Illnesses caused by ticks, mosquitoes and fleas have more than tripled nationwide in recent years, surging to more than 640,000 cases of Lyme disease, West Nile infections, flea-borne plague and other serious infections from 2004 to 2016, federal officials said Tuesday.
Nine new pathogens that are carried by vectors — insects that transmit pathogens to humans and animals — have been identified since 2004 and others that are yet-to-be-discovered are likely to emerge in coming years, health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicted in a new report.
Overall, the CDC data revealed 96,075 infections from ticks, mosquitoes and fleas in 2016 nationwide, compared with 27,388 in 2004. The data were culled from the agency’s National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System.
“Cases of these diseases have more than tripled in the United States and there are several reasons why we are seeing these increases,” Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC’s director said during a news briefing Tuesday.
The agency attributes the rising number of bites to warming temperatures because biting insects thrive in heat. They’re also blaming the surge to “trade and travel” — insects and their pathogens are arriving in this country via freight and in the blood of travelers themselves, as was the case in 2016 when a majority of U.S. Zika cases were found to be the result of travel abroad.
“Many of these diseases are very sensitive to temperature,” said Dr. Lyle Petersen, director of the CDC’s Division of Vector-Borne Diseases, who refrained from using the term climate change, even though he described ever-increasing temperatures as the reason mosquitoes and ticks are causing more infections.
Outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases, especially West Nile, tend to occur during heat waves, Petersen said.
Ticks are no different, thriving in warmer temperatures, which also have allowed them to extend their territorial range, he said.
The Lone Star tick, which has been expanding its range throughout Long Island’s Suffolk County, is a native of Southern U.S. states, but shorter winters and longer warm seasons have allowed the tick to firmly establish itself in the region, infectious disease experts at Stony Brook University said at a symposium on tick-borne illnesses two weeks ago.
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