A recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that emergency room visits related to tick bites have spiked this summer in Arkansas. As Little Rock Public Radio reports, this comes as cases of tick-borne illnesses are on the rise nationwide, with Lyme disease the most prevalent among them nationally.
According to the Arkansas Department of Health (ADH), the tickborne diseases known to occur are:
- Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF)
- Ehrlichiosis
- Tularemia
- Anaplasmosis
- Lyme Disease
- Southern Tick Associated Rash Illness (STARI)
- Alpha-Gal Syndrome
- Other Emerging Tickborne
Many tickborne diseases can have similar signs and symptoms. The ADH reports that Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF) is the most common tick-borne disease in Arkansas.
Health officials caution, “Ticks are often found in overgrown lots and along weedy roadsides, paths, and hiking trails,” and that “most RMSF cases occur between June and August.” The ADH also says half of all people with RMSF do not remember being bitten by a tick.
Erin Mordecai, a biology professor at Stanford University, points to several factors for the surge in tick bites, with climate change topping the list. “A mosquito or a tick is a cold-blooded organism. So, its body processes how quickly it digests its food and how long it lives, and how long it takes to develop all those things depend on the temperature of the environment around it. And as it gets warmer those developmental processes happen faster. So, you get more mosquitos, more ticks. They’re more likely to survive the incubation period of a pathogen, and so transmission increases up to a point where eventually the mosquitos start dying if it gets too hot. ”
Mordecai says a combination of mild winters and periods of extreme heat can also create a perfect environment for a tick boom. “Any mosquito or tick has its own, what you can think of as a climate envelope, the kinds of conditions that it can live in, that it can do well in.”
The CDC’s Tick Bite Data Tracker recorded that 69 out of every 100,000 emergency room visits were for tick bites in July of this year.
