To make Long Island safe from ticks, cull more deer

There’s a linear way of thinking about the increasing spread of tick-borne illnesses on Long Island: To proliferate, ticks need food, and Long Island’s overabundant deer offer ticks a lot of blood meals.

Ilia Rochlin, a tick research scientist and assistant professor at Stony Brook University, said conservative estimates put Long Island’s white-tailed deer population at 30,000. One deer can host 100 or more female blacklegged ticks that produce 2,000 eggs each. A single lone star tick can produce 5,000 eggs.

Do the math: There are billions of ticks on Long Island.

“I’ve seen fresh roadkill and you see a massive number of ticks moving toward you,” Rochlin told the editorial board. “They’re looking for a new host. The ground just moves. You can see them marching toward you.”

Rochlin, who works with Stony Brook’s tick-borne disease clinic, said white-tailed deer are the main source of food for several species of ticks. The number of deer on Long Island has steadily increased due to several factors. One is that development leads to larger and denser areas of soft, green plants that deer like to eat, on lawns and in thin woods.

“Where you have deer, eventually you have ticks and those populations are going to explode,” Rochlin said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that “ticks must have a blood meal at every stage to survive.” If a deer isn’t available, a human might be.

DEER HARVESTS A CHALLENGE

Culling deer is easier said than done, even if reducing Long Island’s deer population has been a goal for decades. Various programs enacted by municipalities, especially in Suffolk County, have yielded mixed results. Despite people being tired of worrying about Lyme disease, deer feasting on their vegetable gardens, and deer-motor vehicle strikes raising car insurance rates, not everyone is comfortable with killing deer to manage the population, even if it can be done ethically and humanely.

Hunters harvested just 3,765 deer in Suffolk last year. Even with loosened hunting regulations, there aren’t enough deer harvested to make an impact on the tick population.

For those reasons, Rochlin said he favors a federal approach similar to how the government handles fisheries, which are managed to prevent overfishing through data and science analysis. Fisheries are constantly studied and fish limits adjusted to protect all species. Managing Long Island’s deer population with similar oversight could lead to expanded recreational hunting opportunities, fewer deer-vehicle collisions and reduced cases of tick-borne illnesses.

“We should see deer as a resource, like we treat commercial fisheries,” he said. “Harvest that population . . . so it would drive the deer density to sustainable levels.”

However it’s done, Long Island’s deer population must be reduced. That will require a backbone from elected officials and community leaders.

There also must be a national effort to develop a Lyme disease vaccine and eradicate the tick population.

Comparisons between the nation’s effort to eradicate malaria from the South after World War II and the current fight against tick-borne illnesses show how we are failing this current fight. According to the CDC, malaria was considered eliminated by 1951. We’ve been waging war with ticks for decades. Yet there are seemingly more ticks now than ever before, and just about every Long Islander has a story about smashing into a deer.

TICK RANGES EXPANDING

Malaria was defeated because the federal government led the way. With tick-borne illnesses, Rochlin said, the emphasis is on individuals being responsible for their own tick-bite prevention. This is a bigger problem than any one village or town can surmount. Tick ranges are expanding; their numbers are increasing; and Lyme disease cases have doubled since 2000.

The go-it-alone attitude has failed.

Our ability to get on the right side of tick-borne illnesses has been hampered by a lack of coordinated response — and more money — from the federal government. Just like the CDC was created to combat malaria, we need a national center dedicated to fighting tick-borne illnesses. Stony Brook’s center is a start. It needs more funding.

The current strategies haven’t eradicated any tick-borne illnesses or led to a vaccine. In fact, more diseases like alpha-gal syndrome spread by the lone star tick have been brought to the public’s attention with seemingly no end in sight.

New strategies are needed.

“There are not a lot of studies showing very efficient, very effective ways at managing ticks and decreasing tick populations,” said Dr. Andrew Handel, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Stony Brook.

That’s worrisome since we have known for decades that tick-borne illnesses are a public health danger. The problem begs for more research.

Rochlin put it bluntly: “The question is: Why has so little been done so far? . . . I can predict with 100% certainty that next year is going to be a bigger year for ticks on Long Island.”

Finding the right tick management strategy will take federal leadership and money. Long Islanders, spurred by our elected officials, should insist that tick-borne illnesses be a national public health priority.