Be On The Lookout, A New Type Of Tick Has Been Spotted In Massachusetts
Of all the creepy crawlies that are out there, ticks can invoke a sense of panic and disgust. They are disease carriers after all. Between Lyme Disease, Babesiosis, and Anaplasmosis, infected humans can experience fever, chills, body aches, fatigue, and worse. The most common ticks in Massachusetts are deer ticks, dog ticks, and Lone Star ticks. However, a new tick was discovered quite recently. Back in August 2022, the Asian long-horned tick, unfortunately, made its way to the Bay State. Here’s what you need to know:
The Asian long-horned tick, or Haemaphysalis longicornis, first made its appearance in the United States in 2017. Since then, they have been found on people, pets, and livestock.
(Pictured here is an unfed female Haemaphysalis longicornis.)
(See link for article)
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SUMMARY:
The Asian Longhorned tick has been found in: Missouri, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia
While not as attracted to human skin as other ticks, they can still be found on humans.
Females can reproduce without mating by simply cloning
It’s been known to carry Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (RMSF)
In her book, “Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons,” Kris Newby reviews the circumstantial evidence suggesting the organism that causes Lyme disease may originally have been developed as a biological weapon
An estimated 476,000 Americans are diagnosed with and treated for Lyme disease each year, and prevalence is rising
Lyme disease is transmitted by ticks (and sometimes other biting insects) infected with the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi. There are about two dozen species of B. burgdorferi with hundreds of strains worldwide, many of which are resistant to antibiotics
Ticks can also carry other pathogens, and coinfections are another reason why Lyme disease is so difficult to treat
A major challenge with Lyme disease is that its symptoms imitate so many other disorders, including multiple sclerosis (MS), arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and even Alzheimer’s disease, making proper identification difficult and time consuming
In a February 28, 2023, Substack article,1 investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker interviewed award-winning author Kris Newby about the U.S. government’s history of manipulating pathogens to make them deadlier, and the secretive federal research that may be responsible for the epidemic of Lyme disease.
Newby, who educates health care providers on vector-borne diseases, is the author of “Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons.” She also produced the 2008 Lyme disease documentary “Under Our Skin,”2 which was nominated for an Academy Award the following year.3 A follow-up film, “Under Our Skin 2: Emergence” came out in 2014.
As is the case with many people who end up becoming experts at a particular disease, Newby and her husband contracted Lyme disease in 2002 during a vacation at Martha’s Vineyard. “We were desperately ill and undiagnosed for a year. I thought that was the end of my life as I knew it. It took us four or five years to fully recover,” she told Thacker.
Background on Lyme Disease
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 476,000 Americans are diagnosed with and treated for Lyme disease each year.4 While exact numbers are difficult to ascertain, what is known is that the prevalence is rising, and this is true across the world. Outbreaks are also steadily creeping into northern areas with less temperate climates.5
Lyme disease is transmitted by ticks (and sometimes other biting insects) infected with the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi. There are about two dozen species of B. burgdorferi with hundreds of strains worldwide,6 many of which are resistant to antibiotics. Research7 suggests one reason for this may be that B. burgdorferi form protective biofilms around themselves, which enhances antibiotic resistance.
Another feature that makes B. burgdorferi such a formidable foe is its ability to take on different forms in your body, depending on the conditions. This clever maneuvering helps it to hide and survive. Its corkscrew-shaped form also allows it to burrow into and hide in a variety of your body’s tissues, which is why it causes such wide-ranging multisystem involvement.
Ticks can also carry other pathogens, and coinfections are another reason why Lyme disease is so difficult to treat, as the symptomology can be all over the place. Coinfections in many cases also don’t respond to treatment for B. burgdorferi, so a multilayered approach is frequently required to get all of the infections under control.
