CDC Reports Spike in Tick Bites in Arkansas as Climate Conditions Shift
A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that emergency room visits related to tick bites have spiked in Arkansas this summer. This comes as cases of tick-borne illnesses are on the rise nationwide, with Lyme disease the most prevalent among them.
Erin Mordecai, a biology professor at Stanford University, says several factors are contributing to the increase, with climate change at the top of the list.
“A mosquito or a tick, it's a cold-blooded organism. So its body processes—how quickly it digests its food and how long it lives and how long it takes to develop—all of those things depend on the temperature of the environment around it,” Mordecai says. “As it gets warmer, those developmental processes happen faster. So you get more mosquitoes, more ticks. They're more likely to survive the incubation period of the pathogen, and so transmission increases up to a point, where eventually the mosquitoes start dying if it gets too hot.”
And it's not just hotter summers that lead to an increase in tick populations, Mordecai says. It’s the combination of milder winters and periods of extreme heat that create a perfect environment for a tick boom.
“Any mosquito or tick has its own—what you could think of as like a climate envelope—the kinds of conditions that it can live in, that it can do well in," she said. "So, you know, it needs at least a minimum temperature and a minimum amount of humidity, but that differs across different mosquito species and different tick species and different pathogens that they can transmit. And so whether or not you see a really big impact of climate change is also going to depend on how close you are to those limits.”
The CDC’s Tick Bite Data Tracker recorded that 69 out of every 100,000 emergency room visits in July of this year were for tick bites, compared to 49 in 2020.
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