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Opinion|We’re Living in a Tick Nightmare. It’s Time to Go to War.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/11/opinion/ticks-disease-lyme-alpha-gal.html
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On a late-summer afternoon in 2024, an airline pilot and father of three named Brian Waitzel ate a hamburger at a barbecue in suburban New Jersey, and four hours later he fell violently ill. By nightfall he was dead. His family was left stunned and confused. What was the cause? Acting on a hunch, a physician friend contacted Dr. Thomas Platts-Mills, an allergist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and an expert on alpha-gal syndrome, a tick bite-induced allergy to red meat.
When Dr. Platts-Mills studied the sample of Mr. Waitzel’s blood from the autopsy, he saw something familiar: high levels of antibodies specific to alpha-gal, a sugar molecule found most commonly in the saliva of the lone star tick. Another test revealed markers of anaphylactic shock, suggesting Mr. Waitzel had suffered a severe allergic reaction to the hamburger. His wife recalled that after a jog in a park weeks before his death, he had come home with a dozen bites on his ankles.
Mr. Waitzel’s became the first death attributed to alpha-gal syndrome from consuming meat ever documented in a medical journal. His death signaled a shift: Our uneasy relationships with ticks had escalated. It was not enough to worry about Lyme disease; now we could contract a severe allergy that could cause death from foods that many of us have eaten safely all our lives.
The alarming surge in cases of severe tick-borne diseases underscores how quickly the risks of infection are changing. Several species of ticks — the lone star, the Gulf Coast tick and the infamous blacklegged tick (also known as the “deer tick”), which spreads Lyme disease — were once regarded as mere nuisances confined to relatively small regions of the United States. But warming temperatures and changes to landscapes have combined to help them expand their range and bring a host of pathogens with them. Some are manageable; others cause illnesses that are severe and untreatable.
The fastest-growing disease of them all is the best known: Lyme. Cases have more than doubled over the past three decades, and each year, nearly half a million people are treated for the disease. As the blacklegged tick rapidly spreads north, that number is sure to continue rising. While a promising Lyme vaccine is in development, it won’t stop the blacklegged tick from potentially giving us other diseases, such as the flulike anaplasmosis or the rare but sometimes fatal Powassan virus, which can cause inflammation of the brain. The rates of babesiosis, a red blood cell-destroying disease that can lead to organ failure if left untreated, are also on the rise. One researcher has called it “the malaria of developed New England.”
Tick-borne disease cases in the United States
Between 2019 and 2022, over 184,000 tickborne disease cases were reported to the C.D.C.; around 76 percent were Lyme disease.
One dot for each reported case from 2019 to 2022. Dot locations are randomized within each county.
Note: Cases reported by county of residence, not necessarily county of infection. Geographic data not available for alpha-gal syndrome. Tick illustrations roughly life size. Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Taylor Maggiacomo/The New York Times
English (US)