The Asian Longhorn tick (Haemaphysalis longicornis), native to eastern China and Russia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, and a few Pacific islands is continuing its spread through the Eastern and mid United States.
In those countries, it harbors an array of bacterial and viral diseases that infect humans, including a potentially deadly hemorrhagic fever. It’s even more feared for the way it attacks livestock. This tick reproduces asexually, laying thousands of eggs at a time and producing waves of offspring that extract so much blood that grown cattle grow weak and calves die.
According to the CDC the tick has now been found in 11 states. It is cold tolerant and feeds on wildlife with long ranges such as deer, increasing the speed of its spread.
It’s a truism among tick researchers that their work is underfunded compared with other insect vectors. After all, the US public health system was founded on fighting mosquitoes
To this day, the CDC maintains national maps of the ranges of different mosquito species. States, counties, and cities operate more than 700 mosquito-abatement districts, and the American Mosquito Control Association estimates those agencies collectively spend $200 million a year on catching, analyzing, and killing the bugs. Ticks don’t get anywhere near that kind of coordinated attention or money.
Four years ago, the Entomological Society of America (ESA) recommended development of an Integrated Tick Management (ITM) program across the country.
Ben Beard, a medical entomologist who is deputy director of the CDC’s division of vector-borne diseases (“vector” is shorthand for “insects that transmit diseases when they bite”), says [the lack of funding] is beginning to change. “We have funded state health departments to begin efforts for tick surveillance,” he says.
This is a start, but the CDC's data, even in its current limited state, shows that the ticks are leaving us behind and we need to catch up.
Previous Coverage
US Invaded by Savage Tick that Sucks Animals Dry, Spawns Without Mating
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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
A vicious species of tick originating from Eastern Asia has invaded the US and is rapidly sweeping the Eastern Seaboard, state and federal officials warn.
The tick, the Asian longhorned tick (or Haemaphysalis longicornis), has the potential to transmit an assortment of nasty diseases to humans, including an emerging virus that kills up to 30 percent of victims. So far, the tick hasn't been found carrying any diseases in the US. It currently poses the largest threat to livestock, pets, and wild animals; the ticks can attack en masse and drain young animals of blood so quickly that they die—an execution method called exsanguination.
Key to the tick's explosive spread and bloody blitzes is that its invasive populations tend to reproduce asexually, that is, without mating. Females drop up to 2,000 eggs over the course of two or three weeks, quickly giving rise to a ravenous army of clones. In one US population studied so far, experts encountered a massive swarm of the ticks in a single paddock, totaling well into the thousands. They speculated that the population might have a ratio of about one male to 400 females.
Yesterday, August 7, Maryland became the eighth state to report the presence of the tick. It followed a similar announcement last Friday, August 3, from Pennsylvania. Other affected states include New York, Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia.
-- submitted from IRC
Savage Tick-Clone Armies are Sucking Cows to Death; Experts Fear for Humans:
Spreading invasive tick spawns without mating and can transmit deadly disease.
Ravenous swarms of cloned ticks have killed a fifth cow in North Carolina by exsanguination—that is, by draining it of blood—the state's Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services warned this week.
Experts fear that the bloodthirsty throngs, which were first noticed in the United States in 2017, will continue their rampage, siphoning life out of animals and eventually transmitting diseases, potentially deadly ones, to humans.
Just last month, infectious disease researchers in New York reported the first case of the tick species biting a human in the US. The finding was "unsurprising" given the tick's ferocious nature, according to Dr. Bobbi S. Pritt, director of the Clinical Parasitology Laboratory in Mayo Clinic. And it's "extremely worrisome for several reasons," she wrote in a commentary for the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @04:43AM
Ticks are technically vampires, we should extinct them lest they infect us with sanguinare vampyris.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Monday July 01 2019, @05:34AM (4 children)
One party has been cutting the funding to the CDC, repeatedly. It is now a very small fraction of what it once was. Don't expect much from the CDC until it staffing can be increased to skeletal levels or above. These ticks are spreading slowly. Soon the pathogens the can carry will also spread.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @06:45AM (1 child)
Yea, republicrats suck.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @02:31PM
So do the censorcrats.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Friday July 05 2019, @11:09AM (1 child)
As far as I can remember, during the Obama administration they had anthrax laying out in the open. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Friday July 05 2019, @11:38AM
The budget for CDC has been repeatedly cut by congress for many years [time.com], going back to before the worry about zika. The US lucked out in regards to zika. There wasn't much of the CDC left by then. There is even less of it left now. If, actually when, anything lands on the US, there's not really the capability to handle it. It won't matter if it's ebola or a repeat of the 1918 flue. There is no capability to manage or contain it. Apparently that is by design, following congress' ongoing choices.
There's some money still floating around, but it's getting spent on unproductive areas. Then again more money would help. Amazon [cnbc.com], Microsoft [seattletimes.com], and Apple [irishtimes.com] could start paying taxes for a change. Funding the CDC adequately would not even make a visble dent in that pile of cash.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Funny) by coolgopher on Monday July 01 2019, @08:20AM (2 children)
As far as quality articles goes, this one gets a tick.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @10:08AM (1 child)
WHY!!!! For the love of all that is holy, just, and right in the universe, WHY!!!!
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday July 06 2019, @02:50AM
A wee bit ticked off, are we?
(Score: 3, Touché) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday July 01 2019, @09:52AM
> tick research ... is underfunded compared with other insect vectors.
Probably because ticks aren't insects. They are arachnids.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Friday July 05 2019, @11:05AM
Now is the time to invest in DEET. I just did.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A