Lyme Disease Is Often Debilitating
A “typical” case usually starts out with an expanding rash, fever, fatigue, chills and headache. As the disease progresses, additional symptoms such as muscle spasms, loss of motor coordination, arthritic pain, debilitating fatigue, heart problems, psychiatric symptoms, cognitive difficulties, and problems with vision and hearing can emerge.8
For more information on identifying a Lyme disease rash, see the American Lyme Disease Foundation’s (ALDF) website.9 Newby describes her personal experience:
“It’s sort of like having multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, chronic fatigue … joint pain, all at the same time. It’s primarily a neurological disease that creates hyper-inflammation in your body. And the symptoms commonly move around your body. You can be very debilitated, unable to perform the tasks of a normal adult …
There is a growing body of scientific evidence that shows that the Lyme disease bacterium is a trickster that is good at dodging your immune system.
It comes out of the tick in a very mobile spirochetal form and, when it senses an antibiotic or killer cells, it goes into a dormant cyst form, hiding out for months to years. And when your immune system is stressed, it can start causing disease again.”
A major challenge with Lyme disease is that its symptoms imitate so many other disorders, including multiple sclerosis (MS), arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and even Alzheimer’s disease, making proper identification difficult and time consuming.10
What’s worse, many Lyme sufferers outwardly look quite healthy, and their blood work often raises no cause for concern, which is why Lyme disease has also been called “the invisible illness.”
In the past, Lyme sufferers were frequently told that their problem was psychiatric; in essence, the symptoms were “all in their head.” Today, Lyme is becoming more widely recognized as an actual disease, but sufferers are still often met with skepticism and resistance from the medical community and insurers.
The Lyme Disease Mimicker
Complicating matters further, there’s yet another tick-borne disease on the loose. Researchers have identified a tick-borne illness that is very similar to Lyme, caused by Borrelia miyamotoi.
The CDC11 describes B. miyamotoi as a distant relative to B. burgdorferi, being more closely related to bacteria that cause tick-borne relapsing fever. This disease is characterized by recurring episodes of fever, headache, nausea and muscle or joint aches.
This bacterium was first identified in Japanese ticks in 1995. Since then, it’s been found in several rodent species (and the ticks that feed on them) in the U.S., as well as in ticks feeding on European red deer, domestic ruminants and white-tailed deer.
Is Lyme Disease a Biological Weapon Gone Rogue?
According to Newby, there’s good reason to suspect that Lyme disease might be a biological weapon. There’s no smoking gun; just circumstantial evidence. But when taken together, it forms a highly suspect picture.
She describes being at a party where a former CIA agent bragged about a Cold War operation that involved dropping infected ticks on Cuba. “At that point, I knew I wasn’t done with the story,” she told Thacker. Her book, “Bitten,” is the result of her investigation into the military’s use of infectious bioweapons.
“When we started the film, Lyme disease was already too controversial to go down the bioweapons rabbit hole, so we focused on the human toll and the corruption in the medical system that allowed this epidemic to get so out of control,” Newby told Thacker.
“This CIA guy was a little bit in his cups, but what he said rang true. I started doing some research, interviewed him several times, and found that it was a verifiable story.”
Newby also got tipped off by Willy Burgdorfer during the filming of “Under Our Skin.” Burgdorfer, a Swiss medical zoologist, is credited with discovering Lyme disease. He worked at Rocky Mountain Labs — a National Institutes of Health-run biosafety level 4 (BSL4) facility in Montana — his whole career, and had contracts with Fort Detrick, which oversees the U.S. chemical and biological weapons programs.
While he made some important admissions during that interview, at the very end, he broke into an “evil little smile” and said, “I didn’t tell you everything.” Was he hinting that Lyme disease was a bioweapon?
“He started hinting at the unnatural origin of the outbreak to several people,” Newby told Thacker. “When I interviewed him for the book, he said, ‘Yes, I was in the biological weapons program. I was tasked with trying to mass produce ticks and mosquitoes.’
That’s also when he told me that he was called to investigate the outbreak of what was called ‘Lyme disease,’ but which could’ve been caused by one or more organisms. In Army documents, they said they were conducting early gain-of-function experiments by mixing pathogens — bacteria and viruses — inside ticks to create more effective bioweapons.”
