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.
The tick—the Asian longhorned tick, or Haemaphysalis longicornis—was first found terrorizing a sheep in New Jersey in 2017 and has established local populations in at least 10 states since it sneaked in. Its invasive sweep is due in large part to the fact that a single well-fed female can spawn up to 2,000 tick clones parthenogenetically—that is, without mating—in a matter of weeks. And unlike other ticks that tend to feast on a victim for no more than seven days, mobs of H. longicorni can latch on for up to 19 days.
According to the new report out of North Carolina, the latest victim there was a young bull in Surry County at the border with Virginia. At the time of its death, the doomed beast had more than 1,000 ticks on him. The official cause of death was acute anemia, which is typically associated with severe hemorrhaging. The bull's owner had lost four other cattle the same way since 2018.
The case echoes the first report of the tick, which stalked a lone sheep paddocked in an affluent neighborhood in New Jersey in August 2017. The animal was besieged by hundreds of ticks, which scrambled up the legs of health investigators when they walked in to survey the situation.
See also:
More information about the tick can be found at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and at Wikipedia.
Previously:
US Invaded by Savage Tick that Sucks Animals Dry, Spawns Without Mating
Invasive Exsanguinating Tick Spreading.
Related Stories
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
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
Hot on the heels of "Savage Tick-Clone Armies are Sucking Cows to Death" comes an assertion that the US Pentagon is responsible for introducing Lyme-disease-carrying ticks into North America. According to a story in the Global Canadian newspaper "a bill has been passed in the House of Representatives which requires the Department of Defence to investigate whether research on biological weapons using insects took place in a 25-year period and whether these insects were released into the public realm either accidentally or on purpose."
The claim originated in the book 'Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons' by Kris Newby. The book tells the tale of "Willy Burgdorfer, the man who discovered the microbe behind Lyme Disease, revealing his secret role in developing bug-borne biological weapons, and raising terrifying questions about the genesis of the epidemic of tick-borne diseases affecting millions of Americans today."
In presenting the amendment in the House, New Jersey Republican Rep. Christopher H. Smith asked "With Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases exploding in the United States — with an estimated 300,000 to 437,000 new cases diagnosed each year and 10-20 percent of all patients suffering from chronic Lyme disease — Americans have a right to know whether any of this is true. And have these experiments caused Lyme disease and other tick-borne disease to mutate and to spread?"
Also at CBS News.
Related: Lyme Disease Lowers Quality of Life Significantly
Long-Underfunded Lyme Disease Research Gets an Injection of Money—and Ideas
New Approaches to Detecting Lyme Disease in Development
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday July 12 2019, @03:54AM (2 children)
Moo?
Moooooo
Meeeew
M..
(Noise of cow falling over dead)
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by driverless on Friday July 12 2019, @06:40AM (1 child)
The fact is, since then, many blood-sucking ticks have been pouring across the border. And I said we need to build a wall, and it has to be built quickly. Mexico is not going to build it, we're going to build it. And it's going to be a serious wall. It's not going to be a toy wall like we have right now where ticks leap over it and they attack cows in our country and then they go back and, you know, we get the dead cows, they get the blood, okay, and that's not going to happen. All over the world, I do business. I make great deals. I've made hundreds of millions of dollars. All over the world I make money and I build great things. Who's going to build an anti-tick wall like me on the southern border? I want a strong border. I do want a wall. Walls do work against ticks. Walls work if they're properly constructed. I know how to build an anti-tick wall, believe me, I know how to build.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 12 2019, @03:03PM
No professional courtesy?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 12 2019, @06:26AM
A decent country girl with an axe can handle them.
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Tick [fandom.com]
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday July 12 2019, @08:06AM (3 children)
Maybe one of those orwellian facial recognition cameras that everyone is trying to sell can be repurposed to alert someone when the livestock becomes covered with ticks?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Farmer Tim on Friday July 12 2019, @11:04AM (2 children)
Came for the news, stayed for the soap opera.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday July 12 2019, @02:26PM (1 child)
Furthermore, it's face is buried in the side of the cow. All you'll be getting is moon shots. Better, to go for daily X-Rays, TSA style.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 13 2019, @02:12AM
I thought TSA style would be to fondle them?
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Friday July 12 2019, @08:41AM (3 children)
In the long run, parasites do not tend to kill their hosts as this is self-detrimental. Human civilization, however, has created conditions where aggressiveness is favored. When the tick arrived the most aggressive individuals would spread best in almost paradisaical conditions. Similar developments led to the aggressive Malaria species we have now.
To me, it seems a them or us situation. The tick has to be fought with the most aggressive means. The best would be a specific drug (unlikely to happen) next would be sanitizing of animals/land. Maybe land can be burned, but who knows whether the ticks survives that.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday July 12 2019, @09:38AM (1 child)
Probably domestication and factory farming has exacerbated if not created this problem. Thousands of cows penned in tiny feed lots, forced into extremely close proximity, with every square foot covered in manure and no place for a roll in the dirt, is ideal ground for all kinds of problems with diseases and parasites. Very similar to what trench warfare did for the flu in WWI.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Saturday July 13 2019, @04:31AM
There could be another issue to address when all 5 dead cows are from the same farmer...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Pav on Friday July 12 2019, @12:23PM
In Australia we control ticks with some novel methods eg. a vaccine against the tick stomach lining, varieties of cattle with more tick resistance etc... though we also certainly use standard control eg. dips, tickicides etc...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 12 2019, @08:46AM
Out on the Upper Missouri we used to have Mosquitos that could fuck a turkey standing flat-footed. A few thousand of them would descend upon a newborn calf, and if the cowhands were not quick enough, they would all get their probiscai into it, and commence to become airborne. Once they had sucked all the blood out of the poor critter, they would let go, and it would lyft back to earth, fluttering from right to left and back again, as it made its way back down. We didn't give much thought to ticks, other than to suggest to right randy cowgirls (or reasonable subsitutes) that a person inspection for the same was in order.
T. Roosevelt
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 12 2019, @12:22PM (1 child)
Well, since they are clones, they will be especially vulnerable to a tailored attack: a vaccine can be made which will make inoculated cow's blood hemolytic for the tick's guts lining. They are welcome to suck all the killing liquid they like.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 14 2019, @03:18PM
Sure, sounds easy enough. And all they need to do is make a vaccine to cure cancer too. Can't believe it has taken so long. Slackers.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Friday July 12 2019, @01:06PM