The first recorded deer tick virus fatality in New York state this May

Excerpt from SAM BUNGEY - Study: High Tick Disease Rates
Current Edition: Tuesday, July 14, 2009

http://www.mvgazette.com/article.php?21942

The first recorded deer tick virus fatality in New York state this May involved the death of a 62-year-old man from meningoencephalitis, apparently after being bitten by a deer tick infected with a strain of Lyme.

Ironically, it was Mr. Telford who discovered this particular strain of the virus 10 years ago, and cleared it as a rare strain of little consequence after extensive study with a team of researchers.

“It’s yet another reason to address tick prevention, though it’s not cause for panic,” he said.

Mr. Telford has been working on tick biology for 25 years. Mr. Telford’s research funding from Tufts University is for the study of tularemia on the Island.

The Vineyard produces one-tenth of all tularemia cases in America each year.

Even more remarkable, most of the recent tularemia cases are respiratory infections, a finding unique to the Vineyard within United States.

In 2001 an outbreak of the disease infected 14 and killed one in a single summer on the Island.

Tularemia is most often found in dog ticks. Mr. Telford’s team found the disease in five to 10 per cent of ticks tested. However, the transmittal of tularemia from that source is low on the Vineyard.

How the disease is spread remains a mystery. It is thought some cases were spread through contact with animal corpses disturbed by mowers during landscaping work. More than a third of the cases have been transmitted through means other than a dog tick.


“We’re trying to identify [what causes it], but we have landscapers who have had it and they know they haven’t run over a rabbit,” he said.

There are some 90 to 100 cases of tularemia a year in the United States, said Mr. Telford.

“The Vineyard has been famous for having dog ticks in its beach grass since the 1920s, so why on earth are we seeing tularemia now? We’ve been working on this seven to eight years, and we’re still scratching our heads about Martha’s Vineyard’s prolonged outbreak. And it’s not a prolonged outbreak any longer; it’s endemic . . . . The respiratory illness is not seen anywhere else. It’s just so bizarre,” he said.

The Vineyard and Nantucket are in the top 10 or top five areas of the country for the concentration of ticks and tick-borne illnesses. Mr. Telford points to the Vineyard’s glacial ecology and maritime habitat as being conducive to ticks.