has taken up its duties with missionary zeal . It has adopted a two-pronged attack : public education and a reduction in deer , the adult tick ’ s preferred host .
“ I ’ ll be damned if we have a nice little report with no action ,” says then-town councilman and task force head Eugene Mihaly . “ The deer population is exploding because they have no natural predators . Last year , between hunters and car accidents , seventy-seven deer were killed , and the herd is still increasing . It can only get worse unless we take drastic action .”
Since the mid-1970s , when Dr . Allen Steere of the Yale University School of Medicine linked a cluster of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis cases in Lyme , Connecticut , to the Ixodes scapularis , the deer tick has proven a wily foe .
Based on insurance claims data , the CDC estimates there are about 476,000 annual cases of Lyme disease in the United States , with the vast majority clustered in the Northeast . In 2018 , Rhode Island had 1,111 cases with an incidence rate of 105 cases per 100,000 people , ranking the state third in the nation for reported cases per 100,000 people .
But Lyme is under-reported by a factor of ten , says Dr . Michael Fine , onetime director of the state Department of Health . Many physicians treat Lyme disease based on the classic symptoms — such as a bull ’ s eye rash — without the confirmation of a blood test .
“ We do not think it gets to the crisis level . It ’ s been here for a long time and it isn ’ t changing that much . But it ’ s clearly a concern ,” Fine says . “ For most people , it ’ s a treatable disease .”
Over forty years of research , scientists have established the arthropod ’ s two-year life cycle , sequenced its genome , identified its hosts and learned how it transmits bacteria from small rodents to humans .
But there are still lots of questions yet to be answered , says Maria Diuk-Wasser , professor of ecology , evolution and environmental biology at Columbia University . For example , different strains of the borrelia bacterium cause varying severity of infection : What role do the hosts play ? More importantly , how can public health officials use what is known to devise a successful intervention program ?
“ None of the strategies will be a silver bullet and they are all hard to implement ,”
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