ramonmercado
CyberPunk
- Joined
- Aug 19, 2003
- Messages
- 58,262
- Location
- Eblana
Everyone is tocking about this tick.
LAST SUMMER, IN a town just outside New York City, a tick bit a man.
This ought to sound unexceptional. Ticks are normal on the upper East Coast; after all, tick-transmitted Lyme diseasewas first identified next door, in Connecticut. But the tick that covertly slid its pointy barbed mouthparts into an unlucky 66-year-old Yonkers resident was something new. It was the first invasive tick to arrive in the United States in 50 years, and this was the first time it had bitten a human.
That bite didn’t make its victim sick. But that it occurred at all is causing scientists to realize how little they know about the insect involved, known as the Asian longhorned tick: what diseases it transmits, where it prefers to live, and how it manages to move across long distances. Behind those unanswered questions looms a larger problem: We haven’t paid as much attention to ticks as we have to other insects that carry diseases. We have a long way to go to catch up—just as changes in weather patterns have ticks on the move too.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-terrifying-unknowns-of-the-asian-longhorned-tick/
LAST SUMMER, IN a town just outside New York City, a tick bit a man.
This ought to sound unexceptional. Ticks are normal on the upper East Coast; after all, tick-transmitted Lyme diseasewas first identified next door, in Connecticut. But the tick that covertly slid its pointy barbed mouthparts into an unlucky 66-year-old Yonkers resident was something new. It was the first invasive tick to arrive in the United States in 50 years, and this was the first time it had bitten a human.
That bite didn’t make its victim sick. But that it occurred at all is causing scientists to realize how little they know about the insect involved, known as the Asian longhorned tick: what diseases it transmits, where it prefers to live, and how it manages to move across long distances. Behind those unanswered questions looms a larger problem: We haven’t paid as much attention to ticks as we have to other insects that carry diseases. We have a long way to go to catch up—just as changes in weather patterns have ticks on the move too.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-terrifying-unknowns-of-the-asian-longhorned-tick/