They're tiny, but they can pack a mean punch.

Every year in the United States, nearly 31 million people are bitten by a tick.

And tick-related illnesses like Lyme disease are on the rise.

A trend experts attribute to climate change, human expansion into forested areas,

and overpopulations of deer.

Ali Rogan is back this time.

She's talking with Dr. Andrew Handel about how to best avoid these tiny insects.

He's a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at Stony Brook Children's Hospital in New York.

Dr. Handel, thank you so much for joining us.

Different states have exposure to different types of ticks. What are some

of the most common ticks that bite and illnesses that they might bring with them? Yeah, absolutely.

So I live here in the Northeast where we see a lot of lone star ticks and deer ticks. And like you

mentioned, depending on the type of tick that's bit new, you're at risk of getting different tick-borne

infections or other medical problems. So by far the most common tick-borne infection you can get

in the United States is Lyme disease. But then those same ticks that transmit Lyme disease can also

give you other infections like Babesiosis or anaplasmosis. In the southeastern United States,

there's higher risk of something called Rocky Mountain spotted fever. And all these infections can give you very different signs and symptoms and kind of give

you different degrees of severity of your illness.

And what do we know about the rate of infections right now and the number of ticks that are

out there around the country? So at this moment, the ticks are very active. There's

lots of tick bites that are happening. I've seen lots of children in my own office and in the

emergency room. You know, this is typical for this time of year. It's always a little bit hard to say if

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