The Cruelest Bite

I’ll start by saying that I’m not afraid of bugs.

As a child, I picked up worms and ladybugs. Even now, I’ll go to the effort of carrying a cricket or Daddy-Long-Legs lost inside my house outside to safety. I treasure the wild world—and it’s my opinion that a lot of what ails our world comes from ignoring our role as participants in nature.

Summer is a special time for me, as my native plant garden shoots up. Most mornings I indulge in an early coffee alone on my porch. Here, stretched out on the wooden loveseat, I watched the denizens of my garden and its surroundings start their rounds. Birds chatter, squirrels take chase, and tiny chipmunks and larger squirrels and rabbits strike Beatrix Potter poses throughout the property. A few times each summer, I see a deer come into the garden; always, a large buck with ten-point antlers. Bucky, as I call him, comes to lounge in a favorite spot near a hedge, rousing himself eventually to munch on some flowers or weedy brush before disappearing to his home, which is most likely the forested Stony Run creek a block downhill.

My pocket-sized Baltimore City neighborhood, Tuxedo Park, was crafted from a large hunting estate sold to developers in the latter half of the 19^th century. The houses are a range of sizes built from the 1880s through the 1950s. All homes and apartment buildings have gardens, and tall street trees shade everything so that it’s usually a few degrees cooler than downtown, during summer’s hardest months. Hardly any homeowners treat their lawns with chemicals or spray for mosquitoes, so it’s a happy habitat for a lot of living things.

I’ve been enjoying my outdoor mornings for many years, June through mid-September. Last year, though, in mid-July I didn’t feel quite myself. My balance was off, and I had unmistakable vertigo. I also had some unexplained bug bites on my arm that I couldn’t remember occurring. Small red marks and a faint pink surrounding rash.

My first thought was that I’d blundered into a spider web (we have so many!) and picked up a spider without knowing it. But the bites didn’t itch. As the dizziness continued, I remembered Bucky’s recent visit, as well as the eye-to-eye contact I’d been having with chipmunks and squirrels who scampered on and off the porch. Had a tick piggy-backed on one of them and then made its way to me? I made a call to the Johns Hopkins Lyme Clinic, and a few days later, I went in.

Those of us who are regulars at the Johns Hopkins Lyme Clinic are all people who’ve had a tick-borne disease with chronic repercussions. My connection was an episode of treatment-resistant Lyme disease they helped me with from 2017 to 2018. As much as Lyme has changed my health picture, I credit my recovery to the doctors and nurse practitioners and allied researchers in this place. I’ve also volunteered for three studies on Lyme patients, in the hopes that more people can be helped.

When I first came to the Lyme Clinic in 2017, it was after my own GP had diagnosed the infection with a lab test he ordered. He wanted to rule out what I hadn’t been thinking about, because I had almost forgotten the strange insect bites I’d received in late summer, 2016. I’d been tired for a week, recovered somewhat, and then a few months later, I had neck pain and brain fog that wouldn’t abate. The Lyme Center treatment plan involved doxycline for many months. Although the infection was quashed, I was left with chronic inflammation showing that my body had transitioned to another disease—rheumatoid arthritis. Quite a few Lyme patients develop auto-immune diseases. But with the right medicine, life can be normal. I consider myself a healthy survivor.

Back to the new bug bites!

This time the nurse practitioner I know so well at the Lyme Center looked at my faded rash and discussed my symptoms with the center’s head. Based on the symptoms, they suggested I take 2 weeks of doxycycline. I agreed, and within days the dizziness was all gone. I made a full recovery. I felt so grateful that whatever insect-borne infection I’d had, it wasn’t Alpha-Gal Syndrome—the meat-eating allergy carried by Lone Star Ticks that has been documented as killing several people.

A recent article by in Atlantic Magazine by Sarah Zhang points out that since 2000, eight new tick-borne diseases have been discovered, and Lyme Disease has more than doubled. With so many of us using Deet and permethrin-treated socks pulled up over our pant legs, how can this be? Why would someone like me, who is a dilettante gardener and not a deep woods hiker, catch a tick-borne infection at least twice within ten years?

The argument is that two unusual patterns are tragically coinciding.

The first factor s a rise in deer populations. With a national rise in forested areas (Maryland is a leader in setting aside land that can’t be developed), and a decline in natural deer predators such as wolves, deer families are living their best lives—but there are so many of them, they are desperate to get enough food and thus are going into gardens everywhere. And deers’ big bodies are key feeders for ticks, who suck their blood without harming them, and then move on to feed on other animals, including the human.

The second reason for explosive disease is the power of ticks to reproduce. A single deer can feed 1,500 female deer ticks, each of which can lay 2000 eggs per breeding season. This means one deer could be spreading 3 million ticks, every spring-summer. If my greater neighborhood currently has forty deer—a simple guess--the level of peril our environment is grave.

What to do? All over the US, different methods are being tried, ranging from giving male deer vasectomies to feeding them tick pesticide on corn to the simplest, extending hunting season.

But a lot of people flinch at the thought of killing the problem away. Deer are sentient beings, with feelings like comfort and pleasure, pain and fear. The thought of killing deer in hunts has always been hard for me, but I have to admit that I will freely slap dead any mosquito on my body, and I am grateful to be in a country where malaria is controlled by occasional governmental mosquito spraying (I’m not talking people doing it in private yards).

I’ve heard about areas, such as Monhegan Island in Maine, where Lyme infections dropped when hunting season was extended. The idea seems to have real public health value. My own city government sent out an email survey and held public meetings asking citizens’ feelings about deer’s proliferation, including feelings about deer being shot.Clearly, there are some powerful strategies available to reduce ticks in suburban neighborhoods, but we will have to be brave to face up to using them.

I’m still drinking coffee on the porch, but whilst wearing a bug-repellant shirt and socks. And you know what? The mosquitoes are staying away, too.