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https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Tick-borne-anaplasmosis-on-the-rise-in-Capital-12935143.php
State health officials urge New Yorkers to remember precautions as tick season begins
By Bethany Bump
Published 5:04 pm EDT, Tuesday, May 22, 2018
A view of the tick information board at the Albany Pinebush on Monday, May 21, 2018, in Albany, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski/Times Union)
Photo: PAUL BUCKOWSKI, Albany Times Union
ALBANY — If you haven't thought about ticks yet this spring, it's time.
We know, no one really wants to think about the black-legged, disease-carrying parasites. But it's May, tick season is here and it's not going away for at least another six months.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed this month tick-borne diseases are fast on the rise. From 2004 to 2016, the number of Americans who got sick from mosquito, tick and flea bites more than tripled. Nine new germs spread by mosquitoes and ticks have been discovered or introduced.
Deer ticks, in particular, are a major concern in New York and the Northeast, where they carry the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, anaplasmosis and other diseases and where the bulk of infections have been reported nationwide.
"In New York, as our cases have gone up, their geography has expanded," said Bryon Backenson, deputy director of the state Health Department Bureau of Communicable Disease Control who has worked in the field for 25 years.
"When I first started doing this a long time ago, Lyme was just in the Long Island and Hudson Valley area," he said. "Then it crept its way north up into the Capital District and now it's getting way up into the Adirondacks and further west. Now you can get Lyme almost anywhere in the state."
More than 7,500 cases of Lyme were reported in New York in 2016. Cases from 2017 are still being finalized, but it's safe to say that number increased, Backenson said.
In the Capital Region, he said, the number of cases of anaplasmosis, a disease carried by the same ticks that carry Lyme, increased last year, county health departments said. In 2016, 775 cases were reported statewide, with nearly a third in Albany, Rensselaer, Saratoga and Schenectady counties.
"We went over 1,000 cases for the first time ever in 2017," he said. "If you go back, say, 15 years ago, we were probably looking at less than 100 cases a year."
So ticks are out and the diseases they carry are on the rise. What can you do? Let's start with the basics.
If you hike, hunt, garden or spend time outdoors, public health officials and tick experts urge you to take these steps:
Wear long sleeves and pants, and light colors if you can. The long clothes will protect open skin (especially if you tuck your pants into your socks) and the light colors will allow you to more easily see a tick and remove it.
Wear repellent. The CDC and state Health Department recommend DEET; Backenson also recommends Picaridin or IR3535.
Upon your return inside, take off all your clothes and put them in the dryer for 10 minutes. The high heat will kill any ticks that might have clung to your clothes.
Take a hot shower or bath, and use the time to perform a full-body check for ticks. Nymph-stage ticks can be as small as a poppy seed. Have a relative, partner or friend look at your back or other easy-to-miss spots.
If you see a tick, pull it off. If it's already attached, track down a pair of fine-point tweezers, get them as close to the skin as possible, grab onto the tick and pull it straight up. Do not apply water, soap or anything else that might irritate the tick. If it's irritated, it will start to salivate and that is the primary way they transmit disease.
Once you've pulled it out, kill it or send it off to a lab to get it tested.
If a tick has attached, what happens next is where public health and medical professionals diverge, and that's because no good test exists for diagnosing Lyme, the most prevalent tick-borne disease.
If you go to the doctor and they follow CDC guidelines, they will take blood and administer a two-tier serology test to determine if you have Lyme.
But the first part of this test produces a false diagnosis 50 percent of the time, according to Holly Ahern, a microbiologist and Lyme expert who teaches at SUNY Adirondack. In addition, many doctors do not order tests for other possible tick-borne diseases.
Ahern, who is working to promote more research into diagnosing and testing, serves on a subcommittee of the federal Tick-borne Disease Working Group, created under the 21st Century Cures Act that was signed into law in 2016.
She recommends patients be their own advocates and watch out for flu-like symptoms, especially in the summer — fever, aches and pains, fatigue, as well as bullseye rashes and other rashes.
The symptoms are often confused for other things, but patients who believe it could be connected to a tick bite or recent time spent outdoors should stand up for themselves and ask their primary care doctor to consider a course of antibiotics to treat Lyme, Ahern said.
"I personally think that's a far better option than just waiting and watching," she said. "The longer you wait, if you have those microbes in you, they will disseminate to your heart and your joints, and at that point, the infection is much harder to treat than it was early on in the disease."
Doctors will often balk at this option if there hasn't been an official diagnosis, but patients who have lived with chronic Lyme symptoms due to a late or untreated diagnosis say the pros of antibiotic treatment if it does turn out to be Lyme far outweigh the cons if it doesn't.
"A lot of people don't understand that they have the right, as a patient, to participate in their own treatment decisions," Ahern said. "And physicians have the moral and ethical duty to at least listen."
To learn more about ticks, Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases, Ahern is giving a series of talks around the Capital Region this spring.They are:
May 31: Town of Queensbury Activity Center at 724 Bay Rd. in Queensbury at 7 p.m.
June 6: Burnt Hills United Methodist Church at 816 Saratoga Rd. in Burnt Hills at 7 p.m.
June 12: Arkell Foundation Community Center at 55 Montgomery St. in Canajoharie at 6:30 p.m.
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