Ologies with Alie Ward - Acaropathology (TICKS & LYME DISEASE) Updated Mega Encore with Neeta Pardanani Connally & Andrea Swei

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

It’s 2-for-1! Ticks AND Lyme: together in one helpful, disgusting, gossipy, empowering episode. This pair of episodes is about tiny, thirsty ticks and the diseases they spit into you is wall to wall wisdom from Dr. Neeta Pardanani Connally of the West Connecticut State University Tick Lab and Dr. Andrea Swei of SFSU’s Swei Lab cover how to remove a tick, if you should spray your yard and with what, how landscaping affects tick exposure, why Lyme Disease is spreading, the Lone Star Tick rolling into town, how to protect your pets and why the CC ruined poppyseed muffins. Also: Lyme Disease, Powassan virus, that Lonestar tick meat allergy, paralysis ticks, and twin princesses, Borrelia and Babesia. Dr. Neeta Pardanani Connally and  Dr. Andrea Swei will charm their way into your heart like a hypostome under your skin.Dr. Neeta Pardanani Connally’s videos, website, Twitter and InstagramFollow Dr. Andrea Swei and her lab SweiLab on TwitterDonations were made to TickEncounter, Union of Concerned Scientists, and 826 ValenciaMore episode sources and linksOther episodes you may enjoy: Opossumology (O/POSSUMS), Scorpiology (SCORPIONS), Epidemiology (DISEASES), Cervidology (DEER), Forest Entomology (CREEPY CRAWLIES), Planariology (VERY COOL WORMS, I PROMISE, Dipterology (FLIES), Kinetic Salticidology (DANCING SPIDERS), Diplopodology (MILLIPEDES & CENTIPEDES), Myrmecology (ANTS), Sparklebuttology (FIREFLIES), Spheksology (WASPS), Lepidopterology (BUTTERFLIES), Melittology (BEES), Entomology (INSECTS), Urban Rodentology (SEWER RATS)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramEditing by Steven Ray Morris, Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions, and Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hi, it's me from the future. Well, at least from 2023, it's Ali, hi. So is this a two and a half hour program about ticks? Really? Yes, it is, because listen, I care about you, all right? Since these episodes aired in 2019, it has been four years, and every spring, every summer, and fall, as it turns out, more on that later,

I wonder, are people staying safe? Have they heard those two tick episodes we did? So this week, as I was sitting in my little hut on my little butt, working and looking through a book of oligies, I saw the word acaropathology, which is the study of tick-borne illnesses, and I thought, well, shoot, here's one that's gonna be perfect for an encore.

So we decided to serve them up again for your health. We jammed them into one sandwich, like a big, disgusting, helpful peanut butter and jelly, okay? I even reached out to both guests, and as an adult woman, I was giddy to get emails back right away. Updates on their work, which I've threaded through this episode with updates, plus a ridiculous story

about them I'm gonna share at the end. So first, let's learn about blood-sucking goblins that sleep in your butt crack. Enjoy this encore. Oh, it's so good. It's really so good. Oh, hey, it's that sweatshirt, who's so flattered that you've worn it three days in a row,

but is starting to get concerned for you. Allie Ward, back with another episode of oligies. You know, there are a few episodes that I've started off just letting you know, I wasn't so sure about something. Please see dinosaurs, scorpions, and cats, because I'm just, I'm really a dog person. But I ended up loving those things and subjects

because what it boils down to is to know something is to respect it, to respect it, is to appreciate it. And this episode is ticks. Will I love them? Well, just listen. But first, listen to me thank some people, namely the folks at patreon.com slash oligies for making the show possible

by giving as little as a quarter an episode to ask questions and see behind the scenes info. Also thank you to everyone getting oligies merch and tagging your Instagram photos oligies merch so I can repost them thanks to everyone who just gasses me up on the weekly by subscribing and rating the podcast and for reviewing, which I shamelessly creep

and appreciate, and I still read all of them. And here's a fresh one from this week, May 2023, from Wongster77 who wrote in the review, this podcast is Nerdlicious Magic. It's as if Radio Lab, Mental Floss and Comedy Central got together and gave birth to the perfect podcast. Wongster77, it's a joy to push it out every week.

That's so nice. Okay, acrology, acronology, I'll figure it out. But it comes from the Greek akari, which means cheese mite or tick, which comes for the word for tiny. PS, side note, I just was like a cheese mite and I just found out that there are certain mites that live on the outside of cheese.

Some folks eat them because they impart kind of a floral, earthy flavor. So now we all know something about cheese mites. Okay, ticks. Ticks and mites are arachnids like spiders, but in the subclass, acari. And tick nymphs have six legs, but they have a glow up and they molt and then boom, adults have not six legs,

but eight, an extra pair of legs, just waiting to hug and kiss you. And by that, I mean cling to you and drink your life juices with its stabby, dirty mouth. I love bugs so much, but ticks and cockroaches are two that I just, I have a beef with. I want to love them, but their existence in my personal space

is just a one-way ticket to Barf City. But this was a topic that we should all know more about. And I saw thisologist work via Twitter, a tick expert based in Connecticut. I gently DMed her, hoping our schedules would align and sadly they did not for a face-to-face meetup. And you all know me, I'd rather bro down in the same room

than have like an echo-y phone talk. But thisologist was wonderful and recorded her side of the conversation into our computer. And though the sound quality isn't the same as if we were chit-chatting in the same room in a Hampton Inn, it's totally clear and this information is timely as hell. So the weather's getting warmer in the US, hemlines are crawling upward,

lawns are flourishing. We all need to know what the hell's going on with ticks. Now, we talk about ticks in this episode, where they live, where they lurk, how to detect them, how dangerous they are, bug sprays, conspiracy theories, and what to do if you find one on you. Thisologist is a medical entomologist

and associate professor of biology at West Connecticut State University, where she runs the tick-borne disease prevention lab, which focuses on the prevention of Lyme, other tick-borne infections, which according to many reports, have just risen very sharply. So how can we stop them from spreading?

How do we outsmart these buggy-buggers? So, ticks, what is their deal? Why do they wanna kill us? Or are they just like, ooh, shoot, I was just hungry, I'm so sorry, dang it. Side note, when it comes to the infections themselves, there's an amazing disease ecologist in San Francisco who studies things

you can catch from a tick. And y'all, dad words over here, just doing her best to interview her this week and make this a two-parter. So stay tuned, cross some fingers, but for now. The first step is understanding the life cycle and the bitey habits and the mind of the tick. This info is critical.

So tuck your pants in your socks and get ready. It's about time for some tick talk with Dr. Nita Pardinani Connolly. D-M-U-T-U-T-S-O. D-M-U-T-U-T-S-O. D-M-U-T-U-T-U-T-S-O. D-M-U-T-U-T-U-T-S-O. D-M-U-T-U-T-U-T-S-O.

D-M-U-T-U-T-S-O. So thank you so much for talking to me. I'm so excited to talk about ticks. You have no idea. Thrilled. I'm excited too. Do you tell people straight off the bat that you work with ticks?

Are you excited at cocktail parties? To be like, guess what I work on? Actually, I used to do that. And now I try not to. But any chance I get, I will talk about it. But I try not to lead with that. I think I learned a long time ago. Sometimes it's not always what people want to talk about.

Really? Yeah. I would think people would be dying to just milk you for information. Well, it may have come from a childhood experience I had when talking about headlights at the dinner table at a friend's house. Learning it was not cool.

Did you have them? Oh, yes. So actually, so I was about eight years old. And my brother and I got sent home from school with headlights. And my mom, she's a pathologist. And she was like, oh, cool. So she had a microscope in her bedroom, which didn't seem weird to me at the time.

And she found an adult head louse in my brother's hair. And she took it out and put it under the scope. And we got to look at it. And I was like, this is amazing. And so not that long afterwards, I went to my best friend's house for dinner. And I start telling them about this close-up view of my head louse and how these little claws it

was holding onto the hair. And it had these little hairs hanging off of it. And it was the coolest. And I was shut down. I learned very quickly that it was uncool. And it was not dinnertime conversation. And it stuck with me, I think, for quite some time. Did you get invited back any time?

I did. I learned a lot at that friend's house. I mean, my parents are from India. And I didn't learn how to eat spaghetti with a fork properly. I didn't know what mayonnaise was until I was in my teens. So it was, yeah, thank goodness for that friend. I learned a lot about how to behave. I think a lot of us don't really know what mayonnaise is,

to be honest. Your memoir needs to be head lice and mayonnaise. I don't really. So wait, no, is a head louse? Is that a mite? No, it's a louse. A type of mite? No, a mite.

No, it's not. And so it's a different organism than a mite. Mites and ticks are related. Lice are totally different. Oh, I didn't know that. OK. So when did you decide to start studying bugs? Well, so I think the way that it, the best

describe how this sort of evolved was when I was a biology major. And everyone in my family basically is a medical doctor. And I think there was this expectation that I would head that direction. And I'm interested in human health. But I took this parasite biology class in college. And it was very cool, so human parasites.

So worms and things that live inside, but also things that live outside, ectoparasites. And so I thought it was really amazing and so interesting. And then I went on to pursue a graduate degree in parasite biology. And it turns out a lot of the parasites that are found inside people are transmitted by insects and arthropods, like ticks.

And so it just sort of evolved in that way. So I found myself living in a place where black-legged ticks were ubiquitous. And so it really just felt very natural to be able to study, to start studying these organisms. And were you raised in Connecticut, or did you go there for school? I did not.

I was raised in upstate New York outside of Albany. And then so that is where I started my tick journey. A little background. Nita got her bachelor's in animal biology from Louisiana Tech, a master's in public health, studying human parasitology from Tulane University in New Orleans, and then went on to earn a PhD in environmental science, focusing

on medical entomology from the University of Rhode Island. She's also been an associate research scientist at the Connecticut Emerging Infections Program at Yale School of Public Health. Woman knows ticks. Really, the work that I've been doing related to ticks since 1998 has been in the northeastern United States. Which is the place for them.

Yeah. Well, yes. The black-legged tick, for sure, the deer tick. And now, have you heard of the term, have you heard of the word acronologist? Does anyone ever call you that? Acrologist. Yes.

Acronologist. Yes. I have one job here, and that is to furnish theologies. But sometimes, despite having them on my radar for years, I just, boom, oops, can't remember what they are. So I just did the equivalent of when your dad doesn't know a band name, but tries to act like he does.

So just quietly mortified, but we're going to move on. I don't normally call myself an acrologist, but I guess, technically, I would be. I tend to call myself a medical entomologist, entomology being the study of insects and arthropods, and the medical piece being the part about where these organisms are important for causing disease in humans. And now, getting to what is a tick.

Obviously, it's an arthropod. But can you be more specific about what makes a tick a tick? I am the tick. And how did they get that way? Oh. How did they get that way? OK, so what makes a tick a tick? A tick is an organism that's sort of a cousin of spiders.

It's also related to mites. And it is distinguished from insects, meaning it is not an insect, by some key features. Whereas an insect would have three body segments and six legs, ticks do not have three body segments. They really have one major body segment. And then they have this sort of head area, at least in the tick that I study.

And it's called a basis capitulum. And ticks, in most stages, have eight legs, similar to their spider and mite cousins. Quick aside, isn't it weird that every tick has grandparents and cousins? Like every bug you see has uncles, anyway. They are parasitic. And so they require a blood meal in order

to carry out their life cycle. Just the words, blood meal, it's dramatic. A blood meal, just it feels definitely like they're a tiny, tiny villain in a story. Do we just know them as villains, or are ticks good for anything? Well, I mean, in the general ecosystem, the ticks will serve as food sources for other organisms.

Like birds will eat them, for example. But if you're asking me, would our world be OK if we eradicated all the ticks? I don't know the answer to that. I personally really admire ticks very much. Of course, I don't want people to become sick. But I think if you learn a little bit about them, you can kind of admire how they've

evolved to be pretty sneaky. And although they are the villain, they do a really good job at it. What are some of the things that you admire about ticks and how they go about doing their business? OK, well, the tick that I primarily study is the black-legged tick. And many people call that the deer tick.

And it is a very hardy animal. So it can survive in temperate regions of the United States and the Northeast and in the Upper Midwest. And so it can sustain very cold temperatures like it can live in Minnesota and Wisconsin, where it's very cold. It can live for a long time under the snow. It lives for a long time.

This particular tick has a two-year life cycle. Two years. Granted, I have refrigerator mustard older than that. But still, that's 24 of your periods. That's two Hanukkahs. That's a longer lifespan than some pairs of shoes or the span of getting a master's degree. So just think, you could meet someone, fall in love,

move in together, fall out of love, break up, and maybe be over it. And there's still a tick out there that was on the planet for all of it. That was sadder than I intended, but whatever. It's kind of hard to kill this tick. And on top of that, when we think of it as a parasite, as something that requires a host in order

to carry out its life cycle, it really has evolved to have these features that makes it go undetected. So this tick, in particular, and many tick species will feed for several days on a host. And so if you think about a mosquito, it lands, it takes a quick blood meal, and by the time you realize it's there, you've swatted it away.

And so when a tick has to feed on a host for several days, it doesn't want to be detected. So it has this saliva that is full of all sorts of components that can fight the host immune system. So you don't typically, when you're being a host for a tick, you may not feel it. You won't feel itchy. You don't feel pain, because it has, in its saliva,

it has vasodilators. It has anti-coagulation factors. It's got these substances that really can protect it. And also, it keeps your blood from clotting. And so they can just start pulling in that blood very effectively. OK, so just a little aside on why they are tiny, creepy vampires.

So many tick species need a blood meal to get to its next life stage, kind of like a video game, leveling up. Only they are detecting your breath, your odors, and your movement, and sometimes crawling on vegetation and outstretching their top two legs, waiting to hug you. This very thirsty behavior is known as questing. And I hereby think it should be applied to humans who

go out looking for a sugar mama, or a money daddy, or a non-binary Bucksfuck. That last one could use some workshopping, any who's all. They find some skin, they cut you like a bitch, and then they stick their straw face in you, sometimes using cement like saliva to tack it down, like hot glue on a bad craft project. So their saliva might contain a few thousand proteins that

do everything from anesthetize you to administer like an anti-inflammatory. So your skin doesn't freak out and tattle that you are being used as a blood buffet. Did I mention that they can get engorged with your blood 200 to 300 times their original weight? Can you imagine what a boss you'd be if you could hose a soup plantation

like that for the price of one meal, like pay $15.99, and walk out of there weighing 4,000 pounds and just set for the winter? Ticks do that. They don't even pay the price of admission. They sneak in the back while you blinked. I mean, respect. So it's pretty good.

