What you need to know about this summer’s tick population and how to stay safe | Local News

PITTSFIELD — Kerry Martel won’t take the family’s golden retriever, Gronk, to Kirvin Park anymore for one very small, but mighty reason: there’s too many ticks.

“I kept pulling them off and pulling them off,” Martel said. “I said we’re not doing this this year.”

“It’s just too much,” Martel said. She said even with Gronk’s expensive tick collar, the dog was finding his way home with ticks after leashed walks down Pine Grove Drive and Williams Street.

“I’m like: How is this happening?” Martel said.

Professor Stephen Rich, the executive director for the New England Regional Center of Vector-borne Diseases, may have the answer. Rich, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, is one of the leading experts in the study of ticks and tick-borne disease in the region.

The center, founded in 2022, began a project this year that looks at the efficacy of various tick treatments to yards across New England. To get a baseline for that study — which kicks off fully next year — researchers conducted a survey of the existing tick populations.

“I do think there were a higher number of dog ticks this year,” Rich said. “In many sites across the commonwealth there seemed to be an increase in the number of dog ticks and I’ve never really been able to say that confidently before.”

Dog ticks are one of three tick species that are found in Massachusetts and are common vectors for disease. Dog ticks, which are brown to reddish brown with a white mark on their shield, can carry Rocky Mountain spotted fever and certain types of tularemia, according to the Massachusetts Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences.

The other common tick species in Massachusetts is the deer tick or black-legged tick. This tick species, which has a red-orange body and black shield, uses white-tailed deer to reproduce and spread. The poppy- to sesame seed-sized tick can carry Lyme disease, babesiosis, anaplasmosis and Powassan virus.

The final tick species to be aware of in Massachusetts according to doctors and researchers is the Lone Star tick, a round body tick characterized by the white dot or “lone star” on the female tick’s back.

This species has come into the spotlight for the possible connection between its bite and development of alpha-gal syndrome — which can cause a food allergy to red meat — though Rich said it’s too early for there to be a definitive answer on the relationship.

While the dog tick population might be a bit higher than researchers expected, Rich said generally the number of ticks are the same every year.

“There [are] generally little fluctuations — sometimes it goes up a little bit or down a little bit — but the average is pretty consistent,” Rich said. “I don’t think there’s across the commonwealth an increase in the number of ticks.”

That’s good news for Martel, who is the school nurse at Egremont Elementary, who also works as a nurse at Camp Russell during the summer. She said that while she had to call two families during the school year about ticks on students, so far none of her campers have come back with an unexpected arachnid hitchhiker.

Ticks well established in Berkshires

Local doctors are on the lookout for tick-borne disease. Dr. Gregory Malanoski is an infectious disease specialist with Berkshire Internists of Berkshire Medical Center. He said it’s still too early in the typical tick season to know how the rate of disease this year stacks up against prior years, but he has started to see sick patients in the hospital.

“We’re starting to get busier as the summer progresses,” Malanoski said. The doctor said that at BMC the two tick-borne illnesses he typically sees hospitalizations for aren’t Lyme disease but anaplasmosis and babesiosis.

Anaplasmosis is a disease that can cause fever, headache, chills, muscle aches and, rarely, more serious illness. Babesiosis is a disease that looks similar to malaria, Malanoski said, but “of course around here we don’t have malaria.”

Rich said for most of the commonwealth these two diseases are rare, but a recent study found that in pockets of the Berkshires anaplasmosis and the bacteria that causes it show up with surprising frequency.

Between 2016 and 2019, there were 87 anaplasmosis cases, 52 babesiosis cases and 12 Lyme disease cases in Berkshire County that were reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“That is definitely a change from what we would have said a couple of decades ago,” Rich said. “These diseases and the ticks tended to be a phenomenon of coastal areas — Cape Cod, North Shore, coastal Rhode Island and Connecticut — now they’re clearly through the Berkshires and well established throughout the commonwealth.”

Rich and Malanoski said there’s several things people can do to reduce their risk of picking up a tick. Rich recommends wearing permethrin-treated clothing or treating your existing clothing with permethrin, an insecticide that kills or repels ticks and mosquitos.

Rich and Malanoski both recommend wearing long pants and long-sleeved shirts when outdoors and doing frequent tick checks of yourself and your pets. Malanoski said the key to a good tick check is being thorough, checking places like your hairline, armpits and backside — all favorite locations for ticks.

Experts say that while disease is a possibility after a tick bite, it’s not a guarantee.

“I think sometimes the notion is that it’s almost like a lightning strike, that there’s really nothing you can do,” Rich said. “I’d like to get to the point where people understand ticks are a risk factor and there are things that can be done very realistically to greatly reduce that risk.”