These ticks were infected with various diseases. KRIS NEWBY, MSME
The Official Story
As described by Newby, the official story is that Burgdorfer was sent to investigate a novel disease outbreak in Lyme, Connecticut, and Long Island. In 1980, he discovered the bacterium that now bears his name, Borrelia burgdorferi, and determined that this was what caused the disease.
He subsequently published an article stating the organism was easily killed off with penicillin. The notion that Lyme disease is easy to diagnose and treat has stuck ever since, even though the reality is often the opposite.
Newby agrees that, if caught early, many cases can indeed be cured with an inexpensive course of doxycycline. Two other antibiotics, ceftriaxone and vancomycin, have also been shown to clear the B. burgdorferi infection in cases where doxycycline fails.12 Unfortunately, Lyme disease patients often go undiagnosed for years, and by the time a diagnosis is made, the infection is well-established and very difficult to treat.
Holes in the Official Storyline
While researching for the book, Newby produced an animation of the original outbreak, which supposedly began at the mouth of the Connecticut River, near Long Island. This turned out to be rather revealing. She told Thacker:
“When I drew a 50-mile radius around that point, there were three new, highly virulent tick-borne diseases that showed up at that same time, in the late ’60s. This was 13 years before the Lyme bacterium was declared the cause of ‘Lyme disease’ in 1981.
I started looking through military records to see if the outbreak could be tied to any bioweapons accidents. And that’s when I discovered this massive bug-borne weapons program, as well as a program where germs were sprayed from airplanes over large areas, called Project 112.
Some of those germs were tick-borne diseases that they freeze-dried and aerosolized for spraying … Whatever happened in Lyme, Connecticut, we don’t have all the details. But I put together a solid circumstantial case, based on available evidence …
Burgdorfer … had worked with Q fever and ticks, experience that was needed at Rocky Mountain Labs for their bioweapons work. As soon as he got a security clearance, he started putting plague in fleas; deadly yellow fever in mosquitoes; and then mixing and matching viruses and bacteria in ticks to increase the virulence of these living weapons.
The Detrick weapons designers were looking for ticks that could be dropped on an enemy without arousing suspicion, filled with agents for which the target population wouldn’t have natural immunity … Ticks were the perfect stealth weapon, untraceable and long-acting …
I went as far as I could as a journalist to put together the circumstantial evidence that says Lyme disease is not the big problem — meaning the bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi.
It’s what Burgdorfer said that they’re covering up: 1) that a different bacteria, perhaps a rickettsia related to Rocky Mountain spotted fever, was developed as a bioweapon in the Cold War; 2) that it might be a combination of bugs inside the ticks that is making people sick.”
Mice and Rats Are the Most Problematic Hosts
Since the late 1970s, the spread of Lyme disease has primarily been blamed on deer. However, more recent evidence suggests rodents like mice and rats are a far more serious threat.13 Ticks are not born with the Lyme spirochetes. They pick up the bacteria when feeding on an infected host.14
Research indicates that white-footed mice infect 75% to 95% of larval ticks that feed on them, while deer only infect about 1%. According to a 1996 study,15 rats are even more infectious than mice, noting that “the capacity of rats to serve as reservoir hosts for the Lyme disease spirochete, therefore, increases risk of infection among visitors to … urban parks.”
Another study16 published the following year also found that Norway rats and black rats were exceptionally effective hosts, infecting nearly all ticks that fed on them.
The main predators of small rodents like mice and rats are foxes, birds of prey, skunks and snakes.17 Agricultural and urban sprawl have decimated the habitats of these natural predators of mice and rats, allowing disease-carrying rodent populations to rise unabated.
Better Diagnostics for Lyme Are Sorely Needed
A big problem facing Lyme patients and their treating doctors is the difficulty of reaching a proper diagnosis.18Conventional lab tests are unreliable, and one reason for this is because the spirochete can infect your white blood cells.19
Lab tests rely on the normal function of white blood cells to produce the antibodies they measure. If your white cells are infected, they don’t respond to infection appropriately. So, for blood tests to be truly useful, you need to be treated first.
