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Hi listeners, it's Lindsay Smith Rogers.

It's tick season.

Stephanie Desmond sits down with Nicole Baumgart, who runs the Johns Hopkins Lyme and

tick-borne diseases research and education institute to discuss why tick-borne illnesses are becoming more

common, how you can protect yourself, and the latest in the vaccine and treatment pipelines.

Let's listen. Nicole Baumgard, thanks so much for joining

us. Thanks, Stephanie. I'm very excited to be here. So you are a tick expert, and it is tick season. I'm

wondering if you could just sort of start with talking about how common ticks that carry viruses are and where we're seeing them.

Yes. Well, they're actually unfortunately common and are getting more common.

They are about 15 states in the United States that we consider ticks to be endemic.

And we all know that in the upper northeast, in particular, Connecticut, New York, Maryland,

these areas are very heavily infested with ticks. But also California, which isn't really considered

that heavily infested, we know that they are ticks. So they are present. They are there, and they're causing diseases by not only carrying viruses,

as you said, they're also carrying bacteria and they're carrying parasites and can cause a source

of different human diseases.

So we are warned when we go out into the woods that we should protect ourselves.

What should we do?

Yeah, it's unfortunately very boring and we may look a little like dogs when we do it,

...