And it's not to say all people don't have a reaction to tick bites, because some people have quite a reaction, particularly after they've been bitten several times. But the fact that it can go undetected, particularly the adult stage ticks that are pretty large, it's pretty amazing. Yeah, it's kind of like the stealth bomber of tiny parasites. Totally.

Under the radar. And now you mentioned adults versus little guys. And I understand that the nymphs are the size of a poppy seed. OK, so quick background on this. I mentioned this in the epidemiology episode with the doctors, Erin, of this podcast will kill you. Hey, ladies.

So the CDC to really viscerally, appallingly, delightfully illustrate how tiny ticks are, put three little baby tick nymphs on a big softball size Costco poppy seed muffin. And it wasn't until the third confused zoom-in that you could even see their little leggies. Us Americans, not always fans of truth and consequences, shamed the CDC into taking it down.

But I like to burn the image into your brain, not to ruin muffins, but to make you just stop and think. If I had a poppy seed somewhere on my body right now, would I even know? And as a person who got ranch dressing on her face hours ago, I'm in a wager of no here, buddies. So they're very tiny, right? Now, in terms of their life cycle,

are a lot of the little guys out in the spring? Is there a higher risk of tick bites in this time of year? Yeah. So the way that it works is there's three main stages. There's the larval stage, which usually feeds on small mammals and birds. And then there's the nymph stage, which you said is the size of about a poppy seed.

And actually, we put them under the microscope here in the lab because we were like, are they really the size of a poppy seed? Yeah. And they actually, they are approximately the size of a poppy seed, but truly the poppy seed is easier to see. I see. You know, it's a little bit darker than a nymph stage

black-legged tick, and the coloration is more uniform. So it really is maybe easier to see a poppy seed than to see the nymph stage tick. But the tick in its nymph stage in this region, the northeastern United States and in the upper Midwest, where it's most common, are typically active, most active, in the spring and early summer months. So we really see them start coming out in May

and then really picking up after Memorial Day with their activity peaking in early a few weeks of June and then slowly subsiding as we get into the end of July. And it's not to say that you couldn't find a nymph during other months of the year. You certainly can. We collected some nymphs in October last year, but they're most active during the spring and early summer

months. And is that when most people who get a tick-borne illness will contract it? Or does that happen pretty much all through the temperate months? Yeah, so most cases of Lyme disease and some of the other diseases that are associated with black-legged tick bites occur

during the time or shortly after the time when the black-legged tick nymph stage is active. So spring and summer, we see cases into August and September. But with that said, the adult stage of tick, which is active in the fall and in the spring and even in the winter when the weather is above freezing, that tick also can transmit infectious agents to humans and actually is twice as likely to be infected than the nymphs.

But the thing about nymphs is that they're out during the time of year that more people tend to be recreating outside. And also, they're very tiny and the adults are a little bit easier to spot. So yeah, it's kind of just bad luck for us, but good luck for the tick in terms of their timing of activity.

OK, so adult ticks bigger and more Lyme and disease ridden. Nymphs less Lyme, but it's more likely you'll find one in a crevice in spring because no one is out in November picnicking at an outdoor concert series or making out with a Tinder date in a park or heading to the woods to cook over a fire or making an appearance in a Speedo, trying to get that D.

That's sweet, sweet vitamin D. So what about flimflamery? Is there any that Nita would just like to take to the mat and debunk? Yes, thank you for this opportunity. Ticks do not fly. They don't jump. They don't hop, right? So you hear a lot of people saying

that the ticks are falling out of the trees under their heads. And so that is unlikely to happen. They're on the vegetation. When they're the smaller stages are looking for mice and birds and they're kind of low to the ground. And then the adult stages are looking for deer and they tend to crawl up a little higher on the vegetation to find a deer and then they'll crawl upward on people

until they find a good spot. So if you find a tick on your head, it probably found you somewhere lower on your body and crawled upward and it didn't fall out of a tree. So that is something that I think is often misunderstood. Did it fall from the sky? No. I think that's the big one in that and that

and leaving the head in. We don't really leave the whole head in just the feeding tube when you remove a tick and I think just getting... Removing it is the most important thing. So even if you leave a little piece of the mouth part, it's better than leaving the tick attached. Right. Do you ever look at Dr. Pimple Popper?

Oh my gosh. Yes. Funny you mentioned that because I actually don't really watch TV and recently we had a friend over and it was late in the night and they decided to show us this and it was really something. Wow, that's disgusting. There was this one little video she posted where she's like, yeah, I was treating a patient, dermatology patient

and his girlfriend was like, hey, can you check out this growth I've got? We had it for a couple of days and she looked and it was like a fully engorged dog tick. Oh wow. It was just floopy flopping off of her abdomen and Dr. Pimple Popper was like, yeah, that's a tick but I guess she just thought it was a new mole. Wow.

I know. Well, so that surprises me a little bit just because adult ticks, particularly dog ticks, are quite big and particularly when they're engorged. I mean, think of like a raisinette. That's really what they look like to me. Yes, sorry if I ruined raisinettes for you forever but they do.

That's if you put an engorged female deer tick next to a raisinette they're almost hard to tell apart. And that's how big it is. If you had one of those hanging off your ear abdomen, I think that would be, at least for me, would be alarming. See the head right there? And this is the body here with the feet. So we need to try to pick it up.

Sorry, am I hurting you? God, that thing was on tight. But, you know, with nymphs, even when they're engorged with blood, you know, they're still very small. And so I think that, you know, not being able to detect one or no or just think it's like a flick of dirt is very common. I do love the CDC poppy seed muffin comparison. I thought that was great.

I was so bummed when they had to take it down before it grossed out. I was like, oh, see, I love that. I also think that that was great and very effective. And I know it may be ruined poppy seed muffins for some people but I thought it really just drives home the point and the visual of like, this is what you're looking for. So maybe we can bring back the poppy seed muffin. It's better to be grossed out for 30 seconds on Twitter

by a poppy seed muffin than to be, you know, putting yourself at risk. What's the best way to not get bitten by one? Is it repellent? Is it wearing just a wet suit every time? This suit of armor. Yeah. So unfortunately in, you know, the 40 years since Lyme disease was first described, you know, right here in the state of Connecticut,

we haven't really done a super job at getting people to prevent disease. In fact, the number of cases in the nation has been growing rather than subsiding. But what we do know from many research studies is that there are some things that may be protective against Lyme disease specifically. So for example, we know that in a couple of studies performing bodily tick checks frequently can be protective against Lyme disease. So that is inspecting your body.

And that includes your entire body. So particularly the cracks and the crevices and the, you know, armpits. Yeah. Well, right. So because the tick will crawl up, right? So it'll crawl, it'll find its host, it'll be waiting on the vegetation for a host to walk by.

And so it may, you may encounter it at your leg, but if there's no skin showing there, it will keep walking up until it finds some skin. So that might mean it will crawl under your shirt and into your armpit or up into your hair behind ears. We find a lot of them at places that are, you know, constricted by say a bra strap or, you know, underwear, waistbands, those kinds of things.

And so performing a tick check is a good idea. And actually performing one daily is a great idea because the Lyme causing tick, the blacklinged tick is unlikely to transmit the bacteria that causes Lyme if it's been attached less than 24 hours. Oh, okay. So this is amazing news. There is a magical window, an almost biological grace period in which you are less likely to have one of these tiny bastards

drool a disease into your blood. So take a moment to just feel yourself all around, get comfy with a hand mirror. Also, you can do this one thing that people on the bus might appreciate as well. Yeah. So the other thing you can do, and there's a couple of studies that support this, is take a bath or shower shortly after coming inside from being outside. So that could work in a couple of ways.

So you could be washing off ticks that haven't yet attached. If the tick is attached, you know, it's not going to wash off. Unfortunately, it will stay there. The water will not do anything to deter it. But if you haven't, it hasn't attached, you could maybe wash it off. You're also removing the clothes that you're wearing that may have ticks crawling upon them. And another thing you can do, and this is all this sort of personal protective measures you can take, you can take your clothing after you've been outside and put it right in the dryer.

There was a study that showed that if you put the clothes directly into the dryer and dry them on high heat for 10 minutes, it should kill the ticks that are crawling upon them. What do you do when you're out in field season and your job is literally to get yourself close to like a tick bomb and just drag layers of cloth through tick-infested weeds? Like what do you, what do researchers do? Do you just cover yourselves in like, deet? What happens? Yeah, well, so in my case, my goal is to get as many ticks as possible.

So I don't cover myself indeed at all. In fact, in, you know, when I'm sampling for adult ticks, I find that I'm more effective using my body as a method to collect ticks than to use a flannel tick drag or a flag, which is what we use typically to collect nymph stage ticks. And so, you know, our field staff, I of course want to keep everyone very safe. They wear long sleeve white coveralls that zip up to the neck. They tuck their pants in long white socks. And depending on the study that we're doing, oftentimes we have those coveralls they are

treated with products that contains permithrin, which acts as a pesticide and also a repellent, which we know is very effective at repelling and killing ticks or knocking them down. And so you actually can buy this stuff to put on your own clothing. And it's great because it lasts through many washings. So it's called permithrin. And you can, you can either buy a retail clothing item that is already factory impregnated with permithrin or you can buy the spray. Usually you can find it at camping and hiking sort of retailers.

Okay, side note. I know all about this chemical because I was covered in a constellation of red itchy bumps in Hawaii last November. And I spent most of my time in paradise convinced I had scabies and rubbing this formula on me just in case. Turns out it wasn't scabies, just mosquitoes. But now I have half a tube of this in my medicine cabinet. And I just hope no one discovers and Googles it.

I feel like we're closer now that I've shared. Anyway, it's a synthetic form of compounds found in chrysanthemums. And it acts by disrupting nerve cell membranes, causing paralysis and death of some ticks and mites and other bugs. You can also just mist it on your cargo shorts and not on your actual body, but rubbing some fresh mums down your pants likely will not do the trick. It also wouldn't hurt if you wanted to. Also, two quick 2023 corrections before you douse yourself or your life with permethrin.

Don't use this stuff directly on your skin unless it's been prescribed by a doctor. Also, check with a vet because liquid permethrin can be toxic to kitties. So look into that. But now you know that permethrin, despite the sound of it, is not like the name of a dragon in a fantasy franchise. And you can spray. Say you have gardening clothes or clothes you do yard work in. You can spray that and those could be the clothes you wear outside.

But typically we don't, you know, we don't, we want the ticks. So we just are, you know, have eagle eyes. We check one another after being at each field site and we do it that way. But for my children, you know, I have two kids and everybody knows that tick checking is part of our daily routine. Sometimes multiple tick checks a day and taking a bath or shower, particularly this time of year, everybody baths daily. And I highly recommend that.

And that's not, you know, there's all sorts of landscaping things that you can do in your backyard. But, you know, taking a bath or shower is really, you know, it doesn't cost a lot. We like it when people bathe. That's not controversial. It's easy to do. Well, it depends on if you're depressed. But yes, that should be easy.

Yes. Okay. Have you ever gotten bitten by a tick? Oh, sure. Absolutely. I've been bitten many times by ticks over the years. And it's, I think, a hazard of the occupation. And now you obviously, you study Lyme disease, which is such a huge issue right now. Have you ever worried that you have contracted Lyme disease or what are your personal feelings

about it? Oh, well, certainly Lyme disease is a very important human disease. And everyone who lives in an area where these ticks are prevalent should be aware. And, and really try to prevent it now for myself. So I don't know if you call this lucky or unlucky. I've had, in my life, I've always been extremely sensitive to the bites of many different kinds of arthropods. So I have a severe allergy to many types of stinging bees, fire ants.

I can't, mosquitoes, I have very poor reaction. And so even with ticks, when they, as I think, as soon as they attach and start to salivate, which they do to anchor themselves into the skin before they even start to take blood, I will get a quite a large reaction to the, to these organisms and I'll be able to detect it and remove it. Okay. A quick rundown of what is in the ticks toolkit. And by that, I mean their alive face.

So they have two palps, which are parts of their mouth, like little tough mustaches. And they have chalicer eye, which cut through their host's skin. And then of course they have that one barbed needle-like hypostome, kind of like a cross between a boba straw and Satan's tiny pitchfork. But Nita isn't a frequent victim, thankfully. So I've never had a tick feed particularly long on me. Actually, I'm not sure a tick has ever taken a blood meal, at least not a black-legged tick. I did once find a dog tick in my hair that might have been there for a day.

And the dog tick carries, you know, can transmit Rocky's mountain spotted fever, but not Lyme disease. And Rocky Mountain spotted fever is much more rare and it was okay. But yeah, it's something we take very seriously because this tick that we study can carry not just one, but actually five recognized tick-borne illnesses. It's full of all sorts of different microorganisms that who knows, you know, may turn out to have some sort of human disease causing capability. And so all of our, you know, seasonal staff and anyone who's working in tick research,

we are very careful about being safe and protecting ourselves. Okay, we're all crossing our fingers. I made this a last-minute opportunistic two-parter with a disease ecologist. But just to wet your infectious barbed whistle, here are some other things ticks can spit into you. Anaplasmosis, babiosis, borella, bourbon virus, Colorado tick fever, ehrlichiosis, heartland virus, Lyme disease, Powassan disease, rickettsiosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, southern tick associated rash illness, tick-borne relapsing fever, tularemia, and some robot sounding thing called 364D rickettsiosis.

Ticks, I know it's not your fault. You just got caught up in a bad disease racket. But dang, you are not welcome in my butt crack. So let's lightly touch on a few, though. Let's talk a little bit about the diseases in particular. You mentioned that you study five, but is the one that's at the forefront the most Lyme disease just because of its prevalence right now? Oh, absolutely.

So Lyme disease is the number one reported vector-borne disease in the country. So cases are reported by doctors and laboratories to state health departments who then report them to the CDC and the CDC counts them. And so each year, there's about 30,000 cases. But a couple of studies have estimated that that's very well underreported and that there was a study, well, 2014. 2014, I think it's estimated that the true number of cases is probably about 10 times that, maybe 300,000 cases per year.

In its early stages, if caught early, most people will be treated and be OK. But in its late stages or in some percentage of the population, even after treatment, they will have persistent symptoms or symptoms that go away and come back. And so those late-stage complications of Lyme disease can be very serious. They can involve severe arthritis, neurological involvement, cardiac complication, facial paralysis, many types of things. Now, with Lyme disease, can you tell me a little bit about what are some of the symptoms of it and is there a difference between late-stage and chronic Lyme?

