Ticks are a growing problem, no matter where you live

Short Wave

NPR

Nature, Daily News, Science, Life Sciences, News, Astronomy

4.7 • 6.6K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2026

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

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Summary

In the grand scheme of things, Lyme disease is a fairly new scientific discovery. It was first traced back to ticks in the late 70s and early 80s. The tick-borne illness can cause a rash, fever, pain, neurological complications, and even facial paralysis. It’s spread by only two of the nearly 50 species of ticks in the United States. Historically, most Lyme cases were limited to a small region, including the Great Lakes area and northeastern US. But thanks to changing temperatures, animal migration and shifts in land use, scientists say tick territory is expanding. So what does that mean for Lyme disease risk? And do you have to be worried about it in your own backyard?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:05.4	Hey, Short Waver is Regina Barbara here, and today I am joined by producer Hannah Chin.
0:10.5	Hey, Hannah.
0:11.3	Hey, so today I want to start our episode with a mystery.
0:15.7	Ooh.
0:16.5	It starts the way a lot of old mysteries start, with a group of kids in a tiny town in the middle of the wood.
0:23.4	Oh, it's a horror movie.
0:24.5	In the late 1970s, a small cluster of children came down with arthritic symptoms and, you know, children aren't supposed to have arthritis.
0:34.1	So this sort of alerted public health officials to something kind of funny going on.
0:39.1	This is actually terrifying.
0:40.6	Like, where did these kids live?
0:42.2	All these kids lived in Connecticut, around a little place called Lyme.
0:46.9	And as public health officials investigated, they started to trace it back to the woods.
0:52.0	They were like, okay, there's some kind of illness.
0:54.7	We don't know what it is.
0:55.8	Maybe it's an insect or a virus or a bacteria or something.
0:59.4	But we know it's coming from the forest.
1:02.7	So it wasn't until the early 1980s that the organism was identified as Berliobergdorferi,
1:09.0	a spirochetal bacteria that was transmitted by ticks.
1:15.2	This is Andrea Sway. She's a disease and vector ecologist at San Francisco State University.
1:20.1	And she says this bacterium had probably been around for a while, maybe even millennia.
1:25.7	This was just the first time that we noticed it and had the
	...

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