What to know as ticks spread to new regions and bring new threats

By — William Brangham William Brangham By — Solveig Rennan Solveig Rennan By — Karina Cuevas Karina Cuevas Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/what-to-know-as-ticks-spread-to-new-regions-and-bring-new-threats Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Audio It’s summertime, and ticks are out in full force. While in certain parts of the country, ticks have long been an issue, they’re now spreading to new regions and bringing new threats. William Brangham discussed the blood-sucking terrors with Holly Gaff, a mathematical ecologist who studies ticks at Old Dominion University. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. Amna Nawaz: It's summertime, and ticks are out in full force. While, in certain parts of the country, ticks have long been an issue. They're now spreading to new regions and bringing new threats. William Brangham has the latest. William Brangham: For many years, ticks have been viewed as a menace because they sicken us with Lyme disease. About half-a-million Americans get Lyme every year, and it can cause serious, sometimes lifelong health problems. But now ticks are infecting us with some different ailments, including one called Alpha-gal syndrome, which can give humans a dangerous allergy to red meat and to dairy products. For the latest on these tiny blood-sucking terrors, we turn to Holly Gaff. She's a mathematical ecologist who studies ticks at Old Dominion University. Holly, thank you so much for being here. The CDC says that, so far this year, E.R. visits for tick bites are way above normal, almost going back -- they haven't seen it this bad since, I think, a decade ago. Do you have a sense as to why we are seeing such a busy start to tick season? Holly Gaff, Old Dominion University: That's a great question. I think tick populations are extremely complex in understanding where they are. This has certainly been a big tick year starting off. I'm really curious to see how it's going to go through the rest of the season, whether we have just jammed them all in the first part of it. But they are up. They are up in a lot of places. I think there's a couple complicating factors of the combination of a very cold winter, which is kind of contradictory to what people would think. They think cold should kill a tick. But, honestly, the cold probably killed some of the things that they would have fed on, instead of you and me. So they're kind of -- I jokingly call them hangry ticks at this point that are up and they haven't found food until they find us. (LAUGHTER) William Brangham: Great. That's just -- way to give us some summer terrors, as an army of hangry ticks out there. Holly Gaff: Exactly. William Brangham: Are there more regions of the country, different regions of the country that are more vulnerable to this explosion of ticks? Holly Gaff: Yes, so I think