What are we looking for when we look at Lyme? Yeah, so I'm not a medical doctor, but I can tell you that in its earliest stages, Lyme disease can present itself in a very vague way. Kind of flu-like symptoms and fever and malaise and feeling generally terrible. So unfortunately, sometimes it goes on diagnosed. The telltale early symptom of Lyme disease is what we call, many people call it a bullseye rash, or an EM, which stands for urethema migrans rash. And this is a red rash that will appear usually at the bite site,

but sometimes some area away from the bite site, and there may be multiple ones of them, and they are typically painless, and so they can go undetected and they expand, and it expands over a period of days or weeks, and then it will disappear. And so you can imagine if you were bitten behind the knee, you may not see any rash that appears. If you need a visual, this rash looks like if the target logo got a little sloppy drunk and manifested itself on your skin as if by a ghostly possession, not to be dramatic. And so, well, it's believed most people who do get infected with Lyme do get a rash, not everybody does, and or it may go undetected again because it's not painful or itchy.

And so, but that sign occurs between three and 30 days after infection. If you can catch that symptom, which is a very classic clinical symptom of Lyme disease, you know, that's like one of the earliest symptoms, and so you can treat it well. In its later stage, we're talking about things like I mentioned before, you know, severe arthritis or cases of Lyme carditis, which is a heart infection, other neurological issues, and then it really can run the gamut. And when it comes to having Lyme disease that might be resolved with an antibiotic versus late stage Lyme or maybe what some people call chronic Lyme, how do you differentiate and

and how do you also feel about some people saying one doesn't exist? Or I guess it's funny that Lyme has such controversy around it by funny. I mean, weird and scary. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you know, again, like the way that we approach this from the science that we do is well, first of all, I'm not a medical doctor, I'm a tick doctor, I guess you could say. And it's definitely true that there's a lot of people who are very ill and whether it's Lyme alone or it's Lyme plus some other co-infection or it's some other tick-borne illness or it's some

other illness, you know, I can't say. But I know that there's a lot of people who are very, very ill from tick-borne illnesses and in particular Lyme disease. And so the place that I come from and the work that we do in our lab is really focused on prevention and understanding tick behavior and also human behavior so that we can prevent Lyme disease, whether it's early stage or late stage or post-treatment Lyme disease or chronic Lyme disease. If we can do better at prevention science and being able to convince people to do prevention

well before they have an experience with illness, then really hopefully we can stop having conversations or have fewer conversations about how sick everybody is and really start having conversations about how well we're doing at keeping people from getting sick. Right. Are there any documentaries that you like or would recommend on the topic? Are there any that you're like, as a tick doctor? I don't. I don't.

And I probably only because I am. I haven't had a lot of time to spend watching them. So I don't know. I mean, I did see one documentary and I think it was called Under Our Skin or Under Your Skin. And it was very emotionally provoking. I think that it really was moving, really pointed to the problem of people who are sick with Lyme disease. The trailer of this is pretty chilling.

We have, I think, a horrible epidemic. And again, Nita studies how to prevent the tick-borne diseases, not how to treat them. But I also think that there's been a lot of scientists who have been studying this topic for a long time. And so sometimes those scientists have become, you know, enemies of the public. And I just, I want everyone to get along. I try not to watch that stuff because I want, I know that me personally, like this is my life and my career. And I really feel strongly about wanting to do a good job and researching my field of study.

Obviously, Lyme disease is a very charged topic. So charged, in fact, that. But we made some videos recently. So maybe I can tell you about those. So we, so there's a lot of, I wouldn't say controversy. I'd say questions and confusion about how people can use pesticides in their backyards to reduce the tick populations in their backyards. We get a lot of questions about that.

And so recently, the Environmental Protection Agency awarded us a grant to try and tackle the science communication issue regarding, you know, safe, but also judicious and effective pesticides use for controlling ticks. And because unfortunately, there's a lot of stuff out there on the market. And there's all sorts of rules and regulations about how things can or don't have to be labeled. And what you can say about how effective they are. And so it leads to a lot of confusion. And we think, you know, people either over apply stuff or they,

they apply stuff that doesn't work, but they feel like they're safe. And so we made these, you know, story based videos. Nita says that she's trying to communicate the science in a way that's conversational, kind of like two neighbors just yacking about precautions and sharing good advice about the black legged tick, which is a super hearty mother sucker. Anyway, go to spray safe, play safe.org. Again, spray safe, play safe.org. And you will find Nita's videos and a wealth of information on how to deal with these little

backyard pests. There's also different types of control methods discussed, everything from essential oils to fungus based ones to synthetic chrysanthemum juice, which is not the scientific term for it. But permeates is hard to say. And I already botched acar, acar, acarology. Yes, spray safe, play safe has you so covered in safe and effective pesticides. And so we just want to make sure that if people, you know, it's the decision to use a pesticide

as totally a personal one and, you know, whether you want to use it or not is up to you. But if you're going to use it, we want you to be armed with all the information to make informed choices. So it's not just like throw a grenade in the backyard? No, but you know, I've been places where people have said they're going to like pave over the whole backyard, which is really sad to me. Or they say, you know, my, my rule to the children is don't touch anything green outside. Right. I know.

And I'm like, is that what it's coming to? I think that, you know, we really want people to be, you know, aware, but not afraid. Because I think just, you know, arming yourself with knowledge is really important in terms of being able to keep yourself safe. Well, what about these sick populations seeming to go up or Lyme disease spreading? I know I've looked at maps from the CDC that have shown where Lyme disease essentially was first kind of identified, which, you know, old Lyme Connecticut and then having it seeing it kind of like bleed out. So to see these maps, go to the CDC website and you can type in historical

data. I'll also link this in the show notes and on my website. So clicking year by year, it's kind of like seeing blue dots hemorrhaging like ink. And in 2017, the only states which did not have reported cases on Lyme disease were Oklahoma and Hawaii. And I asked Nita about where are these black legged ticks hanging out? Are they moving out of the northeast? Are they like aging hipsters going to the suburbs? I understand that a lot of folks think it's maybe just in the northeast, but it's been identified in ticks in all the continental U.S., right? Yeah. So the black legged tick species is, you know, fairly spread in many places of the U.S.

besides the northeast and upper Midwest. We have the same species, you know, down all the way in Florida and Texas as well and in the states in between. The ecology of the tick is a little bit different. And so even though we do see the tick, we see less disease. And I think up here in the northeast and this part of the country, we have sort of this perfect storm of transmission and it has to do with how the ticks behave and how the hosts behave. We have this issue of climate change as well, which really I think is going to make the tick situation a lot trickier. And really it is changing even more than you've seen in those maps because the tick range has been spreading, you know, northward and westward. And so we commonly now see black legged ticks up in

Canada. And so cases of Lyme disease are more frequently reported in Canada now. One thing I don't recommend looking at unless you like to be very grossed out, appalled, and sad for a moose is a photo of mooses covered in ticks to the point where they look like they're just doused in pebbled concrete or like the underside of a boat that's been barnacled. I want to help the moose so badly. Even though given that I am untrained in helping moose with ticks, it would probably like to kick me in the face. Nita says that we have other tick species that are also encroaching. Take for example the Lone Star tick, which sounds like the town asshole walking through saloon doors to suck your blood and leave you with an infectious souvenir. So their

range is in the east, southeast, and Midwest United States. And Nita says in recent years, they've been detecting them more and more, which means they're coming for us. Pointy mouth suckers drawn. And this tick is really important because, you know, it also can carry different disease-causing agents, different than Lyme disease. And also it's been implicated in causing a severe red meat allergy. And we're talking like anaphylactic red meat allergy. And the thing about that Lone Star tick is like it is a seriously aggressive human biter. And so it's different than these deer ticks who just kind of hang out and wait for you to walk by and they'll grab hold. The Lone Star tick will detect you from far away and will come

far away and will come after you. Yeah. And so I think that, you know, talk about, you know, you think mosquitoes are a nuisance, I think, you know, nothing would ruin a technical and a bunch of Lone Star ticks coming along and, and, you know, wanting to grab hold. And just do not under any circumstances, imagine a wave of Lone Star ticks cresting and crashing into your wine and cheese basket aimed at your warm crevices. Don't imagine it. Don't imagine it. Don't do it. In addition, you may have heard that there was a new tick in town and invasive tick species. I don't know if you've heard this, but there's a, so yes. So a couple of years ago, a sheep farmer in New Jersey was covered in these tiny little ticks and she went to the health department

and they were like, take off your pants because they're everywhere and they put her pants on the freezer. And it turns out this tick is a tick that had previously not been established in the United States. And it's known as the Asian longhorn tick. So according to the CDC, as of May 28, 2019, which was like one second ago, longhorn ticks have been found in Arkansas, Connecticut, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. And researchers are looking to see where else it's gone. So Google image search them and be aware they're kind of like a reddish brown color with what appears like long legs and they can be up to the size of a pea fully engorged. Why are we freaking out about them?

And so this tick in Asia is a serious vector of human disease. It carries a virus. It can also cause a rocky, like a rocky mountain sort of spotted fever type illness. And then it's a serious test of livestock. And so it's now established itself here in New Jersey and Staten Island and parks of Westchester County, New York. And this tick is really scary because it can reproduce by parthenogenesis. So what that means is the female she can, she doesn't need a male mate to reproduce. So one female can create, you know, a thousand or more babies just essentially cloning herself. And so we really are watching watching this tick and what it's going to do. And we're, you know, right in sort of the center of

where it has now become established. So we're really in a place of sort of, I think, in this region around New York City and heading northward this sort of tick apocalypse, I guess you could say, where a lot is going on. And so I think we have a lot, you know, to learn and we're going to be seeing a lot of changes in terms of what the ticks are doing in the next decade. This is terrifying. Also one question. Why? Why? Why? Why? Is it that there are more ticks or that there are more deer or that there are more like white footed mice or that there's more development. So there's less land. So they're more concentrated. Like, where is, why is it such a boom town for ticks? Yeah. Well, so part of it is like, if you think about what the landscape looks

like. So, so the ticks have been around a long time. But if you think about what this part of the country looked like, you know, in the year 1900, it was primarily an agricultural place, right? There was a lot of farmland and pasture land and the forest deforestation and, you know, to make these grazing areas. And so the white-tailed deer were not so, you know, abundant. As we've sort of, you know, reforested this part of the country, we've really led to an abundance of white-tailed deer. And so with, we know that there's a link between the abundance of ticks and the abundance of deer because deer are the primary reproductive host for the ticks. So the more deer, there's more opportunity for the adult ticks to reproduce. And so the other

thing that's happened is that we really have started to move into these forested landscapes. So, and in doing so, we've fragmented those landscapes. And so we've sort of made all these little cuts into the forest. So we're living sort of right in the habitat where the ticks live and the deer live. And on top of that, by fragmenting the forest, we create a lot of edge habitat. And edge habitats are really, really great for, you know, deer love them, mice love them. We find a lot of ticks right in the edge. And so the riskiest place really for encountering a tick in this part of the country is really in one's own backyard, particularly in that region. The ecotone, we call it, you know, and right where that place where the lawn is meeting woods is really your

riskiest spot. But yeah, it's kind of all of the above, you know, there's a lot of deer, there's a lot of ticks, and there's a lot of people living really close to them. How do you feel about the conspiracy theories about Lyme disease having started in Plum Island as a bio warfare and then spreading from there? No comment? I don't think it's likely. You know, it's so complicated. Like, if I were going to make a, I'm not, I don't want to, but if I were to think about what would make a good bio terrorist agent or bio warfare agent, I don't think I would want to choose a tick that needs all these things, right? It needs to has a two year life cycle. It only feeds three times in its life. And you know, it needs all these different hosts. It just seems too, too,

too unlikely to me personally. People I had to ask, okay, it's my actual job. But I just wanted to know if you're like, Oh, no, we figured out that that's completely legit. Oh, no. Yeah, no. And as far as I know, it's not legit. And I am, you know, I just seems unlikely. And when you think about the, some of the bio warfare agents, like Tularimia is one that Tularimia can be transmitted, you know, by a tick, but it also has as can be transmitted in other ways. And so I think like, you know, having only one way to transmit it or something that doesn't persist in the environment very long without a lot of other factors and something that, you know, people are always going to encounter. I just doesn't seem like the, you know, way, especially because I mean,

with all different diseases out there, you know, if you want a bio warfare agent would want to cause a lot of death, I would think, right? So, so I think Lyme can be very serious and even fatal in some cases, but it's not causing a high degree of mortality. That's funny to think that someone would come up with a bio warfare scheme and their boss would be like, sorry, just not fatal enough. Yeah. Keep working on it. Well, really, I mean, yeah, I mean, I think to be a good bio weapon, you really have to think about those things. And I don't want to think about those things. But when I think about Lyme disease being a bio terrorist agent, I think it just seems not terribly plausible to me personally. That makes me feel a little better. But you know what,

I mean, that thing about underreporting, I mean, for me, I think like we know there's a lot of cases of Lyme disease and we know there's a lot of ticks out there. And so I just sort of have this attitude that is, you know what, if you live in a place where there are ticks and you go outside or you have a pet that goes outside, you're probably at risk and you should take preventative action and precaution and be aware no matter what. And whether they're counting the case or not, you can still get sick and your doctor can still treat you. And so I think counting cases and things may be important for some people in terms of trying to show the scope of the problem. But in terms of keeping yourself safe from being sick, you know, we know, we know people get sick and

we know there's a lot of ticks and ticks are bad. What do you do if you have a pet that's out romping? Yeah, well, I mean, I have two Australian shepherds. They're awesome. And they are my best field assistants that come out with me. And so we do know there are some studies that, you know, really kind of point to pets that go outdoors as potentially being an additional risk factor for getting a bite by a tick. And so treating your pets with a tick preventive product is a good idea. And, you know, treating them all year long, not just during spring and summer months, because, you know, we'll find ticks in December, if the temperatures are above 40 degrees here. And so I, you know, use a collar on my dogs, they're, you know, it's good for eight months, it kills and

repels. And there's oral preventatives where the dog, you know, gets a pill or the cat, you know, gets a pill and that it every month. And then if a tick starts to bite, it will, it will die before it can feed to completion. And so it can work that way. There's these topical spot treatments that can work in different ways, either repelling or killing on contact or also treating such that the tick attaches and then dies while it's feeding, which is better. I don't, I can't say, but, but I think it's very important to treat your animals with a tick, a tick products all year long. Better than not having an animal, I guess, or you could just get a goldfish. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, I mean, and I think, you know, when I think about the behavior of, of

dogs and cats and things, you know, depending on if, you know, what you're, how you behave with your dog, if you take it on a leash, you may be able to avoid some of that most ticky habitat. But, you know, if you have cats that go outside, which I've just learned is not, is apparently not cool to do. I thought everyone's cats just went outside, but that's a thing now. And I feel really dumb because I didn't know, but I'm learning now. Okay, for more on this, listen to the felonology episode with Dr. Miguel Delgado. So much I did not know about cats. So much none of us knew about cats. Anyway. But people do still have cats that go outside. And so those cats, you know, will go

all over, right? They'll go in the woods and they'll be in the leafy areas where the ticks are, are hunkered down when they're not looking for a house. And so they can, yeah, so they, they can be exposed in that way. And so even if you don't go outside, if your cat does and then comes back inside and you're petting it, you know, there is a risk for sure. Yeah. We don't know what cats are doing out there. They're out honky-tonking. They're like, later days, man. They're out and about. But yeah, ornithologists are like, excuse me. Yeah. Cats back indoors, please. So I guess for, if, for no other reason, then, so that you don't have to check your butt crack for ticks more often. Keep your cats inside.

