How to Prevent and Treat Tick Bites and Lyme Disease
A definitive guide
This story is part of “Tickpocalypse,” a multi-part special report.
Lyme disease first made headlines in 1975, when word began to spread that a mysterious illness — marked by fevers, joint and muscle pain, and fatigue, among other symptoms — was affecting the residents of the leafy New England shore town of Old Lyme, Connecticut. Now the condition is having another moment, this one no more welcome than the first.
Between 1991 and 2014, the number of Americans infected with Lyme disease roughly doubled. From 2016 to 2017 alone, rates of the illness jumped nearly 20%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And as if that weren’t troubling enough, experts say we are on the brink of a Lyme disease epidemic brought on by an explosion in the tick population. (Lyme is transmitted by ticks infected with the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria.)
“The distribution of Lyme continues to expand,” says A. Marm Kilpatrick, an associate professor of ecology at the University of California, Santa Cruz who has studied the potential causes and spread of Lyme disease. “And there are many challenges in managing it.”
Lyme disease is most common in the mid-Atlantic region, the Upper Midwest, and the Northeast, but it has…
