Bright Thursday with Sam Driving Around

It’s a bright Thursday afternoon, and Sam Telford is driving around in the back of his white Chevy Silverado. A pair of bumper stickers stick to the tailgate: the first asks the old question “Do you have ticks?” and the other reads “I brake for Roadkill.” When I asked if the second was true, Telford raised his dark eyebrows over his glasses and assured me that his inhibitions were not lying. “I cut off their heads and took their brains,” he said.

Telford, for the record, is not the type of psychopath who likes to collect dead animals. He is a respected scientist at Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and a key figure in the long-term battle against Lyme disease, not to mention many other diseases caused by ticks, some more serious. That’s why he’s there to pick up roadkill: studying it helps him find and understand the Powassan virus, a deadly tick-borne virus that attacks the brain and kills like 15% of people hold it. Although it is rare in humans – 181 cases have been recorded in the United States in the past decade – like many tick-borne diseases, its number has increased in recent years, and Massachusetts hot spot, recording the second highest number of cases. no at 31. Expecting the continuation of the plague, Telford wanted to know how much Powassan could be hiding in the forest. One way to find it is to examine victims who may have been bitten by ticks. Another method is to trap ticks and look for the virus in small particles. He does both, and the bad news is that if he’s desperate enough, he says, he “can find it almost anywhere.”

Fortunately, traffic jams are not on today’s to-do list. Telford, who wears khakis, brown rubber boots and a blue jacket, however, agrees to take me for a walk in the woods near his office in North Grafton to see if we can catch any ticks. The weather wasn’t perfect — 40 degrees, windy, snow lingering on the ground — but as QQMEGA atau situs slot gacor, a professor of microbiology at UMass Amherst, told me, “Sam can see signs in the rain.” We will see.

In the century-long arms race, the enemy has always had the upper hand, but now its grip seems to be getting tighter — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nearly half Millions of Americans may contract Lyme each year, where the tick. The number and geographic area where they are found has increased dramatically over the past half century. Telford has spent more than 30 years studying and developing strategies to combat ticks and the viruses they carry, but one step forward often leads to many steps back.

For starters, he helped develop the first and only FDA-approved vaccine for Lyme, only to see it leaked and pulled from the market, one of the first casualties of the anti-vax movement and questionable safety concerns. glass. He also conducted a multi-year study of the benefits of deer population control, an idea dismissed as ethically and politically weighty. But in our new world, where public health is at the forefront of every conversation and spending time outside is paramount, Telford is in a prime position for his war cry to finally cut through the noise. . If he gets the chance, Telford – who loves bow ties and exudes a kind of gee-whiz charm – will talk to anyone he can in the hope of getting them to play music like it does. After all, it’s a threat that seems to be getting worse every year: when Telford started his project, deer ticks and dog ticks, two species common in Massachusetts, were only a handful. , especially in the Cape and the islands. . Now they can be found from the Berkshires to Medford’s backyard to Arnold’s Arboretum to Jamaica Plain.

It’s not just Lyme that we need to worry about. Ticks have been described as “dirty needles” and “a mess of germs”. The more Telford walked around the lake, the more nervous he became. Nantucket, Dukes and Barnstable counties are currently ranked first, second and third in the country for the number of babesiosis, a common disease in malaria. Anaplasmosis, which can be a severe flu-like illness, and Borrelia miyamotoi infection, which can cause long periods of recurrent fever, are also imminent threats. He said, “There are five different diseases that are transmitted only by deer ticks, and people who live in places where those five things can be in their backyard. You will be shocked to know what is happening in the forest about the flying creatures.

And with that, we go to the tree.