Yeah, total. And there's, I guess there's a lot of reasons now for keeping your, for keeping your cats inside. And I felt really dumb because I didn't know. Maybe it's because I'm a dog person and I'm not a cat person, but I, you know, shout out, I love cat people. Well, I thank you. Well, I just learning and I, but I do know there's a, for sure, these, you know, cats can pose a risk to birds. And there's an issue with feral cats and potential rabies transmission and certain parts of the country. So yes, PSA, keep your cats indoors. I talked to a felonologist who's like, put it on a leash and take it to the park for an hour.

That's just fine. But I have questions from listeners who are super excited that you're on. And can I ask you some rapid fire questions? Uh, okay, sure. Okay. And before we get to the lightning round with your questions, a few words about sponsors. I like very much who also make this podcast possible. But before we get to them, the sponsors also make it possible for us to donate to a charity of the oligists choosing each week. And Nita enthusiastically supports tickencounter.org saying it's a wonderful science-based resource for all things tick related. And it's housed at the University of Rhode Island where she

worked on her PhD. So they do great stuff. They have so many pictures of ticks, tips, that's tickencounter.org. So a donation was made to them in her name. Okay. Some other things I like this week. Back to your questions. Okay. So Alice and Turry wants to know, what is the proper method to remove ticks if you get any on you? Great. So the proper method would be get the pointiest pair of tweezers that you can find, grab the tick as close to the skin as you can and pull it perpendicular to the skin and pull up and, you know, deliberately. And so we really don't recommend slathering it with Vaseline or setting it on fire. Get some hairspray, make some flame throwers. Some people put a

lit match, you know, which isn't a great idea. So we don't, we want the tick to come out as soon as possible. The longer it's attached, the more likely it is to transmit things that it's carrying. And we don't really know what happens if you like soak a cotton ball in peppermint oil and put it on the tick. Does it make the tick really pissed off? And then does the tick start salivating more and then more likely to transmit something? We don't know. And so, you know, we recommend that you just a pointy pair of tweezers and pull it straight out. And the thing is with the pointy tweezers, you can get the closer you can get the better because you'll hear people say, Oh, I left the head in, which is actually impossible. But what you can leave is the feeding tube. It's

called a hypostome. It's like a straw, but it's barbed like a fish hook. And so it's hard to get out. And sometimes that breaks off. And that's not the end of the world that think of it as like a splinter. Eventually, it'll work its way out. Also, when a tick is hungry versus engorged, they look so much different. And I did not know that until this episode. Full ticks can take on a grayish color. They look like a whole different species. So if you go to tickencounter.org, you can see different pictures of different stages of feeding kind of looks like a big gray brain that's about to burst pretty gnarly. Ruby Ostrich wants to know how close are we to a human vaccine? I know that there is a lot of work in the vaccine research field. And I don't know the

answer to that. And I would like to think that we're within this decade, there will be something. And as you may know, there was a vaccine on the market for a short period, it was removed from the market. So we'll see it. I think that, you know, the vaccine for Lyme has a lot of potential. With that said, if the same tick that carries Lyme can transmit other pathogens to humans, still prevention measures beyond being vaccinated are still really important, like checking your body or wearing repellent. Let's see, Raymond J. Deutsch wants to know, what is it about the area of Connecticut that lent itself to the onset of Lyme disease? Do you think it's the altitude or climate or soil composition? Yeah, well, we have a lot of forested habitat with deciduous

forests in particular. And so the ticks really thrive under the leaf litter, those dead leaves at the base of the forest. And in these forested areas, we have lots of, excuse me, lots of white-tailed deer, which are the most important hosts for the adult stages of deer ticks. And so we have great habitat. And of course, those forests are full of white-footed mice and other small mammals that can be great hosts for our ticks. And I think the other piece of it is that we live among these hosts in this forest. And then the third thing, particularly here in Connecticut, is that we have in some places an abundance of an invasive shrub plant that's known as Japanese Barbary. And unfortunately, Japanese Barbary is often sold as an ornamental plant by nurseries

and garden centers. And so you can buy it and plant it. And unfortunately, it can become very widespread and is really damaging to the forest ecology. And the thing about Japanese Barbary is now we know that places that have more Barbary actually tend to have more ticks. And so it sort of adds to this already problematic environment now we have to worry about Barbary being something that's going to help foster the survival of ticks. I mean, I get it. Barbary is pink. It's cute. It's evergreen. But Barbary, GTFO, I hate you now. Oh, so down with the Barbary. Yeah, definitely. If you have Barbary, you should consider removing it from your yard. Please don't ever buy Barbary at your garden center. Find something else to plant. The other thing in

backyards that people have besides just like a wooded edge is in this region, people have this ground cover vegetation like Pakistan or myrtle. And that is very low to the ground. And then underneath it, it's a very moist environment. So ticks, this tick species, the black legged tick, really needs a very high humidity, like 80 to 95% humidity to survive well. And so it spends a lot of time down in that moist environment. So people who have this pack of Sandra, it looks very nice. But, you know, it's a great tick haven. And so that's again, something to consider in your own landscape. Like, should I, you know, remove it? Or if you're going to treat with a tick control product, you want to treat not just the wooded edge, but also, you know, ground cover vegetation

or the ticks may also be abundant. So Pakistan or Barbary canceled? Cancel, yeah, or cancel or treat or a treat. Here you are. But certainly the Barbary is bad for so many reasons, not just for ticks. It's just shouldn't be in our forests. Oh, that's good to know. I had no idea. Yeah. The truth is, you know, I think knowing, just knowing about whether or not you are in a risky environment for getting a tick bite can go a long way. And so, you know, taking preventative action and knowing what a tick looks like is huge. So a lot of people like to send us pictures of ticks or things they've found, they send us stuff in the mail. And, you know, it's not a tick. And if you, if you're able to just know the key distinguishing features can go a long way

towards keeping people safe. And so, yeah, I, I, I do, I, I'm in full agreement. Lyme disease is a major problem. Tick-borne illnesses are a major problem in the US. And, you know, we're really focused on trying to prevent it. But I think, you know, because we're dealing with humans, you know, we're, we're pretty good actually at controlling ticks and we're, we're not very good at controlling humans. And so people, we find that people don't always get good at prevention until they've been sick themselves or someone in their family has been sick. And so what we need is people to be thinking about it before they're sick and taking action before they get a tick bite, you know, not waiting until that happens. And it scares the, you know, the Jesus out of everyone.

And then, and then they go running around trying to figure out what to do. And the other issue we have is that, you know, there's a lot of misinformation out there in terms of, you know, even prevention, which you think is a benign topic. Just this morning on our, you know, community social media pages, someone asked for advice about preventing backyard ticks. And then the responses, you know, really varied from stuff that's science-based to, you know, totally erroneous and not science-based. And, and so the, the age of information has kind of put us in a place where, you know, people have to think critically about, is this good information? And should I use it? And so that's, that's something we're battling now is trying to understand human behavior and,

and how we can, you know, get people to take action and feel, you know, empowered to take action in a way that is going to be effective. And I think that people are a little bit just kind of stunned and don't know what to do. So they're just afraid of getting it without really knowing how to prevent it because there's so little and sneaky that it just seems like getting bitten by a ghost. Like, what are you going to do? Yeah. And so it's good to know that there are measures that you can take to prevent that. Yeah. And, and just understanding that, like a tick, it takes some time before it actually can, can suck your blood. It's a whole process. They have to salivate, and they have to fight your immune system. And then they, they, they salivate this cement

so they can really stick on you and never come out, you know, and not never, but not while they're feeding. And so it, but, and then they salivate and then they, you know, the blood is accumulating, it takes, and they feed really slowly at first. And so, like really, people like they had the tick, it's been on them for, you know, an hour, they take it off, they have a red mark, and all of a sudden they're like, I need three weeks of doxycycline, right? And, and that's not necessarily always the case. Sometimes the red mark is just you're having a reaction to a tick bite, or, you know, it's, it's, it's knowing these small bits of information about how these ticks behave or, you know, what a tick looks like that can really help you know if you need to run and

get three weeks of doxycycline, which, you know, has its own issues. We worry about antibiotic resistance and all of that. So, so I think, you know, it's, it's getting to know the information, but that's true for all diseases, right? Like you're supposed to be good at preventing all, you know, tooth decay. And so you brush every day, but that's a habit, right? So are you checking for ticks every day? What's our new motto? Be your crevice's best friend. Maybe not. So how can we turn it into a habit? If you can help me figure that out, I'd love that. Significant others can always be a tick check, buddy, I'm sure. Totally. Well, yeah. And if we know that tick checking is protective and we know that showering is protective, maybe you can make that

into like a, you know, activity together. Yeah. It's like ticks, but make it sexy. Totally. Yeah. I mean, why not? If that's what it takes. Yeah. I mean, I'm trying to imagine what that, you know, infographic that we promote next is going to be, but why not? I mean, I think at this point you have to, you know, if it's going to grab your attention and make you take action, then we'll do it. Right. Oh, 2023, your dad here with a few updates from the doc. So she wrote me last night and she said that she published a 2021 tick net study with partners at the CDC in the journal Zoonosis and Public Health. It was titled prevention of Lyme and other tick-borne diseases using a rodent targeted approach, a randomized control trial in Connecticut, which put around 650

bait boxes out with rodents treated with a tick killer. And they found out that they did not reduce tick numbers or human infection rates in those areas. And she noted that this study in Combo with some other work that they're just wrapping up looking at backyard tick infections rate is leading us to consider that in some Lyme disease hotspots, the whole host community and not just mice and chipmunks, which is a common thought in that region, needs to be considered as they keep trying to figure out the best ways to mitigate ticks and their pathogens in those endemic areas. So it's not just the rodents, all of the hosts matter. And she's also excited about a study that they're writing up right now that looks at what backyard activities lead to more tick bites

and found that most ticks were encountered during moving activities like walking or gardening, like moving your hands in vegetation versus just sitting around stationary ones like kneeling or sitting on the ground. So moving around, you're more likely to get a tick on you. And they also found that more than half of the tiny, tiny nymph stage and adult stage ticks were detected below the knee. They're mostly hanging out below the knee, which she says supports prevention actions that people don't commonly do, such as wearing permethrin-treated socks or tucking your pants into your socks and boots, which I will add also, I think looks cool. So how did they find all of this out? For that study, her team climbed into skin tight white

head to toe unitards with hoods, just their face exposed. Then they had to run around backyards logging thousands of minutes and counting every single tick encounter. They put themselves not only in harm's way, but also in full body spandex. And this, this is why we love her, like a tick loves blood. Can I ask you a couple more listener questions? Sure. Is that cool? Don Ewald wants to know, there have been some studies about mosquitoes and their possible preferences for certain blood types. Are there any studies on blood types that ticks prefer? Oh, so it's interesting. There are no studies that I'm aware of that show that ticks have a host preference. We do know with mosquitoes that, that they do,

they, they will seek, tend to seek women over men and brunettes over blondes. Okay. So side note, apparently there's something about the contrast that the mosquitoes just really dig. So likewise, if you're a brunette on a light sandy beach, just watch out and don't swat them. Mosquitoes, when you swat them, they're like, Oh, there you are. And then they just keep writing you, just FYI. Also, as long as we're going down several holes on this, blondes report feeling more emboldened socially, but brunettes out earn blondes. For more on why we judge each other for stuff that doesn't matter, see the two part collology episode about beauty standards. Also, should I mention that one study said that redheads have

the spiciest romantic lives? No, I don't want to mention that. That's gross. Oops, I did. Okay. I don't know how ticks feel about me though. With ticks, we don't know. And I, I think there's some question about that because, you know, you hear from people all the time, you know, my husband and I are both always working in the yard, but he always gets ticks and I never do and he's more tick attractive. But in terms of, of whether or not any of that is true, we don't know. What we do know about, particularly about the black legged tick is that it will feed on everything. It feeds on mammals, it feeds on birds, it feeds on reptiles, and it really is opportunistic. It feeds on large mammals and

small mammals. So I think that this particular tick species, the Lyme perpetrator is pretty easy going when it comes to, comes to choosing a host. But whether or not it might choose you over me, if we're standing right there presenting ourselves as hosts, I don't know the answer. And we do talk about it a lot and, and I think it needs further study. Neeta's body though, let's her know when she's got a sucky blood barnacle. I think it's great that you have essentially a very loud car alarm in your body that's like, you got a tick, you got a tick. So helpful that you have an immune response to it, perhaps. Yeah. And actually, so some, some researchers are, you know, trying to capitalize on that

because there are people who are very reactive to ticks. And so can there be a vaccine that is an anti-tick vaccine, right? And it will make you itchy or reactive to a tick bite so that you catch it before it has time to transmit anything. So using those reactive properties that some people have to try and create a vaccine. And his last listener question is, Deli Dames wants to know, how does the town of Lyme feel about having a disease named? You'd have to ask the town of Lyme residents. I really don't know. I mean, they're either sort of famous for this. And I don't know. I guess it's good to be on the map for some reason. And actually, I mean, though, there was a woman who really was the start of all of this becoming known.