Once your immune system begins to respond normally, only then will the antibodies show up. This is called the “Lyme Paradox.” You have to be treated before a proper diagnosis can be made.
That said, I recommend the specialized lab called IGeneX20 because they offer highly sensitive tests for more outer surface proteins (bands), and can often detect Lyme while standard blood tests cannot. IGeneX also tests for a few strains of coinfections such as Babesia and Ehrlichia.
Patients and Doctors Fight for Recognition of Chronic Lyme
As if the difficulties of getting a proper diagnosis and treatment were not enough, Lyme sufferers face additional hurdles when they don’t fully recuperate after the initial treatment. Whether “chronic” Lyme disease is possible or not has been the subject of controversy for many years.
The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), which publishes guidelines for a number of infectious diseases, including Lyme disease, has long opposed the idea chronic Lyme exists, and doesn’t include long-term treatment guidance for chronic Lyme in its clinical guidelines.21,22
This is important, as insurance companies frequently restrict coverage for long-term treatment based on IDSA’s guidelines. Physicians’ treatment decisions are also guided by its recommendations. Opposing IDSA is the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS), the members of which argue that many patients suffer long-term consequences and require far longer treatment than recommended by IDSA.23
Prevention Tips
Considering the difficulty of diagnosing and treating Lyme disease, taking preventive measures should be at the top of your list:
Avoid tick-infested areas, such as leaf piles around trees. Walk in the middle of trails and avoid brushing against long grasses and path edgings. Don’t sit on logs or wooden stumps and take extra precautions if you’re in an area where rats have been sighted.
Wear light-colored long pants and long sleeves, to make it easier to see the ticks.
Tuck your pants into socks, and wear closed shoes and a hat, especially if venturing out into wooded areas. Also tuck your shirt into your pants.
Ticks are very tiny. You want to find and remove them before they bite, so do a thorough tick check upon returning inside, and keep checking for several days following exposure. Also check your bedding for several days following exposure.
As for using chemical repellents, I do not recommend using them directly on your skin as this will introduce toxins directly into your body. If you use them, spray them on the outside of your clothes and avoid inhaling the spray fumes. The Environmental Protection Agency has a list24 indicating the hourly protection limits for various repellents.
If you find that a tick has latched onto you, it’s very important to remove it properly. For detailed instructions, please see lymedisease.org’s tick removal page.25 Once removed, make sure you save the tick so that it can be tested for presence of pathogenic organisms.
It’s Time to Ban Gain-of-Function Research
In closing, the Lyme disease epidemic and COVID-19 both appear to be the result of bioweapons development, and the real-world ramifications clearly demonstrate the risks involved. They can’t guarantee containment of the created pathogens, and sometimes, they don’t even try to contain them. In the case of Lyme disease, it’s possible that live testing is what led to the epidemic.
And while we don’t know whether SARS-CoV-2 was intentionally released or simply escaped, the end result is the same. The virus spread worldwide. If the world doesn’t wise up and realize just how suicidal these biological weapons programs are, humanity may eventually be wiped out by one of our own creations.
I highly recommend reading Thacker’s substack article. In it you will learn that Sam Telford, a Chronic Lyme denialist who is part of the Cabal, teaches biosecurity, specializes in the bioweapon Tularemia, and was the director of a bio-level 3 lab in Groton, Massachusetts that works on dangerous, tickborne diseases on the government’s select agent list. He’s funded by the NIH and the military-industrial complex so of course he was going to destroy anything that threatens the official narrative on Lyme/MSIDS.
Back from Lyme disease, disc golfing champ has some advice for you
Ricky Wysocki, currently the number-one professional disc golf player in the world, was bitten by a tick and diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2019. This landed him bedridden for months.
After journeying back to recovery, Wysocki has partnered with Insect Shield to spread awareness about the dangers of ticks and the importance of taking preventative measures to avoid tick bites.
Ticks can now be found in all 50 states and around the world and the number of Lyme disease cases in the United States continues to skyrocket. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, insurance records suggest that each year approximately 476,000 Americans are diagnosed and treated for Lyme disease. This places a large burden on the health care system and shows a dire need for more effective education and prevention tactics.
