t know what it was, I’ve lived in the mountains most
of my life and have had moose around the house regularly and had never
seen on till that morning. I’ve seen several more since.
I read that these ticks that cause this are a recent development and
that they are thought to be the cause of the recent moose population
loss. That also could be caused by the increasing wolf population or
both. The ticks don’t seem to effect the deer or elk as I’ve never seen
a “ghost” variation on those.. But their numbers are currently on the
decline too, likely from large predators eg. wolves . lions and grizzly bears.
Just had to add this to the story..
I’ve lived in the same scrub oak forested site for 28 years. For the first 20, from the time the snow melted until it dries out in June, i could expect 3-5 ticks a day on my clothes when I was working outside, Then we had 6-7 years of zero ticks, and this year I saw one. Seems like a diminishing population rather than proliferation.
This article is a classic illustration of the principle that even a blind squirrel will find a nut.
Deer ticks have, in fact, been extending their North American range during the past decade or so. That the attempt to connect this with climate change is transparently a scare tactic piled upon thousands of previously-discredited scare tactics is emphatically not a good reason to dismiss the health threat posed by increasingly abundant ticks.
The effects of Lyme disease are painful, debilitating, and can lead to very severe consequences by aggravating other existing health conditions. Anyone who knows they have been bitten by a tick or begins experiencing flu-like symptoms or a red “bullseye”rash several days after spending time in brushy environments should seek out testing for Lyme disease–and understand that the testing regrettably delivers many false negatives and repetition may be highly advisable.
The alleged global warming connection is a bad joke. The reality of tick-borne illnesses is no joke at all.
Agreed. They expanded their range substantially well before that.
In Manitoba (north of Minnesota/North Dakota) they had been sampling for ticks regularly over years. Ixodes started showing up occasionally in the late 1990s and was presumed to be transient populations as no evidence of breeding populations could be found. That evidence was found in the early 2000s and Ixodes scapularis is considered to be established in Manitoba at this point. We’re considerably colder than Ohio and one heck of a long drive from Lyme, CT or Ohio for that matter.
Although I would point out that I disagree with the notion of using DDT as a solution to this problem. Blanket spraying with a persistent pesticide isn’t really a useful solution in this instance, given there are less broadly harmful options available in most locations. I do think persistent OC or OP insecticides still have tremendous value in certain areas (bed bugs, termites) applied in restricted manners, but ticks isn’t one of them. The impact on non-targets is too great.
As someone also from northeast Ohio, Byce is suffering from some seriously selective memory. Ticks have always been a worry in this part of the world. Most people ignored the them, however, because they either didn’t carry or we didn’t know about Lyme disease. Tick bites were gross but not worrisome. You put a matchhead to them or covered them in butter or whatever other usually-wrong folk remedy was popular in your area and moved on.
Ticks “quest”. They can sense the CO2 mammals exhale and using that and a sense for body heat find the game trails and paths where mammals frequent. They climb up on weeds or other vegetation holding on with their back legs and with their front reach out waiting to latch on to the mammal as it comes by.
We humans are a bit harder targets since we’re usually clothed and have a lot less hair to grasp onto as we pass by. If a person wears high lace up boots and blouses their long pants in them or has high socks to pull up over the bottom of their pants and wears long sleeves it makes it much easier to find what ticks may have hitched a ride before they have a chance to bite. Of course a hat of some kind helps also.
Killer ticks is NOT part of Apocalypse BINGO!
You can’t introduce a new feature over half way…that’s unfair to all of us loyal players!
Get with the rules already. Sheesh………people ya know?