Old Dominion Professor Holly Gaff is a mathematician, but you’ll often find her in a field or a swamp, searching for ticks.
“I came into the world of ticks and tick-borne diseases through mathematical risk assessment and modeling of various tick-borne diseases and have slowly become an entomologist of sorts," she says with a smile.
Since 2009, she and her students have collected about 375,000 ticks from roadkill, from hunters and by using a technique called flagging.
“You attach a meter square of white denim – white just for the convenience factor of seeing ticks on it, and then you attach that to a dowel rod and drag it through the vegetation. Ticks will cling to that. You look at the flag every couple of steps, pick the ticks off and put them in a vial and bring them back to the lab," Gaff explains. "We try to hit every city and county in the eastern two-thirds of Virginia just to get that once-a-year snapshot of where the ticks are, what has changed, where they’re going and then test them for pathogens to get that big picture idea.”
And the big picture is not good. Female ticks can lay as many as 200-thousand eggs, and a mature tick might live three years, so the population keeps growing, and our mostly mild winters help, according to Mike Tidwell with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.
“It is hard to kill ticks. You know one cold winter isn’t going to recalibrate the tick population. You need the kind of series of cold winters that we used to get,” he says.
Tidwell got Lyme disease from a tick in his back yard, and Gaff says there are many other pathogens carried by the ticks found in Virginia.
“The most common species of tick is one called the Lone Star tick," she says. "We also do have black legged ticks which is one that can transmit the pathogen that causes Lyme disease. We have the American dog tick which was historically associated with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever but has not caused as much of that lately, and we also have Gulf Coast ticks which will bite humans, and we have a whole bunch that are much more animal focused.”.
The good news is that ticks don’t feed constantly.
“Most species it’s three blood meals in their entire life, spaced out by months to a year," says Gaff. "Once they get that full blood meal, they’ll usually fall off.”
And Dr. Jeffrey Wilson, an expert on allergy and Immunology at UVA, says it takes a while for ticks to transmit disease, so it’s important to remove them as soon as you’re aware of their presence. Then, be on the lookout for a distinctive rash.
“Classically you can see a bullseye rash with Lyme disease, but there are still many Lyme transmissions where you don’t get the bullseye rash," Wilson counsels.
And if you develop an upset stomach, feel itchy or have trouble breathing hours after ingesting meat, you may have contracted a condition first identified by a doctor at UVA – an allergy known as alpha-gal.
“If you get a really itchy, irritated site where that tick was -- especially If that lasts for days or weeks, that could be a good tipoff,” Wilson says.
Dairy products, gelatin and certain eye drops that contain gelatin can also trigger an allergic reaction that could be serious and should prompt a trip to the doctor or the E.R.
So Wilson and other experts encourage people to follow Holly Gaff’s lead. She and her team never want to bring their work home with them.
“We wear long pants. We wear boots up to our knees, because we’re also in a swamp half the time. Duct tape your pants to your boots, tick-check a thousand times, shower when you get home – always checking, always checking, always checking.”
Insecticides like DEET can be sprayed on the skin, and permethrin on shoes and clothing. If you have pets, they should be checked for ticks that will take blood from almost any animal.
“We used to say that amphibians were safe, " Gaff recalls, "but now we’ve found some soft ticks that feed on an amphibian, so pretty much every animal on the planet has some tick that will feed upon it.”.
Ironically, she has some kind words for ticks. They’re good bird food, you have to respect their ability to adapt and survive, and they’ve done less to harm the planet than people.