For disc golfers, the risk of tick attachments is very high during play. Disc golf courses often have increased tick populations due to their natural environments including tall grasses, bushes, and wooded zones where ticks thrive.
In these environments, ticks can easily attach to skin and clothing. Gear can also pose a risk. Disc golfers carry gear bags and place them on the ground as they move throughout a course.
This practice also increases the risk of tick attachments after the bag has touched the ground and then is picked back up and carried.
Power loss
Several months following the tick bite, Wysocki began to experience symptoms such as fatigue, power loss in his shots, and rashes. A blood test confirmed his Lyme disease diagnosis.
“To go from being a pro athlete to getting diagnosed with Lyme disease, exhausted, barely able to walk, and ultimately bedridden and wondering if I would ever play disc golf at my peak level again, was crazy,” shares Wysocki.
To stay protected on the course while playing disc golf, Wysocki leverages Insect Shield essentials and offers a series of tips:
For more information about how to stay protected from ticks and the dangerous diseases they may carry on the disc golf course, visit Ricky Wysocki – Insect Shield.
https://www.cdc.gov/ncezid/dvbd/media/dpk-nootkatone.html So it appears the update on Nootkatone is that it is now an EPA-registered product the CDC has licensed patents to its partnersEvolva and Allylix. The substance is available to be used to develop new insect repellents and insecticides. And this is exactlywhat is wrong with the CDC. I heard about Nootkatone years and years ago and it’s languished on the sidelines like so many things due to CDC patents/influence.
Everyone and their brother knows that avoiding ticks and not getting infected in the first place is the optimal solution, yet similarly to ivermectin and HCQ/zinc treatments for COVID, our own government stands in the way of progress and true answers. Due to severe conflicts of interests and corruption in pubic health, they continue to deny the public the exact things that would help.
Dr. Timothy Sellati, GLA’s Chief Scientific Officer Interviews Dr. Shelley Adamo, a Professor and Researcher at Dalhousie University in Canada. They discuss her latest discovery that balsam fir needles are effective in preventing ticks from surviving winter.
So many of our readers were interested in this story, that we decided to learn more about this exciting discovery!
Watch below:
A transcript of this video is below:
note: transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Dr. Timothy Sellati:
So what I’d like to do is ask you about how you determined that balsam fir needles could kill ticks, and in particular, why does it seem to only work or work better under very cold temperature conditions?
Dr. Shelley Adamo:
So what I had noticed, and this is sort of the way science works, is observation. And I know that’s why citizen science can be so powerful: You’ve got lots of people observing. So I was observing, and I just noticed that I didn’t see a lot of ticks coming out in the early spring, where there were a lot of balsam fir trees. And it was just a hunch, and so I thought, “Well, let me see.” So I brought in ticks, into the lab, and then we also had balsam fir needles, and we chopped them up, and we put them in an incubator. So it was a winter-like condition for the ticks, and they died. It took a long time to kill them, though, so it didn’t kill them right away. It took a few weeks for them to be sitting in balsam fir before they died. So then I thought, “Well, I wonder if I could make this more powerful.”
I was working with my colleague, Nicoletta Faraone, at Acadia University, who’s a chemist, and we distilled the essential oil out of the balsam fir needles. And when I used balsam fir oil, that was a lot more lethal. Now, the problem with essential oils, as probably people know, is that they evaporate, and so at warm temperatures, they disappear.So it still takes a while to kill ticks. So essential oils, particularly at the low percentages I wanted to use, because I was thinking ahead. And I know one of the questions you’re going to ask is, “Where is this going?” I wanted to make sure this wasn’t going to be lethal to other organisms, or as low lethality as I could get. So I was using very small percentages, and because of the small percentages, I needed cold temperatures, so that the essential oil would last long enough to have this slow effect on the ticks; they would slowly die. And it turns out to be amazingly effective, and that’s what we found.
