DAILY TRIFECTA: Nature's Bill Collectors
Getting kicked in arrears
THE SET-UP: “Nature’s little bill collectors.”
That’s how I characterized the Lone Star Tick back in 2019. The tick had long been confined to eastern Texas, but the changing climate gave it a passport to Wisconsin and Maine—states that had been too cold for the temperature-sensitive species. The ticks brought something with them, too … alpha-gal syndrome.
And here’s where it gets interesting.
Alpha-gal is an allergy … to meat. So, an appropriately-named tick from the land of cattle ranching and oil … is spreading an allergy to meat thanks to climate change, which is fueled by cattle ranching and oil. The symmetry of it is rivaled only by its irony. The irony may be a bit spooky, but the symmetry is ominous. That’s because Mother Nature has a knack for finding ways of restoring equilibrium and balance to ecosystems. When that balance is interrupted, Nature reacts.
That’s what happened when humans killed the apex predators—wolves—that kill and eat deer sickened by Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD). It's a brain-warping prion disease akin to Mad Cow Disease, and it’s spreading around the United States. Unlike wolves, humans cannot eat sickened deer without risking death. And now humans are trying—and failing—to “manage” the mess we made by removing Nature’s managers.
We could embrace Nature’s proven solution. But a lot of humans refuse to share the land, which they use to raise the livestock (meat) that contributes to the warming climate, which, in turn, opened the door to Lone Star Ticks spreading a violent allergy to meat.
Now imagine what we’ve unleashed with climate pollution and plastic pollution and pesticides and herbicides and forever chemicals and on and on and on. Cancers and extreme floods and epic wildfires are among Nature’s responses to our unchecked appetite for destruction.
Add a population that’s grown billions in just decades and we’re clearly out of balance with Earth’s ecosystems.
In fact, every year we reach a point called “Earth Overshoot Day.” That’s the day when humans collectively start taking more from the Earth than it can replenish. This year it falls on July 25th. Everything you eat, burn, use or send to the landfill for the rest of the year is the equivalent of deficit spending. If Nature was a credit card, we’d been way over our limit and our account would be sent to collections.
And that’s where the Lone Star Tick comes in. - jp
TITLE: ‘Explosive increase’ of ticks that cause meat allergy in US due to climate crisis
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/29/lone-star-ticks-increase-climate-crisis
EXCERPTS: Blood-sucking ticks that trigger a bizarre allergy to meat in the people they bite are exploding in number and spreading across the US, to the extent that they could cover the entire eastern half of the country and infect millions of people, experts have warned.
Lone star ticks have taken advantage of rising temperatures by the human-caused climate crisis to expand from their heartland in the south-east US to areas previously too cold for them, in recent years marching as far north as New York and even Maine, as well as pushing westwards.
The ticks are known to be unusually aggressive and can provoke an allergy in bitten people whereby they cannot eat red meat without enduring a severe reaction, such as breaking out in hives and even the risk of heart attacks. The condition, known as alpha-gal syndrome, has proliferated from just a few dozen known cases in 2009 to as many as 450,000 now.
“We thought this thing was relatively rare 10 years ago but it’s become more and more common and it’s something I expect to continue to grow very rapidly,” said Brandon Hollingsworth, an expert at the University of South Carolina who has researched the tick’s expansion.
“We’ve seen an explosive increase in these ticks, which is a concern. I imagine alpha-gal will soon include the entire range of the tick, which could become the entire eastern half of the US as there’s not much to stop them. It seems like an oddity now but we could end up with millions of people with an allergy to meat.”
The exact number of alpha-gal cases is unclear due to patchy data collection but it’s likely to be a severe undercount as people may not link their allergic reaction to the tick bites. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said around 110,000 cases have been documented since 2010 but acknowledges the true number could be as high as 450,000.
Cases will rise further as the ticks spread, aided by their adaptability to local conditions, according to Laura Harrington, an entomologist and disease specialist at Cornell University. “With their adaptive nature and increasing temperatures, I don’t see many limits to these ticks over time,” she said.
