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Mississippi Department of Health passive survey of ticks
Reuters HealthAtlanta, GA
A passive survey of ticks associated with bites to humans in Mississippi shows that, while most species were indigenous, some were quite unusual.
Dr. Jerome Goddard from the Mississippi Department of Health, in Jackson, collected data from 1990 through 1999 on which species of ticks were biting individuals in his state, with the aim of devising better protection and control measures. He identified four species of disease-carrying ticks not commonly seen in Mississippi.
"There are a lot of unusual tick species in places we don't expect them," Dr. Goddard told Reuters Health at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Disease sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention and the American Society for Microbiology. " It raises the questions of not only how did they get here, but what sort of disease did they bring with them?"
Seventy-three people contributed a total of 119 ticks during the 10-year period.The most common species recovered were the lone star tick, Amblyomma americanum; the gulf coast tick, A. maculatum; the American dog tick, Dermacentor variabilis; and the black-legged deer tick, Ixodes scapularis.
Among the unusual varieties that were collected were "twelve larvae of Amblyomma tuberculatum, a species generally associated with the gopher tortoise," from a man in north Mississippi. The man reported that he had not traveled to the coastal regions where this tick is commonly found.
An elderly lady from Jackson, Mississippi, who rarely ventured beyond her back yard, was found to have two Dermacentor albipictus larvae.
A man in central Mississippi was bitten by a Dermacentor sp. nymph not native to North America, but common in South America. "It probably came to America as a larva on a migratory bird," said Dr. Goddard. "We can't be sure, but this is the sort of thing we are trying to better understand."
© 2006 The National Lyme Disease Memorial Park Project
