Tickle the blood “exploration” on the beaches of California.Is Lyme Disease at Increased Risk? | National

In the warmer months, millions of people spend their time relaxing on the beaches of California. The same is true for ticks that carry Lyme disease.

This is one discovery from four years of fieldwork that collected about 3,000 deer ticks in the San Francisco Bay Area and nearby wine-growing regions of California.

The abundance of blood-sucking spiders has surprised some mite biologists and experts, partly because they don’t know which animals are spider-scattering.

Dan Salkeld, an ecologist at Colorado State University (Fort Collins) who led the study, still has some mysteries about how these mites survive, feed, and breed in coastal areas. The tick-favorite mammal host, Save Ecologist, does not frequently enter and leave the grass on the beach.

Studies haven’t been published yet, but it could be important in assessing whether Lyme disease, a tick-borne infection, is on the rise across California’s Bay Area and state.

Linda Jumpa, chairman of the Bay Area Lime Foundation, said there was little doubt that the disease had become even stronger.

“It’s definitely increasing,” said Jumper, the organization that funded the research. “This is the basic ecology.”

Others, including Salkeld, say it’s difficult to determine long-term trends.

“It’s not easy to see patterns in human cases over the years. It’s likely to fluctuate from year to year, and climate change, changes in consciousness, monitoring of Lyme disease, etc. can complicate the situation. There is, “he said. “It is difficult to identify a particular trajectory in a human case.”

Still, California has a much lower incidence of disease-transmitting mites than in other parts of the country, especially on the East Coast, where up to half of all mites are carriers.

In contrast, studies conducted in the counties of Mendocino, Sonoma, Napa, Marin, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, and Monterey found mites found in forests, grasslands, and beach shrubs that cause Lyme disease. It has been shown to be 4% bacterial.

Further south, according to Jumper, there are hotspots such as Malibu, Manhattan Beach and Newport Beach.

Jumper “knows it’s there,” citing an ongoing study funded by her organization in Southern California.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 476,000 people get the disease each year. Most cases occur in the northeastern, Mid-Atlantic states, and the Upper Midwest.

Early symptoms of the disease, caused by a bacterium known as Borrelia burgdorferi, include fever, chills, fatigue, muscle aches, and swollen lymph nodes. If left untreated, it can cause arthritis, swelling of joints, facial nerve paralysis, heart irregularities, brain inflammation, and neuralgia.

The disease is usually treated with standard antibiotics. Because it is so common on the East Coast, doctors regularly prescribe antibiotics to patients who report tick bites. However, cognition is delayed in California, where the disease has not been fully studied or encountered.

Jumper’s group is about to make a difference in this regard, funding studies like Sarkeld to better understand the behavior and ecology of Western black-footed mites and develop the bacteria that cause Lyme disease. We are investigating the rate.

The organization sponsored a citizen science study published in 2019, collected by people across the country, and sent ticks to laboratories in Arizona for analysis. From 2016 to 2018, the team analyzed more than 21,000 ticks in 49 states and found ticks that could hide Lyme disease in 24 states. And the Midwest.

And a January study showed that as the population grows and the climate changes along the west coast, western black ticks are likely to expand their habitat.

Shimei Chow, a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco, is currently working with Sarkeld and others to investigate other diseases of ticks, including the virus.

For other microbes in mites, “we are trying to investigate the Northern California region more completely,” trying to uncover a lesser-known tick-borne disease.

As the footprints of these infectious mites grow, it is important to know how and where they occur, researchers and supporters say. “

Richard Ostfeld, an ecologist at the Cary Ecosystem Institute in Millbrook, New York, said humans often create an environment in which mites and their hosts thrive. On the east coast, where Ostfeld conducts most of his research, the ideal host for deer ticks is the mouse. And they love the suburbs.

Along the west coast, black-footed ticks favor lizards and squirrels, and as this new study shows, there are still unidentified hosts that frequently appear in beach shrubs. Ostfeld and Sarkeld state that lizards are unlikely to be their hosts because they have biological agents that neutralize the bacteria.

Ostfeld said he wasn’t surprised to find ticks by the sea, noting that he prefers moist and moist environments. Other researchers have said that mites, despite the current drought situation. Has heard anecdotal reports that is becoming more and more prevalent throughout the state, Sarkeld said: “I don’t know what that is.”

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