So what we did was we just had the ticks in these little cotton balls, and they were each one tick per tube, and we put them in incubators to simulate winter temperatures, and we added small amounts of balsam fir essential oil, and that was in the paper. And we found that as long as the temperatures were cold, we could get 100% lethality, but if the temperatures were warm … I’m going to use Celsius, but feel free to change that to Fahrenheit for yourselves. If it’s above 12 degrees Celsius, it hardly worked at all, and it had its best effect if temperature stayed below four degrees Celsius. So we’re looking at 36, 38 degrees Fahrenheit below that.
Dr. Timothy Sellati:
So what are the next steps for the study?
Dr. Shelley Adamo:
Well, so the study is now complete, and I published those results. So what we’re working on now is something a little new for me, at least, is I would like to have a practical application to this. And ideally, what we’re working on right now is: Can we turn this into as low-toxicity product as we can, so that people could put it on their yards, for example? And over the winter, it would slowly get rid of all the ticks.
Now, there are a couple things we need to do. We realized very quickly that one, I wanted something non-toxic, so we’re only using food-grade ingredients, so literally, stuff you can eat. And also, we wanted to use very small percentages, so that we wouldn’t have toxicity on other organisms. And we needed to get into the leaf litter for this to be practically useful to people. Because maybe you don’t know: How do ticks get through the winter? They burrow into the leaf litter, and it’s like an insulating blanket. I don’t know if you had there, where you are, but we had some very cold weather recently. It went down to minus 20 Celsius, very cold. You would think all the ticks would be dead, because they’re not actually cold-loving arthropods.
But it turns out, probably not, because we had sensors. Laura Ferguson, who’s another colleague of mine, Acadia, we have sensors in the leaf litter, and it only went down to minus five Celsius, which ticks can handle. So that’s why ticks can get through the winter. So if we want to get those ticks, we have to make sure the balsam fir can go through the leaf litter and find them where they’re sleeping, basically.
And so that is our goal right now, and of course, we don’t want to use petroleum products, and we want to use literally, just food-grade materials. And I think we can do it, and we’ve got a handle on it, but we need to perfect it. So that’s one thing.
The other thing we’re doing is we need to ensure this has minimal toxicity and is ecologically safe, so we’re looking at off-target effects. Fortunately for us, most of the pollinators are not out at the wintertime, and very few of them are in the leaf litter where the ticks are. But we do need to do our due diligence, so that takes some time, and that’s what we’re working on now.
Dr. Timothy Sellati:
I mean, that’s the aspect of your work that I find most intriguing, is the idea that this provides an opportunity to apply an acaricide, something that can kill ticks, during the winter season. You talked about how the ticks can overwinter, because they’re hiding under the leaf litter. I know from my own research experience that if you don’t want the ticks to move around much, if you’re using them in the context of a mouse infection study, you keep them on ice.
But my own observation this winter, living here in Danbury, Connecticut, is that we’ve had some relatively warm days, and I’ve unfortunately had to pull ticks off of myself and off of my dogs that are playing around in the back yard, because the ticks become active again. And that’s something that’s very unusual. I think it is a reflection of the warming winters and the shorter time period that the ticks are subjected to very cold weather.
Dr. Shelley Adamo:
It’s also a function of the way ticks overwinter. Ticks are not insects, so I’ll say arthropods. Many arthropods that overwinter, they go into what’s called a winter diapause, and they are truly hibernating. So even if there’s little warm bumps in the winter, they tend not to wake up, because their bodies are physiologically changed. They’ve pumped themselves full of antifreeze proteins, and they’re just waiting.
Ticks do not do that; they just lightly slumber. You can see; that’s from their southern heritage. They didn’t evolve in Connecticut; they evolved further south. And they keep some of those traits, and you would think that that would make them susceptible to cold, and if they didn’t hide under the leaf litter or wood. But what it does mean is they are opportunistic. So as soon as temperatures go above … I’m trying to convert in my head. About four degrees Celsius. It’s got to be 40 degrees or so.
Dr. Timothy Sellati:
32 degrees Fahrenheit, yes.