And her name was Polly Murray. And she was a very astute mother who was noticing that there were a lot of kids getting arthritis around the area. And so if it weren't for her real great powers of observation, you know, it might have taken a lot longer to come up with that. So I think the town of Lyme should be very proud. And I think, you know, why not be proud of that and having, you know, someone who is astute enough to say, OK, something's going on here. Yeah, there was some kids movie I was watching with my kids. I think it was like Madagascar or something like that. And they are, you know, Chris Rock, his character was like, come on, what would Connecticut have to offer us? Lyme disease. Thank you, Melmond.

I'm like, oh, it's for Connecticut. That's where, you know, that's what we get as being, you know, what we're known for. Now, what is something about your job? Last two questions I always ask that you really hate? What sucks about ticks or your job? What sucks about ticks you were making upon? That was great. Oh, no. I swear I wasn't. I swear. But I fully understand that I have no credibility anymore when it comes to denying dad jokes. OK, but yes, what slices her open and takes a blood meal out of her day? What sucks? I mean, I love my job. I feel so lucky that I can, you know, study an organism that I absolutely think is, you know, very important and also really very cool from the biology standpoint. You know, as someone who is trying

to run research studies and I guess sometimes there's a lot of, you know, paperwork and stuff like that. And that's probably the hardest part. But I think that other scientists may like that more. But not really for me. I think I feel really lucky that this is something that I get to do for my for my job. I really love I want nothing more than to be out in the field, you know, doing the fieldwork, you know, collecting the ticks we'll do. Well, last summer we had a study where actually we're laying down and we were sitting and we were kneeling. We're trying to figure out what activities get us or, you know, be more risky than others. And I mean, I could do that all day. It's my favorite thing. And when I have to stay inside and do a budget or report,

I feel so sad to watch everyone go out in without me because I would do it all day long every day. I love it. Her favorite thing about her job is lying down to have ticks literally eat her alive. God, I love her. I love all the just so much. What was the position that got you the most ticks? Stay tuned. We only did we only did a pilot and we're going to scale it up a little bit this year. But, you know, I think surprisingly to many people, you know, we found that a lot of our ticks were found above the knee from these activities. So, you know, a lot of people think, you know, you're only going to if you're walking through the woods, it's going to end up on your on your shoes. And it may be that, you know, it's when you kneel down to pull a weed or when you,

you know, drop, you know, pick up a stick or you're clearing brush in your yard, you might get it on your arm. And certainly laying down is a risky thing to do in the woods. I don't know how many people do that, but we did it. And and that seemed to, I think, I think it was either sitting down or laying down that that exposed us to the most nymph stage ticks. And it was, yeah, that's fun. I, I don't say that lately. I know that, you know, ticks are a major, the risky thing. But I just, you know, just to give you an idea of the things that we do in prevention, we put ourselves out there. Well, my last question is always, what's your favorite thing about your job? But apparently yours is lying in the woods waiting for ticks. Yes, I love it. I love collecting ticks.

I love I also love looking at the ticks under the microscope. They're just they're amazing. If you look at one up close, they're it's pretty astounding to see their anatomy is really complicated. Just if you could look at a picture of the tick hypostomate that's their feeding tube, it has multiple like teeth on them and they're they're barbed so that, you know, the tick easily can go in, but it's more hard for it to come out. It's very elaborate and different tick species have different, you know, we call it dentation. It's the different numbers of these little teeth, spines, and it's really incredible to to look up close. So I recommend everyone take a look. It really looks like if a knife grew more knives on the surface of the knife,

it's a micro horror. I mean, I love bugs. I have to say that ticks are though, like, takes it kind of the ones on my shit list of like ticks and cockroaches. I feel bad because I'm like, I do think that it's really great to respect them for how stealthy they are. So I think that they'll create a really good thing to start just outsmart them. It's don't hate them, just outsmart them, maybe. I think that's a really great approach. I like that. This is one of my lists forever. Thank you for being so passionate. I'm so, I'm so glad that you got head lice as a child. Me too. It's really firm to I am. I actually had sort of forgotten about that. And I was telling the story to someone not that long ago. And then I'm like, Oh, yeah, you know, that could have been the moment.

We're all better for it. So thanks for getting head lice. Well, you're welcome. I don't know. Yes. Bye. Bye. And I know we're all terrified of ticks, but they did a lot of evolving to get where they're at. And we have pretty big squishy brains. So let's just try to outsmart them. Again, so much info is up at tickencounter.org. And Nita's videos are at spray safe play safe.org. I will put a link to my site in the show notes. You can find all this stuff there. And remember, daily tick checks, be your crevices best friend. Now you can follow Nita because she's amazing. She's at tick lab on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook, just at tick lab. God bless her for that uniformity. And her lab website is www.wcsuticklab.com. And I will put a link in the show notes.

Okay, 2023. Me again. We learned about the acaro part. We learned about the ticks. Now let's bury our heads deeper. Let's get into the pathology part more. You're gonna love this ologist. What a team these two. And stay tuned for the secret at the end of the episode because it's a good story. Let's get into this. Oh, hey, Cyril, Uncle Dad, who's not too proud to shove a finger in each of his ears when a fire truck goes by? It's too loud. Alleyward. Back with another episode ofologies. All right, diseases. Nobody likes them. Not even vectors probably. But isn't it nice to be united in a common dislike of them? So let's clamber down into a big juicy vat of tick-borne illness. Shall we? Did you come out of acrology liking ticks? Just a little bit.

Because I didn't. I still hate them very deeply. And they've silently crawled to the very, very tippy top of my shit list. So let's talk about what they can do to us. Okay, so this disease ecologist is one of the best. She studies the whereabouts and effects of baddies like Lyme disease and babbiosis and other things that like to live in your body without permission. So she's an assistant professor at San Francisco State University. She is a research scientist for the Bay Area Lyme Disease Foundation and a member of the California Department of Public Health Tick Working Group. She runs her own lab at SFSU dedicated to research on these very topics. And she hopped into sound booth at 826 Valencia in San Francisco and we chatted about how many

times she's been tick-bit. What to do if you find one that's been on you? How animal populations carry Lyme and other diseases? Why possums and Western fence lizards are our friends? And what scares her the most about ticks? So button up your cosmic lab coats and take a micro gander at disease ecologist Dr. Andrea Sway. And so tell me what you study. Tell me what your work entails. This is so exciting. Yeah, so my work is really, if I were to summarize it, it's trying to understand diseases and how they're transmitted and how ecological factors, environment and vertebrate communities, sort of natural communities might influence how they're transmitted and

where they are. And many of the diseases that I work on happen to be zoonotic. So that means that they're pathogens that are naturally sort of maintained in wildlife and in wild situations and can also cross over to humans and cause disease in humans. And so zoonotic diseases are a huge part of the burden of infectious diseases that we see in the world. And many of the diseases that we're facing that seem to be new or seem to be emerging actually come from wildlife reservoirs. A lot of the diseases that we're seeing that are tick-borne, those have existed in populations in animals in wildlife well before. That's right. I mean, nothing is really new in the sense of spontaneously generating. We're starting to see some of those with antibiotic resistance and sort

of new genetic strains. But many of the pathogens that we talk about as being new, they're really just new to us or new in terms of causing harm in human populations. Now, tell me a little bit about when you decided to be a biologist or when you were like, this is my deal. This is what I'm going to do. Yeah, you know, I've been sort of reflecting on that a little bit recently after listening to a few of your shows. And I think it happened pretty early on. I've always really been interested in science. I remember getting my first microscope when I was 11 or so. And I wanted to put everything under the microscope. And I totally got shamed once because someone caught me putting a scab under the microscope. I really wanted to see what that scab looked like. And, you know,

then after that, I started doing it more in secret with the things I looked at under the microscope. And it wasn't until I got to college that I took a class and I realized that I really was interested in understanding animal populations and how understanding their populations has all of this relevance for human well-being and, you know, our sort of way of life. And so I began to be interested in field ecology. And so I started taking classes that took me into the field all over the place. I started learning how to do things like trap mammals. And that was really, I think, maybe the moment when I realized that this is really cool. You know, I could go out there and set out a little trap, bait it with oats and peanut butter, and then come back the next morning.

And there would be like a little surprise present inside. And, you know, you didn't know what it was until you opened it up. Hey, fancy meeting you here. And so I got a lot of experience working with small mammal population genetics. And because I knew how to trap small mammals, I somehow learned about a field assistant position in upstate New York on a Lyme disease project. And so that's how I got into studying Lyme disease. So I really got into it for the cute, fuzzy mammals. And then I stayed for the tick-borne diseases. That's a common marketing ploy, you know, for the disease. So Andrea got her bachelor's and PhD in integrative biology at UC Berkeley. And her doctoral dissertation was on the ecology

of Lyme disease. But I just, I had a lingering question. I have a question. Did you ever eat any of the oats and peanut butter balls? Because it sounds really good. You know, I, I never did. Even though it smelled good, you know, we mix it in these big vats, you know, and it's just not appetizing. Although, yeah, although, you know, my students do make jokes about how, you know, as starving grad students, they can dip into it if they really needed to. It sounds good. It sounds like cookie dough, but I guess in a five gallon Home Depot bucket mixed with like a stick, it's a little different. Yeah, exactly. It's more, it's, you know, it's really about setting the mood for eating. And yeah, it's not it. I'm really not very hungry. And so you're working in upstate New

York. And now how long ago was this? And how has the prevalence of Lyme disease or the way we study it changed since then? Well, so this is about 20 years ago that I got this first experience working with Lyme disease. And I'd say that a lot of what we do in terms of collecting the data in the field, a lot of that has sort of stayed the same. You know, we go out and we trap these mammals, we look at how many ticks they have on them, we can test their tissues for infection prevalence. I would say in the lab is where things have changed where we have much more sensitive techniques, much more specific techniques to detect pathogens. So for a long time, what we do is we would look for the bacteria under dark field microscopy, you could see them swimming around.

So dark field microscopy side note is when the background of the object you're looking at is dark. So the background is dark, it's good for spying on things that you can't stain or that are transparent and don't absorb a lot of light. So it's kind of like photographing your evening. Look, if you were a Lyme spirochete and no offense, but I would hate you. And so they're pretty distinctive. You know that you have a spirochete, but we didn't necessarily know what species of spirochete we had. And so now we're realizing that there's all of this diversity by using, you know, much more specific sequencing methods. And now, of course, we can look for not only the spirochete, but other microbes and other bacteria and viruses that are also coexisting

in this tick milieu. And so we can kind of look at that whole community within a tick as well. Okay, so let's direct our gaze and we'll zoom in on Lyme under the scope. And when you talk about Lyme disease and being a spirochete, can you kind of explain what that looks like? And if you're like looking at a drop of blood, is it hard to come by the spirochete or is it just lousy with spirochetes? Is it just a spirochete party in there? Yeah, no, that's a really good question. So it turns out there are a lot of different spirochetes and some of them hang out in the blood. These tend to be relapsing fever, briliae, and these are things like briliamimotoi or early acryaceae. These are different types of spirochetes. The one that causes Lyme disease

and related ones, they actually don't hang out in the blood for very long. What? Really? This totally surprised me. And to be honest, ticked me off a little bit. I said it. They pass through the blood really briefly. Actually, detecting them in blood is not the best way to pick up Lyme disease infection prevalence. So for that, we actually go for tissue. So we'll try to get some ear tissue or if you have a whole animal, you can go for some other organ. That's where the briliae or goreferi, the pathogen that causes Lyme disease, that's where it will migrate to eventually and sort of hang out. In the blood, it depends on what kind of briliae you're talking about. But if you do see one, what it looks like is just a little squiggle and they kind of vibrate.

I feel like I'm vibrating. You know, one nice thing about the semester being over is I actually get back into the field and back into the lab. And so earlier this week, I was culturing some bacteria and it was so nice to sort of see again under the microscope. I still love using, looking under microscopes. And so that was really fun. And when you see the spirochetes, they kind of vibrate on the, in the culture and the liquid culture that we grow them in. And they kind of look, I was putting a talk together recently and I made a little pun about a twist of Lyme, which I was very pleased with. And then I realized that it kind of does, they do almost look like a twist of Lyme when it kind of curls around. So that's sort of what

they look like. And they, and they move so they can, they use that sort of their whole body to sort of corkscrew through things. And that's how they can tunnel into tissues. Oh, that's such a brilliant and wonderful visual pun. You get like 20 dad joke points for that. That's amazing. Yes. And let's, before we dive more into Lyme, can you give me kind of just an overview of some tick-borne diseases that people might be a little bit worried about? I know in the tick episode, I've focused a lot on US, but I've heard from Australian friends that there's like a tick paralysis. Like, what are some of the baddies out there? Well, I mean, certainly Lyme disease is the most prevalent one that most people will know about. There are actually

several different species of Brillia that cause Lyme disease. They're in the United States and North America. We have Brillia burgdorferi in Europe. There are other species like Brillia aphzelii and Brillia gurinii. They all cause what's called collectively Lyme boreliosis. So there can be different species of Brillia that are transmitted by ticks and cause Lyme disease. Now, of the 52 identified species of Brillia, 21 are known to cause Lyme disease or Boreliosis. Now, if you look up a Lyme spirochete, they're kind of like curly little worm looking bacteria or bits of those little paper streamers that spring forth from a New Year's popper. You know, those things are pop, those, but they're alive

and they live in your body. Okay. So a twist of Lyme is brilliant. Oh, and that Australian paralysis tick, they tend to be on the eastern coastline of Australia. And it's not a pathogen that does the paralysis but a neurotoxin in their saliva. It can cause paralysis and respiratory failure, even death. So what is our motto? Check your crevices. Now, let's zoom out a little bit and back to some other diseases. And then in terms of other pathogens, I mean, I think one of the scariest ones to me is Powassan virus, which is a virus obviously. But what's really scary about it is it can get transmitted really quickly after a tick attaches. And so within minutes, maybe 15 minutes or so, it can be transmitted and it's fatal. And so that, that

sort of cushion of time that we have with detecting a tick for Lyme disease prevention, we don't actually have that for Powassan virus. That sucks. Luckily, it's not very common. What's the range of that? It's mostly in the northeast and a little bit in the Midwest, I believe, but it's pretty limited in distribution. Okay. So I looked into Powassan disease named for an unfortunate city in Ontario, Canada, the tourist board of which is probably not stoked, because this viral disease, not a good one. So some folks won't have any signs. But if you're infected, symptoms could include fever, headache, vomiting, weakness, confusion, a loss of coordination, trouble speaking, memory loss, and encephalitis, which is swelling of the brain. Just the last

