Lynne McCormack moved to Chilmark last year and enjoys working at the public library in the small town on Martha’s Vineyard. But this summer, McCormack, an avid hiker, said she’s afraid to explore the trails near her house.
“My partner has lived here since the 1970s, and this is the worst tick season he’s ever seen,” McCormack said.
McCormack finds ticks on her body every time she comes inside from the garden, despite wearing insect repellant clothing and spraying cedar oil on her lawn. Her partner, like many on Martha’s Vineyard, suffers from Alpha-gal syndrome, an allergy to red meat and dairy products triggered by the bite of a Lone Star tick.
New Englanders are used to dealing with a vast assortment of ticks, including Lone Star ticks, deer ticks that carry Lyme disease, and American dog ticks that can transmit Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. But this season is shaping up to be a particularly bad one, with a surge of tick-borne diseases and tick exposures across the country, especially in the Northeast.
In June, visits to emergency rooms for tick bites reached their highest levels in at least five years in New England and other nearby states, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Last month, 233 out of 100,000 ER visits in the Northeast were for tick bites, nearly double the national average of 118.
The trend is similar in Massachusetts. According to monthly records published by the state’s department of public health, more than 0.6 percent of visits to an emergency department in May were for tick exposure, up from around 0.4 percent from 2022 to 2024. Visits typically peak in July.
Massachusetts State Epidemiologist Dr. Catherine Brown said that although the data doesn’t capture visits to urgent care and primary care providers for tick exposure, it points to a real increase in interactions between ticks and humans in the state.
“This year is definitely an outlier for us,” Brown said.
Thomas Mather, director of the University of Rhode Island’s Center for Vector-Borne Diseases, said that higher levels of tick-borne diseases in New England are mostly caused by higher numbers of blacklegged, or deer tick, nymphs.
The nymphs are around the size of a poppy seed, and about 20 percent of them in the New England region carry Lyme, Mather said.
They thrive in humid weather.
“It’s not related to how warm it is in the winter … if it’s dry in the early spring when they first emerge, they start dying,” Mather said. “Whenever there were low-humidity episodes early in the season in late May and early June, we always had fewer ticks and fewer disease cases.”
All in all, New England is seeing more humidity in the spring and summer now compared to the previous two decades, said Ken Mahan, the Globe’s lead meteorologist. This is a direct result of climate change and a warming atmosphere: warmer temperatures hold more moisture.
“When dew points push above 65, that’s when a big change in available moisture can be felt,” said Mahan. “[There has been an] increasing trend in the number of 70-degree dew point days across Boston over the years.”
Deer tick populations are also positively correlated with the populations of small rodents and deer, the animals that serve as their most important food sources.
Mather said that the migration of Lone Star ticks, which were formerly common only in the South, over the past five years has been the biggest change in the trend of tick-borne diseases in New England. Mather runs an online project called TickSpotter where people across the country can send in photos of ticks they encounter so that his team of scientists can identify what kind of tick it is. Data from TickSpotter showed a more than 300 percent increase in people encountering these ticks in the past three years.
“Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts are right on the edge of the northward expansion of these ticks … Martha’s Vineyard and Narragansett Bay are completely infested with them,” Mather said.
Allison Cameron Parry, a professional bodybuilder and mother of two who lives on Martha’s Vineyard, said that almost everyone in her family has Alpha-gal. After giving up meat and dairy, she has had to work harder to supplement those nutrients, which are necessary for her athletic training.
Cameron Parry also said she was worried about her 3-year-old son playing outside.
“Long grass literally gives me anxiety … We use a natural spray in our yard, because I have a young child. Unfortunately, the smaller the child, the bigger the risk, because they don’t know to stay out of the bush,” Cameron Parry said.
At a virtual panel held by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health last week, experts from Harvard and Boston University spoke about preventing tick-borne diseases.
Richard Pollack, senior environmental public health officer at Harvard University, recommended that people treat their clothes with permethrin, an EPA-registered tick repellent derived from an ingredient found in chrysanthemums. Pollack also advised people to pull ticks off of their skin as soon as they notice them, because ticks attached for 24 to 36 hours can transmit the infection that causes Lyme disease.
“You don’t necessarily need to go to the emergency room to have somebody pull the tick off. You might be sitting for six hours, in some cases, before you’re actually seen,” Pollack said. “So just pull the tick off, save it, and then you can delve into what it was later.”
Dr. Daniel Solomon, infectious disease specialist at Mass General Brigham, recommends that people take the antibiotic doxycycline within 72 hours of removing a tick that was attached to their skin.
“By the book, the CDC would say that the tick needs to be attached for 36 hours or more [for a patient to take the antibiotic], but we don’t know when ticks attach,” Solomon said. “So if there’s a tick attached, it’s plausible that it could have been on there for a day or more, so take a single dose of doxycycline.”
Brown, the state epidemiologist, said the increase in tick exposure should not discourage people from enjoying the outdoors. She recommended people use tick repellents, wear light-colored, long-sleeved clothing so it’s easier to spot and remove ticks, and put their clothes in the dryer on high heat after returning home to kill ticks that are hard to see.
For pets, Pollack said that there were oral medications for dogs as well as topical ointments that can be applied at the back of the neck once a month to prevent tick bites.
Patrick and Lily Marvin of Topsfield have three golden retrievers and have noticed more ticks on their dogs this summer when they go for hikes in Beverly. Two summers ago in Nantucket, one of the dogs, Kevin, contracted Lyme disease despite wearing a medicated collar.
“He was lethargic, didn’t want to eat, and would cry whenever we gave him antibiotics,” Patrick said.
He has since recovered, and the Marvins have been proactive about giving their dogs chewable tablets to keep them safe from ticks.
The speakers at the panel also noted that there are vaccines in the works to fight tick-borne diseases.
A Lyme disease vaccine developed by Valneva and Pfizer is in late-stage clinical trials. The University of Massachusetts Medical School’s MassBiologics has also developed an antibody designed to be used as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for Lyme disease, but human trials haven’t begun yet. A Lyme disease vaccine called LYMERix had been approved by the FDA in 1998 but was discontinued in 2002 because of a lack of consumer demand. There isn’t a prophylaxis being developed for Alpha-gal yet, though University of Michigan scientists tested a nanoparticle treatment that successfully reduced allergies in mice bitten by Lone Star ticks.
This is welcome news to McCormack.
“Ticks are scary because they’re so small and they carry such life-altering diseases,” she said.
Angela Mathew can be reached at angela.mathew@globe.com.