Dr. Shelley Adamo:
Yeah, they wake up. It’s easy for them to wake up, because they haven’t switched their whole physiology. They’re in a light behavioral quiescent state, but it’s not a true diapause. So that’s why whenever winter temperatures get warm, and they’re desperate at that point, especially the adults. So the adult ticks that are overwintering are adult ticks that couldn’t find a host in the fall, and they’re looking hard. They would rather not get you. They’d rather get a deer, because they’re looking for mates, as well. They’re probably not going to find a mate on you.
Dr. Timothy Sellati:
Hopefully not.
Dr. Shelley Adamo:
Hopefully not. That suggests you have many ticks, which would not be good. So that is a good point to remind people, that with these warming winters, you will see ticks as soon as it’s warm enough for them to move, and it doesn’t require very much.
Dr. Timothy Sellati:
So the other question I have is related to the fact that this is an essential oil product, and again, from my own personal experience, I contacted my tick control company, and unfortunately, they informed me that they do not do spraying for ticks during the wintertime.
So do you think that this essential oil product, if it’s ultimately commercialized and made available to the public, is it something that a homeowner would be able to apply themselves?
Dr. Shelley Adamo:
I would say yes, but I think probably would be better to let a professional, because they have the high-powered nozzles, which will help these products get into the leaf litter. It’s just because of where they are, and they have the specialized equipment, and that combined with, I hope, the formulation we’re developing, which helps drag it down below the leaf litter, between the two, would probably give you good coverage. No, I think winter is overlooked. Let’s say an overlooked season for control. I think it’s got a lot of potential. These animals are not moving around very much, which means you have a good chance, once you’ve saturated an area, that they’ll stay there and let this low-toxicity product slowly kill them.
The other thing about it is that there aren’t very many other organisms around, so it can really reduce off-target effects, and the last point is it’s a vulnerable time for ticks. They actually don’t like winter very much. As I said, they’re in this behaviorally quiescent state, but they’re not comfortable in the winter, and it’s a stress for them. So if you start piling stressor upon stressor, you can really increase the lethality. And so unlike maybe some of our native insects, they’re more susceptible, and I think more fragile, at this point of time, point of the season. And I think it’s been overlooked as a method of control.
Dr. Timothy Sellati:
Okay, I’ve got one other question that unfortunately, is going to demonstrate my ignorance of chemistry. But the other intriguing idea for me is with an essential oil, it’s an oil; it’s maybe not as dissolvable in water. So do you think that once applied, the essential oil from balsam fir needles would remain longer in or under the leaf litter, even if you get a rain in the winter? That it wouldn’t necessarily wash it away as readily as in the summertime?
Dr. Shelley Adamo:
So what we found is that just plain old balsam fir needles themselves do not really control ticks in the real-world situation very well. The reason I was seeing it, it’s my self-observation, is because this was right under a balsam fir tree, and all the leaf litter was balsam fir. But typically, you have a mix, and they will move around. They will search. Ticks will move around for their favorite overwintering site, so they will not actually overwinter under balsam fir needles, if that’s all there is. They’ll move around until they can find their nice maple, oak, comfortable, cozy leaf litter.
So what we’re doing with our formulation is trying to solve exactly that problem. We’re going to encapsulate. Basically, we’re working on encapsulating the balsam fir into little basically food-grade capsules that will get into the leaf litter and slowly dissolve, and so they will stay there. That’s what we need to test, is making sure that with massive rain and snow melt, it won’t all get lost in the runoff, and that is something that we need to test.
I have some hope, just because of the type of capsules might stick to some of the leaf litter and so may not be washed away with the rain, because our winters are becoming, well, at least here in Nova Scotia, wet, because we’re going through these cycles.
Dr. Timothy Sellati:
Same here.
Dr. Shelley Adamo:
And these cycles, it’s not just rain, but snow melt. And so it’s something that we have to consider, and we are on it, but it’s one of the reasons it’s a difficult problem, and we are working on it.
Dr. Timothy Sellati:
Right, right. Well, no, what you’ve just related is absolutely brilliant. It’s the tick-control equivalent of a time-release capsule that we might take, as humans, to treat some condition.
Dr. Shelley Adamo:
Yeah, yes.