month, two folks from Hampton, New Jersey have come down with Powassan virus from a tick bite. And one 80-year-old Armin Desamaro did not survive. So only 33 people were diagnosed with it in the US last year. So it's very rare, but it can be fatal. So check yourself before a tick wrecks yourself. And then other diseases that are emerging are babesiosis, which is caused by a parasite, actually. It's a protozoan parasite that's api-complexin. So it's related to malaria. So ticks can harbor all these different kinds of pathogens, really diverse and varied. And babesiosis can be caused by babesia microdi in the East Coast. And more recently, we've been doing some work on babesiosis in the West Coast. And it turns out that it's caused by a different parasite that's

called babesia duncanii. That has a really different life history, different tick associations, different seasonality. Okay, babesia is not the same as beryllia. Now, I know, I know they sound like names of twin Ukrainian princesses, but babesia is a round little protozoan parasite. It lives in red blood cells, and it gives you symptoms like malaria. Sometimes anti-malarial drugs are used in treatment. Now, our other enemy, beryllia, is that twist of lime spirochete. So babesia, round, lives in the blood cells, beryllia, spiral, and it goes honky tonkin. It could be anywhere in your body. It's hard to find. So guess what? They both suck, and they could both come from a tick. So thanks, you tiny, thirsty little assholes. And so one of the things in my work

that I'm really interested in exploring is how these ecological changes can lead to differences and how a pathogen is transmitted. And what does that mean for, you know, disease control and sort of public health awareness? Because these different ticks have different affinities for biting different people, and then they can, you know, affect different populations. So you need to know what kind, what the vector is. You need to know where it's found. So there are so many different tick species. One tick species might transmit one pathogen, and another one might transmit another one. But a lot of people don't really recognize that there are multiple tick species and that there are very specific host associations. And so, you know, sort of getting the word out

on that is, you know, one of my research goals. I'm sure there are people wondering like, who's it more risk? Do they really prefer particular people? Like if you have more sugar in your blood, or you're more caffeinated, or redheads, for example, fake redhead rote at greater risk? Yeah, I mean, there are definitely personal differences between people. So I personally do not, I don't seem to be very liked by ticks in terms of a blood meal. I've had very few ticks attached to me. And, you know, despite working in tick-borne diseases for over 20 years, I think I've maybe have had two ticks attached to me. Wow. Two? Only two. In that whole time. And last year, we actually tried to, I tried to get a tick to bite me for a video segment that

this other program was putting on. And it refused to bite me. It actually, I saw it as it rolled itself off of my arm. So, you know, I think maybe a common theme is that people that work on these things are not necessarily the most prone to getting lots of tick bites, maybe just out of selection or, you know, these sorts of occupational hazards. But so I know that I am not preferred by ticks. And I know that, you know, other people, if they come into the field with me for an hour, they will get a tick bite. So there are definitely those preferences. But I don't know if anyone is really, really understands what's driving that. What are the mechanisms behind that? Ticks also have preferences for different host species as well in the field. So we know that, like in

California, we have this amazing tick host that's a Western fence lizard. Those are the blue belly lizards that you often see. Bright blue bellies, really ubiquitous in California. Western Black Lake a tick that we have here really loves that host. Oh, okay. I hate how cute this next part is. Thinking of ticks being like, boopy-doo, what do I want? Someone actually did an experiment where they gave them a little bunch of tunnels to different hosts. And one of them had a lizard, one of them had a mouse, and one of them had a bird. And most of the ticks went for the lizard. So they are picking up on pheromones or chemicals or something. But it's really a little bit unclear what that is specifically. And now that species of lizard has something in its blood that kind of

interacts with the limespire keep. What is happening there? Yeah. So that is another reason why that host is so important is that in its blood, it has, part of the immune system, it has proteins that will actually kill the Lyme disease bacteria. And so if a tick is infected with Lyme disease, with the pathogen, and it bites a lizard, that lizard's blood, the immune system of the lizard, will kill the bacteria in the tick. And those ticks will all drop off uninfected. I'll have what she's having. Wow. Yeah. So it's an amazing interaction that we have here in California. 2023, me again. So I got a great email from her with some updates on the research from her lab. And they recently published a paper in molecular ecology. It was called host blood meal identity

modifies vector gene expression and competency. And it found that feeding on different species can affect a tick's ability to get and transmit a pathogen. And she said that this is work that two students in her lab worked on. Casey Ring, Lisa Cooper, looking at you. And they found that when larval ticks and them's, the teeny tiny ones, feed on lizards first instead of mice, when they molt into nymphs or teenager ticks, and they feed on an infected mouse, they're more than two times more likely to get the pathogen if they feed on the lizard first. And she said that this was really surprising given how Western pencilzards are famously known to cleanse ticks of their infections. And she's also working on a paper now on a study that found that when there are more

rodent species, there are more Lyme disease variants that may have different levels of pathogenicity in humans, meaning get you sick. So what do we do? Well, okay, some new research suggests that host targeted pesticide treatment and host targeted vaccines may reduce the density of those disease causing ticks. But remember from Nita's research, you can't just go after the rodents. So stay tuned for more research on that. What about, here's the idea, what about an army of marsupials? I understand also that possums are big tick eaters. Do they get bitten by ticks a lot or do they just do the biting of the ticks? Yeah, so I think they, what they do is the ticks will bite them and then they'll end up biting them off and eating them and many of them don't survive.

God, I need more possums and more Western fence. I don't want the possum to eat the lizard though, just leave them alone. And so when it comes to Lyme disease, can you explain what is happening with it? What does it do? How does it infect us? Yeah, so when a tick is out looking for a blood meal. So, you know, these ticks, the Eastern tick, the Western black and the Western black legged tick in California, they're sort of related species and they have really similar morphology and sort of general life history traits. But in California, we have, they have a three-year life cycle. So they go from a larval stage, which is the smallest, tiniest stage to the nymphal stage to the adult stage. PS, side note. So tick larvae have six legs and then they molt and the nymphs

have eight legs. They eat, they molt, the nymphs have eight. So eggs and then larvae with six legs and nymphs and up have eight legs, just in case you're like squint counting at one under a microscope. And each of those life stages takes a single blood meal. So they will find a host and attach to it, stay on for three to seven days, take a big blood meal and then drop off until they molten to the next stage. And so each of those blood meals is an opportunity for that tick to pick up the Lyme disease bacteria. Because fortunately, there's no vertical transmission of the bacteria. So an adult female that is infected does not transmit that pathogen to her offspring, to her copious, you know, thousands of larvae that she lays in these eggs. And so, so fortunately, the

smallest stage of these ticks, which are really, really tiny, I mean, if you think a poppy seed is small, these are about a tenth the size of that. What? And they're, and they're sometimes transparent. So they're incredibly hard to see. So side note, those larval ticks have six legs once again, and they're like tiny, tiny little ghosts. And sometimes they're called seed ticks. And I have heard ghoulish reports of walking through a tick bomb containing thousands of these newly hatched nightmares, but they tend not to have diseases because they've not fed yet. But their first meal is where they can pick things up just like licking doorknobs. So carry duct tape and pick them off you thusly. You can just kind of wax a bunch of baby seed ticks off of your body and clothes.

Isn't that disgusting? But it works. And then throw all your clothes in the dryer on high when you get home. Take a shower, maybe douse yourself in holy water. Take a priest to raging waters and be like, Father, bless this mess. Also do a crevice check. But don't worry too much about the larval ones, Andrea says. So fortunately, they are not infected when they hatch out of their eggs. And so they can only get infected when they take their first blood meal from an infected host. So first, they have to find a host. And then if it's uninfected, then they remain uninfected. And if it is infected, then that's when they can pick it up. And so it's that next stage, that nymphal stage where they can first transmit the pathogen. And so a lot of my work is really

looking at where are these larval ticks taking their blood meal? Is it and sort of what is available to them in their community? And what are their infection prevalences and how good are they at transmitting the pathogen? Because it's that nymphal stage that's still pretty small that if it bites you, that nymphal stage transmits most of the Lyme disease cases in the United States. So remember, eggs and then a six-legged larval seed tick that drinks animal blood like a horror villain and gets infected with a disease, molting to become a tiny, tiny poppy seed, disease-infected eight-legged nymph, then they latch onto your sacred butt crack where it can spread infection before molting into an adult, which can also spread infection.

And so when that tick attaches to you, it has to, you know, prepare itself. It takes a while, about 36 hours or so before anything really gets injected into you. And at that point is when you start to get the bacteria getting injected into you as it salivates into you. And then the bacteria, as I said, it only stays in that local area near the tick bite for a very short time. It quickly disseminates through the blood, through the tissues, into, you know, all over the body. And so that's why Lyme disease is so hard to diagnose is it's, we don't really know where to best look for it. And blood draws, which are the most common ways to detect a lot of other pathogens don't really work for, for Lyme disease.

Just feel free to let our collective frustrated groan or scream like a cling on, grieving a howl into the sky. I know I did. Now remember, over 300,000 new cases of Lyme a year in the US and a lot of people might be getting the wrong tests. Also, side note, I would like to take this opportunity to just say I had a weird low grade anxiety attack writing and researching this episode because Lyme disease is such a controversial topic. Some people might not know that. I know eight people who have had Lyme disease and each of them struggled not only with a bunch of physical issues like joint pains and fatigue and headache and autoimmune issues and brain fog, but also had to deal with this weird emotional maze of some people or some doctors

not believing that they were still struggling with Lyme symptoms after treatment. So this is known as the Lyme wars. Now in terms of chronic Lyme disease, the CDC does not recognize chronic Lyme disease as a thing. Now symptoms could linger for years and some doctors do acknowledge post treatment Lyme disorder. Now around 10% of patients who get Lyme disease and are treated for a few weeks with antibiotics won't fully recover. So these patients might ask for longer courses of antibiotics or have to follow certain anti-inflammatory dietary protocol. They might try supplements or other ways to try to fight the spirochete, which some research suggests can hide in a little cloak called a biofilm. So it's hard to kill. So chronic Lyme disease poo pooed by many

some doctors acknowledge post treatment Lyme disorder, but there's still a lot of flim flam out there. There's a lot of skepticism. There's also a lot of people who are just still suffering from symptoms of Lyme disease and people don't know why. I read a blog post from a doctor at Harvard who said it reminds him of the first stages of HIV and AIDS when there were a lot of rumors and not a lot of research and a lot of patients were getting blown off by doctors. So more research in hindsight will probably look back and think, wow, what a big murky mess. But the first step to any of this is getting a diagnosis, which Andrea said that blood draws don't really work that well for Lyme disease detection. What does work? I mean, I know it

seems like so many people are frustrated by maybe feeling like they have Lyme disease, but their tests show they're fine. So what is what is medical science doing to address that? So, you know, serology is one way that you can detect things without detecting the thing, right? You're detecting the signal, sort of the immune response to the pathogen that you're interested in. The problem with serology is not very specific. And so you often get cross reactivity. So you'll get things that will have the same signal. And so it's really hard to say for sure whether or not this serological signal matches the pathogen that you want to definitively diagnose. Oh, hey, serologist, holler at your dad. And so that's why it takes so many markers of

these serological approaches to be able to say this is definitely a Lyme disease case. And so this is what led to the CDC two tiered, you know, testing to make sure that you are not picking up false positives. Now there are approaches now that people are trying to develop to be more specific and more sensitive. You know, so one possibility is maybe looking at the host immune response. Now we can look at gene expression in different individuals and it's becoming cheaper and cheaper to do that. And so one way might be to look at what genes are upregulated in an individual who has had an acute infection with Lyme disease or maybe a longer term infection with Lyme disease. And so there are other methods and maybe other secreted proteins that might also be picked up by

some more sensitive tests. And so there are people that are working on better diagnosis, but it is a really difficult problem. It's something that it just really has to do with the way that the bacteria behaves in our bodies. It doesn't stay in one place for us to pick up really easily. Okay, so side note, I looked up what these gene expression tests are all about and a 2016 study published by SF University and Johns Hopkins University showed that in people infected with Borrelia, remember it causes Lyme, there's a unique gene expression pattern in their white blood cells. So certain genes turn on or off when infected with Lyme and that continues even after their antibiotic treatment. So more of that gene expression testing might be on the horizon or

you could just ask a witch to turn you into a rat today. Why can't they use the same type of tissue test that you would use on, say, a mouse in the field on just a human being? Could you use the same kind of thing? Like, I'll set your piece in my ear. Actually, I don't know. I mean, we probably, we know that when we take a little bit of the mouse ear that we are not necessarily catching every single case, right? It's kind of a sample. And so our objective isn't necessarily to diagnose every single mouse. We're trying to get kind of a population level average. And so the objectives are a little bit different. But I do think that probably tissue biopsies would be more effective than than blood draws, but it's really hard to

convince people to undergo a tissue biopsy. It just, I don't think it's practical. And so it hasn't really been discussed as a, as a potential way forward. But certainly, you know, if at the tick, the site of the tick bite, if you get it early enough, a tissue biopsy would, um, you would get the bacteria there. They should just offer free ear piercings with every test. That way, at least you walk away with a new piercing, tiny bit of tissue. I'm sure that'd work fine. Okay, side note. I just looked up how much gauging your ears cost, and it can be like 75 bucks a pop. But Lyme disease tests can be in the hundreds, depending on your insurance. Now, they usually start with an

enzyme-linked immunoabsorbent assay or an ELISA test. Those look for antibodies and then something called a Western blot test can confirm. But according to some research, those are only about 50% accurate. Now, some folks who have been diagnosed with Lyme say that the immunoblot Igenex tests are more effective at detecting it. But ask your own doctors if this is something you suspect that you have. Again, this is just a podcast. I'm not your doctor. I'm sorry. Now, in researching this, I stumbled across just such a dark GoFundMe blog post from the company, just suddenly suggesting the best ways to crowdfund for Lyme treatment, since most insurance companies don't cover much beyond that first round of antibiotics for an initial diagnosis. So good

to know that help is out there in the form of suggestions on how to crowdfund your medical treatment here in America. And so what exactly is Lyme doing in the body? Is it causing a lot of inflammation? Is it affecting neurological function, joints? Where is it hanging out? Yeah, I mean, pretty much all those things you just mentioned, I mean, it will go, it'll sort of embed itself into joints, into muscular tissue, neurological tissue, and cause inflammation. And a lot of what we think some of the maybe longer term symptoms might be or might just actually be the immune response, responding to that infection of trying to fight it. So sort of, you know, a regulated cytokine inflammation that leads to a lot of the swelling and pain that

