The number of emergency room visits from tick bites spiked over the past summer, according to numbers reported from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As cooler weather moves in, health officials say the threat still lingers. Ozarks at Large’s Daniel Caruth reports.
In July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention flagged a record number of hospital visits attributed to tick bites across the U.S. So far this year, 87 out of 100,000 emergency room visits were for tick bites, based on the CDC’s Tick Bite Data Tracker. And with those bites can often come dozens of diseases that can cause problems for human health.
Hugh Jackson is a physician and director of emergency services for Mercy Northwest Arkansas. He says illnesses like ehrlichiosis and Rocky Mountain spotted fever are some of the most common for the region.
“We even have our own little geographic disease process that might be interesting. I don’t know that we should be proud of it, but it’s a disease spread by a lone star tick. So there’s sort of a southern name — Southern tick-associated rash illness. There we go. STARI. How about that? Looks a little bit like Lyme disease but has no real ongoing symptoms.”
He says many of these tick-borne illnesses have a wide variety of symptoms and can take anywhere from a few hours to several days to show up.
“They can present kind of like a flu. They can present just with muscle aches. They can present with rashes. They can present with headaches. Sometimes they’ll have fevers. Sometimes they can have stomach upset, like nausea or cramping. Sometimes they can have a headache associated with it. Sometimes they can just have joint pains.”
Jackson says of the labs Mercy’s ER has run on patients, only about 6% since April have come back positive for a tick-borne illness. But he says about one-third of those patients didn’t even know they’d been exposed to a tick.
“A fair number of those people don’t even know they got a tick bite, and that’s a substantial number, particularly with kids. And that’s an important thing.”
Kurt Avery is the founder and owner of Sawyer Products, which produces insect repellent for several outdoor suppliers and has a long history of dealing with ticks. He says while people often associate ticks with summertime, you can encounter a tick any time of year.
“As soon as the snow melts and as soon as they have a couple of warm days, they’re out there. You can get bit as early as March, as late as November. But it doesn’t get the publicity until late in the season.”
He says as many people let their guard down and engage in more outdoor activities in early fall, the threat can often be more prevalent. He especially cautions hunters or anyone who might be handling animals at risk of carrying ticks.
“When they shoot the deer or any other game, they have a lot of ticks on them. What the tick is going to do is drop off because the meal ticket is gone. If you were to put down a blanket or canvas that is treated with permethrin, they’re all going to fall out onto the canvas and die that day.
“Otherwise, you bring them home and you’ve got ticks falling off wherever you deal with the deer when you get home, because they’re going to take hours to fall off. So you might as well bring home a dead tick and not a live one.”
Avery says one of the biggest mistakes people make when they get bitten by a tick is how they remove it.
“They have these little barbs on their mouthpiece that they use to hang on with because they’re not hanging on any other way but their mouthpiece. And so they have to spit everything they have in their belly to loosen those up to exit on their own.
“So you don’t want to do that. You can sneak up on them real easy. Just take a pair of tweezers, get underneath them, and very, very slowly, gently pull them back out. It’s very easily done. You can clean up the area with a little alcohol pad or something.
“You want to make sure you didn’t pop them out and leave the head in there, because then it could be a little bit of an issue. So you just go really slowly.”
Dr. Jackson says most tick bites in the region are not cause for concern. But he does say one illness that has seen a significant spike is alpha-gal syndrome.
“Some types of ticks have this antibody to a particular type of sugar — this alpha-gal we talk about. They can give us that antibody, and that’s what we get alpha-gal syndrome from. That manifests different ways, but basically it’s just a food allergy. It does seem to be increasingly common, once again, possibly because we’re looking for it more.”
Numbers from the Arkansas Department of Health show incidences of alpha-gal syndrome have more than doubled in the state since 2023.
Jackson says the best medicine when it comes to tick bites is prevention.
“That’s why we tell people, okay, prevent by wearing proper clothing, by putting some type of repellent on. But also, when you get done with whatever activity, do a tick check. Just check your skin in those areas that likely could be available for the ticks. That’s anywhere, really. But just a survey of skin — and look at your kids. Make sure they don’t have ticks on them.”
He also recommends anyone going outside this fall wear long clothing and make sure to treat it with tick spray or repellent.
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