Dr. Timothy Sellati:
Well, that’s wonderful. I really appreciate your taking the time to tell us more about your fascinating research.
Dr. Shelley Adamo:
Happy to do it. Just wish us luck for our success. We’re trying to come up with something as non-toxic and cheap as possible, so that everyone will have, I hope, reduced experience with ticks and Lyme.
Dr. Timothy Sellati:
Yes, you will be able to count me as a customer.
Dr. Shelley Adamo:
Thank you very much.
Dr. Timothy Sellati:
All right, have a good day.
Dr. Shelley Adamo:
You, too.
***
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The above material is provided for information purposes only. The material (a) is not nor should be considered, or used as a substitute for, medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, nor (b) does it necessarily represent endorsement by or an official position of Global Lyme Alliance, Inc. or any of its directors, officers, advisors or volunteers. Advice on the testing, treatment or care of an individual patient should be obtained through consultation with a physician who has examined that patient or is familiar with that patient’s medical history.
The risk of contracting Lyme disease from a tick bite in California has been well-documented, though there is still a long way to go in educating health providers and the broader community in the exposure risk from a tick bite. TickReport’s surveillance of ticks from California (and Oregon and Washington) goes back as far as 2006 and has expanded in recent years.
What ticks are endemic (commonly and consistently found in wild populations) to California and other West Coast states?
That’s a big question, and there are a few dozen species from different genera or families. Many of those species are specialist feeders and—if everything goes “right” in their life cycle—they will only feed on certain wild mammals, birds, or lizards and will bite humans very rarely. That’s doesn’t mean that finding one of these “specialists” attached to ourselves or a family member is impossible: it’s just much less common (and a topic we’ll try to visit soon in another post).
Our surveillance shows that the majority (91.5%) of human or human-adjacent (dogs, cats, horses, etc) tick bites are caused by the following ticks:
Ixodes pacificus (“Western black-legged tick,” a close relative of the Deer tick in the Eastern U.S.)
What pathogens can these ticks transmit to humans?
Vector competence (the ability of a vector like a tick to transmit a given disease-causing pathogen) tends to run along genus lines, so species within the Ixodes genus tend to be able to transmit pathogens X and Y but not Z, while Dermacentor species tend to transmit Z but not X and Y.
The most common pathogen found in California ticks is Borrelia burgdorferi, which causes Lyme disease in humans and pets. But there’s more than Lyme in those hills! If you find a tick bite from an Ixodes tick in California, it’s also important to consider possible exposure to these pathogens:
Borrelia miyamotoi: a bacterium that can cause hard tick relapsing fever—sometimes called Borrelia miyamotoi disease.
Anaplasma phagocytophilum: a bacterium that can cause Human granulocyctic Anaplasmosis.
*For every two ticks we find infected with Borrelia burgdorferi (Lyme disease bacteria), we detect one (or more) of these other pathogens
It’s vital that both tick surveillance and diagnostic approaches keep these non-Lyme pathogens in mind. For every two ticks we find infected with Borrelia burgdorferi (Lyme disease bacteria), we detect one (or more) of these other pathogens, so be sure to resist Lyme Tunnel Vision when responding to a tick bite! Common diagnostic tests for Lyme disease have a specific focus on Lyme disease and will not detect infection by these other pathogens if present. Make sure you and your doctor are considering the whole story of a tick bite.
To learn more about the pathogens we find in West Coast ticks, browse our real-time testing data at TickReport.com/stats. If you find and remove a tick, arrange for fast and accurate identification and testing at TickReport.com.
The above material is provided for information purposes only. The material (a) is not nor should be considered, or used as a substitute for, medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, nor (b) does it necessarily represent endorsement by or an official position of Global Lyme Alliance, Inc. or any of its directors, officers, advisors or volunteers. Advice on the testing, treatment or care of an individual patient should be obtained through consultation with a physician who has examined that patient or is familiar with that patient’s medical history.
Paul Killinger oversees tick surveillance and pathogen testing at the TickReport testing lab in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has led the lab's public health education and outreach since 2018.