people associate as well. So the body's immune system freaks out and chemical messengers named cytokines might kind of still be ringing the old fire alarm, which triggers inflammation, which can cause arthritis like symptoms. Now, some folks with post treatment Lyme seem to feel better on anti inflammatory diets, you know, like skipping ingredients like gluten or sugar. So if someone doesn't have technically celiac disease, which in itself is a serious and huge bummer, but someone's eating gluten free or sugar free anyway, just give people a break. People know their own body's best, let them eat or not eat what they don't want to eat or not eat. Anyway, autoimmune disease and inflammation to be discussed in a future rheumatology and or

immunology episode. Is that how maybe it could be linked to autoimmune disease? Because your body's immune system just freaks out. There are some similarities to how some people respond to a Lyme infection and some autoimmune diseases. It does seem like it may have some sort of long lasting immune consequences that, you know, maybe even after the pathogen has gone, it might still be that the immune system is sort of sort of oversensitized. Do you ever have to get involved with the debate between late stage Lyme and chronic Lyme? Do you kind of stay apart from that medical kind of controversy or do you have to weigh in at all? Well, I actually did a short postdoc where I studied that issue where we were really trying to look for some of these gene

expression markers in people with this late, late stage Lyme disease. We didn't really find a really clear signal there. So I have worked a little bit on it and it's really complicated. There I know there are good people that are trying to come up with better diagnostic tools and people that are trying to work on vaccines and all these different things. The bulk of my work is really on the ecology. And so, you know, one thing I always say is that if you have a tick, if you if you pull the tick off of you, we can test that tick and be fairly certain whether or not it's infected or not because it's much easier to do that than to try to query an entire human body, right, and not really knowing whether or not we're picking up the pathogen or not. But if you give us a tick,

we'll crush the whole darn thing up. Exactly. See, I'm crushing it. And we can look for the pathogen in the tick. So we can't really do that with humans. So, you know, we can do that with a tick. And so a lot of what my work is really, really focused on the tick is we can learn so much from it that our diagnostic tests and tools are much more effective when you have a tick. If people, say, pick a tick off, and they put it in a freezer bag, you know, like a little ziplock, are there labs that would be like, send me your ticks? Or is that pretty hard to come by? There are actually increasing the numbers of labs that will do that. You can send them your ticks. I know Area Lime Foundation does that. Tick Encounter might also do that.

I just heard about another organization that'll take your pet's ticks as well. And they don't necessarily test them all, and you may not necessarily get a test result as a result right away. But I know there are these, a lot of agencies that are trying to use this method to surveil tick-borne pathogens much more broadly and comprehensively by having people send in their ticks. Side note, okay, I looked this up. And the tickencounter.org site, remember that was the nonprofit that acrologist Dr. Nita Pardinani Connelly chose, they have great resources. That's tickencounter.org. And they pointed to tickreport.com, which has instructions on how to send in a tick for testing. And it costs 50 bucks per tick, but it includes Borrelia, which is the

spirochete, the lime-causing one, and Babesia, which is that round malaria-like protozoan. Also, in that same test, it includes Powassan and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, a whole host of things, and results can come back in 72 hours. So that's tickreport.com. So they have info on how to send in your non-alive ticks that you have plucked off of your or a loved one's body. Ticks, that is. They also send a micrograph of it in case you just want to look at it up close. Maybe print out a picture, have it framed, make a dartboard. Now, what about distribution of tick-borne diseases? As a disease ecologist, Andrea fundamentally studies where these bad feeling-causing things dwell. And now, one thing that I found so fascinating looking at your research is the

percentage of ticks that are infected with lime even on the west coast. It seems like a big myth is that lime is only in the northeast, and chances are there's no way you could get it in California. But do you do a lot of field work like in Tilden and in the areas around San Francisco? Yeah, I do. So most of my field sites are from Northern California. Actually, the hot bed of lime disease on the west coast is from about, I would say, around San Francisco up north into Mendocino County along the coast. They need certain conditions. So they need it to be moist. They need certain habitat. They need to have all of these different hosts required to complete their life cycle. And so there's really a kind of a narrow range where they can be found. But in California,

that range is sort of the entire coastal region of California north of, I'd say, Santa Cruz or so. After that, lower down south, it becomes much too dry for them, although you do still see them. And I do have some projects down south. So I don't want to say that it's not there. But the majority of tick abundance, the highest tick densities are along those northern areas and also infection prevalence can reach, you know, 20 to 25% in certain areas. So pretty high prevalence is 25%. Oh, there's so much groaning in this episode, but I feel like it's warranted. But I think one of the things that distinguishes how the west coast is different from the east coast isn't just the ecology. It's also the way that humans interact with their environment.

And so I think on the east coast, a lot of people live in the woods. You know, they have these houses that are surrounded by secondary forests that has been known to come back with lots of the hosts that are responsible for maintaining tick populations. In California, we have a lot more sort of primary growth forest that hasn't been cut down before. And we have a lot of logged areas too as well. But the way people come into contact with ticks, it tends to not be around the home as much. You know, most people live in more dense urban areas. And so to encounter a tick, it kind of means you're camping or you're biking or you're going on a hike or something. And so a lot of the work that I'm doing is looking at how habitat fragmentation size

influences things like tick abundance and also the community composition of the vertebrate hosts that are involved in tick ecology. And so some of the bigger sites are where we have more diverse rodent communities and where we also have top predators. So we actually have a lot of intact, relatively intact food webs in the West Coast where we have sites with pumas still wandering around. And so those help to control the deer populations. And this is something that they don't have on the East Coast. So I think a lot of these ecological differences also are shaping the differences that we see in Lyme disease ecology in California. I was going to put a really bitchy West Coast, West Coast clip here. But honestly,

all coasts and areas inland are lovely. We really don't need to heighten these Lyme wars with any regional rivalries. We may have ticks crawling around our crotches, giving us diseases. We don't need any more drama today. I love you all. Please check your bodily crevices. Yeah, you know, I've seen some people argue that doing more deer hunting would actually help control the deer population. And it's kind of better ecologically than maybe eating factory farmed meat. As a disease ecologist, do you see too high a deer population as a kind of a consistent problem? Or is that a myth? No, I mean, certainly on the East Coast, the deer populations are really unchecked, right? There isn't that much hunting. And there are no

top predators that are keeping those populations down. So deer are an important part of that equation, I think. Here in California, the deer populations are a little bit more stable. They have predation. I don't know if hunting is more or less common here, but I certainly think that especially in areas where you don't have natural predators of deer, hunting might actually help stabilize those populations. Right. And I know different wildlife ecologists advocate for that. I'm sure some others are disagree with it, but it does seem if we've killed off a lot of the wolves and the pumas in some areas, that everything could kind of get out of whack a little bit. Okay, quick side note. I just read an article that addressed Connecticut deer populations,

and although they are reaching lower healthier levels due to some yearly hunts, one guy, Stefan Ozondri, who's a chairman of a deer management implementation committee, says that winter flyover counts like a census of deer averaged 42 deer per square mile in some parts of Connecticut. And some ecologists want to see it closer to 20. So I also started getting lost looking at statistics and figures of roadkill incidents with deer before these town hunts were started and about an equal number of deer died from being hit by cars as do now from hunting, but now the roadkill deaths have plummeted. So about as many deer die with fewer accidents and more deer used for food. So I'm very much not a person who loves to think about animals

being slaughtered. But ecologically, I see the pro-Connecticut deer hunting point. I'm so sorry, dear. What about speaking of meat? What about this Lone Star tick meat allergy situation? What is happening? Yeah, no, that is a really interesting thing. So that isn't a pathogen. That is just the saliva of the tick. Wait, what? And so the tick doesn't have, like, another, it's not transmitting any kind of pathogen. It's just proteins in the tick saliva that are inducing this allergy, an allergy to alpha-gal, which is a protein that is found in mammals. So, you know, basically, it's called a red meat allergy, but it's really a mammal allergy. Wow. Did that start recently, or are we just hearing about it more? You know, it does seem

to be much more common, and I don't know why. I don't know if it's because the ticks are becoming more abundant or common, but they are a very aggressive tick, and they do seem, their populations do seem to be growing, but I don't know, I don't work on that species of tick, so I don't know if there's good data to support that or not, but certainly the reports of these red meat allergies are becoming more common. By the by, I was like, Lone Star Ticks. Yeah, they got a big white dot on the back, I got it, but I just looked it up, and only the adult females do. So, tickencounter.org has you covered on what every stage looks like, and it also says that Lone Star Ticks are very aggressive biters. I hate them also. Ticks, I just fucking do not like you. I tried to

wonder at you and respect you, but if I had a genie with a lamp, I would be like, number one, global warming fix. Cancer, figured out, number three, ticks fuck off and die. Anyway, this alpha gal acquired meat allergy with Lone Star Ticks can cause serious reactions from the meat of mammals, from their dairy products, even from gelatin, from their hooves, or exposure to wool fibers. So, it's a huge pain in the ass. About 5,000 people a year in the US get this alpha gal sensitivity, which is up from 3,500 two years ago. Rising temperatures could be a play. Also, in a sense, just increased awareness. Yeah, I wonder if it's just because we have more Twitter, so there's more like, my cousin got that, you know, or like there's just we hear about it more.

Are there any myths about tick-borne diseases that really, as my dad would say, fry your legs, which means make you mad? Yeah, I mean, I think, well, the biggest one for me is that a lot of people think that there is no Lyme disease in California. And, you know, as someone who has been studying it for a while, it's definitely here. You know, when my field assistants or students have an exposure to a tick bite and they go in to see a doctor, a lot of times they just won't consider Lyme disease. And, you know, and we have to tell them, look, we have stent, we have tested the ticks in this habitat. We know that the infection prevalence is 20%. So, you know, give me the prophylactic antibiotic. So we do have to push for that sometimes knowing that we

are in these risky habitats. But a lot of people really don't know about it. You know, it's definitely not as common or as prevalent as it is on the East Coast. There are about a little over 100 cases a year in California that are not travel associated. So, you know, figuring out which ones are sort of locally acquired. But it is definitely here. And it, you know, probably is in certain areas more common than we think. So like having to watch live shows that are actually pre-taped and aired three hours later, the West Coast gets East Coast feeds just on a little delay. This time, I guess it's to our benefit. Now, my friends who have been diagnosed with Lyme have mentioned co-infections. So I wanted to ask, what was the deal with that?

So I did. Do you find that there are a lot of co-infections in ticks? I've heard about that a bit, but where maybe someone might not just have Lyme, but they'll have a few different things happening at once? Yeah, I mean, that can certainly happen. I think it's more common on the East Coast where Borrelia burgdorferi, the Lyme disease pathogen, and Babesia microdii tend to be co-transmitted more often than you would expect by a random chance. So there's some risk of co-infection there. But in California, we don't see a lot of co-infection. You know, a lot of the pathogens that we look at are pretty rare on their own. And so the chances of seeing them in the same tick vector or in the same host is pretty rare. Okay, so co-infections. This is like the two

Ukrainian princesses Borrelia and Babesia just hanging out together in your blood. But it's more common on the East Coast. Also, I don't know anything about Ukrainian royalty. So I just had to Google, does the Ukraine have princesses? And I found some history on one named Olga, which does not sound like a tick-borne disease. And then I started looking up gendered Ukrainian baby names to see if any even sounded remotely like Borrelia or Babesia. And literally none of the popular Ukrainian baby names even started with a B. They were like Anastasia, Yelizvera, Oleksandra. And I was like, does Ukrainian even have a B? Yes, the Ukrainian alphabet does have a B. But shit, it's pronounced like a V. So I'm sorry, Ukrainians who have been

screaming at me while you're driving in your commute. Babesia and Borrelia would never be Ukrainian princesses. But at least you know now there are different diseases from ticks. And one is a Lyme spirochete, Borrelia, and the other is a round parasite that lives in red blood cells, Babesia, right? Let's just change the subject, okay? Can I ask you some Patreon questions from listeners? Okay, so listeners have a bunch of questions. Okay, so now is the time for your questions submitted through Patreon. And before we get to those, we have some words from sponsors of the show who make it possible to make a donation to a charity of the oligists choosing. And this episode we donated to, one being 826 Valencia in San Francisco who hosted

Andrea for the recording of this episode, and which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting under-resourced students ages 6 to 18 with creative and expository writing skills. It's a really awesome literacy program. I love them. They also have a storefront at 826 Valencia in the Mission District of San Francisco where you can purchase pirate supplies, highly recommended. I have several fake mustaches from that establishment. Now, another donation went to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Andrea chose them and said they are a wonderful science advocacy organization of nearly 250 scientists, analysts, policy and communication experts. They're dedicated to combating climate change, developing sustainable ways to feed and power and transport ourselves

to reduce the existential threat of nuclear war, to fight back when powerful corporations or special interests mislead the public on science and to ensure solutions to these issues, advance racial and economic equality. And they recently, like in 2023, launched a podcast hosted by our very first guest, Jess Phoenix. And her first guest for her podcast was me. And we'll link that on my website for you. It was very exciting. So two great donations, Union of Concerned Scientists and 826. Okay, now a few words about our sponsors making those donations possible. Okay, back to your questions. Ruby Osterike asks, how close are we to a human vaccine? The dog one is very effective and lifelong ramifications of Lyme disease are awful.

So can you tell me a little bit about how the vaccine works and how it works on pets versus humans? So this isn't my area of specialty. But what for what I understand about the vaccine is that, you know, there was a human vaccine that was available and was pretty efficacious. And it was taken off the market for a couple of reasons. One was that the sales were not that good. And the other one was that there was a class action lawsuit against the manufacturer. But I think subsequent to that they found that there really was no biological reason why it should have been taken off the market. And so basically what it is is that the, you know, it was FDA approved already. And so there are vaccines in development that are basically the same as the previous vaccine.

But I think as far as I don't know if of any company that has sort of taken that on because of the difficulties that they had previously. So the Centers for Disease Control website states grimly quote, a Lyme disease vaccine is no longer available. The vaccine manufacturer discontinued production in 2002 citing insufficient consumer demand and quote, I feel tonally this is like when someone wants to shit talk someone else so bad, but remains diplomatic, like the split is amicable. And we request privacy during this time. You can vaccinate your dog though. And according to one study published by the companion animal parasites council, nearly 6% of 5 million dogs tested in the US did test positive for Lyme infection.

But the Lyme vaccine doesn't protect against other tick borne infections. So one vet, Dr. Betsy Brevitz called the Lyme vaccine like wearing suspenders when you're already wearing a belt. It's a good backup, but the belt is really tick control. And that's what's most important. So do tick checks whenever your pup comes in from outside to potty, going out on a walk, or just going romping and ask your vet about good tick killing agents because that's number one. Same for kitties. Okay, but back to that human vaccine. Is there any hope for us? And so it's very likely that a vaccine will be developed in the near future. Because we had a good working vaccine before, there's no reason, no biological reason why we

don't have one now. I think a lot of it is more financial and political. Yeah. Oh, that's a bummer. I'm like, get that recipe down. Let's remake that. I would just have that in a second. Savshari says, I live in Germany where tick borne encephalitis has had an outbreak and there's apparently no cure. And their husband, a doctor says that the tick has to be on you for two days before you can get any diseases from it. Heard anything about it? I don't know as much about the transmission of tick borne encephalitis. But if it's anything like Lyme disease, it does take a couple days for pathogens to, well, at least the bacteria pathogens to be transmitted because the tick just takes a while to have the pathogen move

from the mid gut to the salivary glands and sort of settle in for that blood meal. But I'm not exactly sure how long it takes for tick borne encephalitis, which I know is a big problem in Europe. And it's transmitted by the same tick that transmits Lyme disease there. Oh, really? Okay. That's interesting. So tick borne encephalitis or TBE, by the way, can be what's called biphasic. So it first presents with either no symptoms or about a week of vague symptoms like fever and fatigue, maybe muscle aches, headache, kind of barfiness, like a flu. And then things calm down. You feel better for a week. You're like, look at me, I'll sprung back. And then the second phase hits. And that's neurological.

And it can involve meningitis, brain swelling, paralysis with a death rate of up to 2%. There is a vaccine though. So folks in riskier areas for TBE like Central and Eastern Europe, Northern Asia, at least you're as protected as our dogs are from Lyme in America. So that's a plus. Oh, back to Lyme and pets. There were more questions about this from Bryn Spear, Hannah Leese, Trisha, M.E.B., Margie Seymour, Sarah Patterson, Annie Burwell, and Isabelle B. Holper. A few different people kind of wanted to know if the symptoms and pets are similar to what humans get. I'm not exactly sure. I do, I do know that dogs can get arthritis and joint pain. And so, but I would imagine that a bullseye rash might be a little bit more difficult to detect in

a pet. But I would imagine that a lot of the symptoms, the acute symptoms would be pretty similar. Okay, now what about that rash? I have a hard time pronouncing. First time, question asker Don Evald asks, why does the rash look like a bullseye? Why do some infected people not develop the bullseye rash? Erithema migrants, yeah. I knew I was saying that wrong. Why exactly does that happen? And does that happen on like, if a raccoon gets Lyme disease under its fur, does it have a target logo bullseye rash? It has to do with the immune response. So, basically there's a local inflammation that happens and it sort of spreads out. I'm not quite sure why the white ring forms, but it has to do with that, that local, as like the immune

system is recruited to that local site is what causes that distinctive rash. Kristen Long wants to know, this feels like a stupid question, she says, but is it possible to get Lyme disease without a tick bite or are all cases related to tick exposure? Like I've heard that maybe mosquitoes can transmit it, but I didn't know if that was flimflam. I haven't heard of any other methods of transmission. It's possible that, you know, if you're working with it in the lab, if you have a culture of it, it's plausible that if you got a culture, a life culture on your unprotected skin that you could get infected that way because it does start out as a dermatological infection. And so that's why when we work with it in the lab, we work under biosafety level two conditions

just to make sure there's no, to minimize the risk of transmission in that particular setting. But I think a lot of the other methods of transmission are not really, really proven. At PS, I was curious what kind of precautions a biosafety level two lab had to take because I instantly envisioned just like a bunch of scientists in biohazard suits, just talking about their weekend in the break room, but really it just involves lab coats and gloves, face shields as needed, an eye watch station in the lab, self-closing lockable doors, and some biohazard warning signs, all of which are also just a great way to keep people out of your cubicle probably. But yes, getting back to it, other methods of transmissions like mosquitoes,

she says are not really proven. Also the question all of us want to ask, but feel like shitty people. Beatrice Rumford wants to know, is it okay to kill ticks because they are disease vectors, or do they play an important ecological role and I should just let them live their lives? I say that you should probably kill anything that you come across, it's totally fine. I mean the ecological role, I'm sure there are animals that eat them, they probably play a role. They might actually play an important role in sort of population regulation in terms of keeping certain populations that are really abundant. If they have high tick burdens, it might actually slow down. So there might play an ecological role, but I would say it's

a minimal one if you find a tick and kill it. Okay, what's the best way to kill it? Just smush it with a rock? Well, I mean the way we do it is we put them in ethanol. I think if you were at home, you could probably put it in scotch or something that you have lying around. Maybe not your best scotch, put it in like us. Not the age stuff. Some Gilby's gin from a plastic bottle. Let's see, Crystal Mendoza has some questions. She says, what is up with hemophysalis longicornis? And how scared should we be? Fully freaking out about it. Is that bad? And she says, sorry for the multiple questions,

but I work in a tick-borne virus lab. So she also does tick-borne work. So how scared should we be with hemophysalis longicornis? This is an invasive tick that was just picked up recently on the east coast. It's sort of spreading. I have to say, it's a little concerning. It's spreading pretty rapidly, control pretty much. I know a lot of people that are working on this species and it's really hard to control tick populations. It's really difficult to do that because they're not even like mosquitoes where you can go after the water body breeding sites or anything like that. They're just all over the environment. And this particular species can actually undergo

parthenogenesis, so it can clone itself. And so it doesn't even need a male tick to complete its life cycle. So I don't know if that means that it can reproduce faster or not, but it probably does because I think one of the limiting factors for other ticks is that they have to meet each other on a host like a deer. That's sort of the tick hookup spot. The males will hang out there and wait for the females. Will you co-op with me, please? The males aren't there for the blood meal because they don't take a blood meal. They just are there for the females and then they'll breed on the host. So for this invasive tick species, they don't need that. And so potentially their populations could sort of expand at a much higher rate.

Wow. So I'm a little concerned and I'm not someone that sort of goes to that emotion very quickly. And so it's a little bit scary that it's here now and it's spreading and we don't know how to control it. Yikes. And what's the scariest disease that might have? I know it carries a disease in Asia where it's from, but I don't think that parthenogen has been picked up here yet. But I can't remember the name. Okay. So this longhorn tick can spread according to my friend Wikipedia, Lyme spirochetes, spotted fever, aerolyctia chaffensis, Russian spring summer encephalitis, Powassan virus, Casin virus, tick-borne encephalitis virus, Japanese spotted fever. But the one I

think she was referencing was the not at all catchy sounding SFTS or severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome, which in northeast and central China has a fatality rate of up to 30%, 30%. Now, so far, none of the longhorn ticks found in the US have tested positive for these diseases, but the fact that they just showed up and are spreading is freaking people all the way out to put it scientifically. So welcome to my shit list, longhorn tick. You deserve to be here. Christina Meyers says, I live in a rural area and although folks have kept poultry for various reasons forever, more and more I hear about how great they are at controlling tick populations. So I'm wondering if any one domestic bird species is better than the rest like ducks,

chickens, guineas, or should we just work on domesticating possums instead, which is an idea that I love. I would think that chickens would be pretty good. I think a lot of the tick populations will not be particularly high in a backyard setting because they do need all of those different host species to complete their life cycle. So they shouldn't be very abundant in your backyard anyway, but couldn't hurt to have some chickens. I think they would probably do an okay job, but yeah, I haven't heard of that as a control measure, but maybe you could create a little perimeter of the chickens. Just a chicken patch. Dan Sterrett wants to know, is it true that ticks can survive in sub-zero temperatures and then when brought back to room temperature,

they can continue on with their life as if nothing happened, sort of like Walt Disney's wish, okay, Burby. Is that true? Can you freeze them and then they pop back? They can. I mean, for short periods of time, they couldn't do it for very long. They're much more humidity sensitive than they are temperature sensitive. So they can tolerate a wide range of temperatures as long as they have the right humidity. They probably couldn't live in a freezer for very long, but you could probably put them in there for maybe up to a day, half a day, I don't know, and they might still be alive afterwards, especially the adults. They can be a little hardy. Don't advocate these experiments at home, but... And one last Patreon question,

one Patreon Martinez wants to know, how does the tick affect the deer? And if you eat deer meat, can you get lime from it? So that's a really good question. We don't really know how an if deer are affected by the pathogen. The evidence of it is that the deer actually are not really good reservoirs. They don't maintain an infection. They may actually fight off the infection similar to how lizards do that, but there aren't a lot of studies that have really dived into this with deer just because they're kind of hard to work with. But the evidence is that they actually are probably not a really important source of infection for the tick population and probably are able to fight it off. Okay, so I look this up and again, according to the

CDC, you will not get Lyme disease from eating venison or squirrel meat. And now last two questions that I always ask are, what is one thing that's just the worst about what you do? Anything? So I have a couple of things that really suck. Probably the worst is poison oak. So doing field work, the poison oak in California is a big hazard. People can get really sensitive to it. I've had students go to the hospital because of their reaction to it. And that's where the ticks like to be right underneath that poison oak. And so sometimes if we're sampling, we have to go through it. You just have to dive in and pray for the best. The other thing that is really unpleasant is with trapping small mammals. Sometimes predators will find the traps

and then they leave us a nice juicy dismembered body or something like that. And so that's pretty unpleasant as well. And now usually when you're sampling a little rodent, are you able to sample it and let it out or do you have to take it into the lab with you and it's game over for the mouse? Oh, no. Most of the animals we sample in the field, we process them in the field and release them. Oh, nice. So we're really interested in sort of how it's maintained in natural populations. And so this way we can go back year after year. We know, oh, this is A2591. We caught him last year and he was infected. Is he infected this year? And so we can look at those long-term population trends with this sort of data. Nice. So they're like, oh, yes, it's peanut butter oats

season. They're like, I remember this is delicious. They're maybe not the mice that learn super fast. Yeah, no, they are not trap averse. There are some species that you really have to coax them in. This is why it's really hard to work on Western gray squirrels, which are also a potential reservoir or they are a reservoir of Lyme disease in California, but we could not get them into our traps. They just, you know, they stay away. But a lot of the other, the mice and the wood rat, they're happy to spend a night in our little peanut butter hotel. And so we have no problems coaxing them in. I would stay in that hotel easily if it was just filled with peanut butter oat balls and be like, check in, pierce my ear, I'm out. See you next year. And then what is your

favorite thing about what you do and about science or about working with tick-borne illnesses? Honestly, all of it. I mean, I just love like every aspect of it. And unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time to do it myself these days. And so, you know, when I do, do have more time, it's just, I'm thrilled, you know, I get to go into the field and I get to work with my students and catch animals and bring the ticks back. And I love looking at stuff under the microscope still. So whether it's the bacteria or the ticks themselves, we, you know, we collect thousands of ticks and every single one has to be identified. You know, I get a lot of help from my students who do a lot of that work. But I love to get under there as well, under the

microscope and see what we found. And, you know, they are really intricate and interesting when you look at them under 900X. Do you have a microscope at home too, just for funsies? I have a really crappy one. That's like a kid toy one. But I've been toying with the idea of bringing home a better one just because there's lots of fun stuff to see at home too. Yeah, I was thinking like there's so many people that have like a record player at home for vinyl, which is great. But I feel like if everyone had a microscope at home, it's kind of like just unlimited entertainment, you know, especially if your Netflix is down or something, you just put anything under there. Oh yeah, I totally agree. In fact, I'm going to bring a

microscope home. Thank you so much for talking to me over Skype. I turned off the air conditioning in my house because it was too loud and I'm sorry, I'm just melting like a candle and I'm not much to look at, but thank you for being so patient. Of course, this is so fun. Say hi to the ticks and by hi, I mean, tell them I hate them. Yeah, I'll put them in ethanol for you. Because it just might save your body the trouble of fighting off something nasty. And you the trouble of having to crowdfund medical treatment. So more info on Dr. Andrea Sway's work is at swaylab.com. S-W-E-I-L-A-B.com. You can keep up to date with her science bad assery on Twitter at swaylab or at Andrea Sway.

I'm going to put links to those in the show notes as well as sponsor links, the nonprofit links and more links and info is always up at alleyword.com slash oligies. It'll be alleyword.com slash oligies slash disease ecology. I am on Twitter and Instagram at alleyward with 1L. The show is on both at oligies. You can say hi. You can tag your merch photos with hashtag oligies merch or artwork at hashtag oligiesart. I love to see and repost them. Merch is available at oligiesmerch.com. Thank you to Aaron Talbert for admitting the oligies podcast Facebook group. Thanks to everyone who signed up on patreon.com slash oligies. Thank you to the very handsome Jared Sleeper of Mindjam Media. And of course, huge

thanks to editor Stephen Ray Morris who hosts the podcast about kitties and C-Jurassic Right, which is about dinos. He stitches this all together each week, always saves the day. Also, 2023 alley here, thinking Noel Dilworth, who schedules my whole life and Susan Hale, who runs this whole situation, plus Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, who judged this episode with all these updates. Thank you. We love you. The theme song was written and performed by Nick Thorburn of the band Islands. And fresh secret for you. So when Andrea Anita emailed me their updates, again, they're amazing. I truly love them both. I have a love for them that may not be as deeply mutual as I wish, but I don't even care. But Andrea said in her email quote,

a couple of years ago, when we were still pretty deep in the pandemic, 2021, I think, my family went on a backpacking trip to the CRS. It was great. We got outside, stayed away from most people, caught one trout. Then afterwards, she continues, we decided to stay at a lodge near Yosemite and relax a bit. Our first afternoon there, we are sitting in the outdoor hot tub. I look over and who was in the hot tub with us. But Dr. Nita Connolly, Nita's in the hot tub. She says, we had met once before, but only briefly. So it took us a while to be sure. And then we had a good laugh about us running into each other at a hot tub in Yosemite. I feel like we are bonded through your show and that experience.

Oh, I love it. I love it so much to a caropathologist in the forest, just chilling in a cauldron of knowledge. So follow them, of course, and of course, please. Remember, check those crevices, my wonderful friends and ticks. If you're listening, I respect your very effective life cycles, your thousands of children in one go. I think your knife mouths are amazing. Your thirst for horror is just so edgy. But still, I fucking hate you so much. So leave my bathing suit areas alone. Okay. Have fun out there. Check your crevices. Bye.