As the climate heats up, due to the burning of fossil fuels, ticks are able to shift to areas that are becoming agreeably warm for them. Growing numbers of deer, which host certain ticks, and sprawling housing development into natural habitats is also causing more interactions with ticks. “Places where houses push up against habitats and parks where nature has regrown are where we are seeing cases,” said Hollingsworth.
But much is still unknown, such as why lone star ticks, which have long been native to the US, suddenly started causing these allergic reactions. Symptoms can also be alarmingly varied – Forsyth said she rarely eats out now because of concerns of contamination in the food and even that alpha-gal could be carried to her airborne, via the steam of cooked meat.
So how far can alpha-gal spread? Cases have been found in Europe and Australia, although in low numbers, while in the US it’s assumed lone star ticks won’t be able to shift west of the Rocky mountains. But other tick species might also be able to spread alpha-gal syndrome – a recent scientific paper found the western black legged tick and the black legged tick, also called the deer tick, could also cause the condition.
Hanna Oltean, an epidemiologist at Washington state department of health, said it was “very surprising” to find a case of alpha-gal in Washington state from a person bitten by a tick locally, suggesting the western black legged tick could be a culprit.
“The range is spreading and emerging in new areas so the risk is increasing over time,” Oltean said. “Washington state is very far from the range and the risk remains very low here. But we don’t know enough about the biology of how ticks spread the syndrome.”
The spread of alpha-gal comes amid a barrage of disease threats from different ticks that are fanning out across a rapidly warming US. Powassan virus, which can kill people via an inflammation of the brain, is still rare but is growing, as is Babesia, a parasite that causes severe illnesses. Lyme disease, long a feature of the US north-east, is also burgeoning.
“We are dealing with a lot of serious tick-borne illnesses and discovering new ones all the time,” said Harrington.
TITLE: As Mosquito Season Peaks, Officials Brace for New Normal of Dengue Cases
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/mosquito-season-new-normal-dengue-vaccine-florida-california-climate-change/
EXCERPTS: As summer ushers in peak mosquito season, health and vector control officials are bracing for the possibility of another year of historic rates of dengue. And with climate change, the lack of an effective vaccine, and federal research cuts, they worry the disease will become endemic to a larger swath of North America.
About 3,700 new dengue infections were reported last year in the contiguous United States, up from about 2,050 in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All of last year’s cases were acquired abroad, except for 105 cases contracted in California, Florida, or Texas. The CDC issued a health alert in March warning of the ongoing risk of dengue infection.
“I think dengue is here with us to stay,” said infectious disease specialist Michael Ben-Aderet, associate medical director of hospital epidemiology at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, about dengue becoming a new normal in the U.S. “These mosquitoes aren't going anywhere.”
Dengue is endemic — a label health officials assign when diseases appear consistently in a region — in many warmer parts of the world, including Latin America, India, and Southeast Asia. Dengue cases increased markedly last year in many of those places, especially in Central and South America.
The disease, which can spread when people are bitten by infected Aedes mosquitoes, was not common in the contiguous United States for much of the last century. Today, most locally acquired (meaning unrelated to travel) dengue cases in the U.S. happen in Puerto Rico, which saw a sharp increase in 2024, triggering a local public health emergency.
California offers a case study in how dengue is spreading in the U.S. The Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes that transmit dengue weren’t known to be in the state 25 years ago. They are now found in 25 counties and more than 400 cities and unincorporated communities, mostly in Southern California and the Central Valley.
The spread of the mosquitoes is concerning because their presence increases the likelihood of disease transmission, said Steve Abshier, president of the Mosquito and Vector Control Association of California.
From 2016 through 2022, there were an average of 136 new dengue cases a year in California, each case most likely brought to the state by someone who had traveled and been infected elsewhere. In 2023, there were about 250 new cases, including two acquired locally.
In 2024, California saw 725 new dengue cases, including 18 acquired locally, state data shows.
Climate change could contribute to growth in the Aedes mosquitoes’ population, Ben-Aderet said. These mosquitoes survive best in warm urban areas, often biting during the daytime. Locally acquired infections often occur when someone catches dengue during travel, then comes home and is bitten by an Aedes mosquito that bites and infects another person.
“They've just been spreading like wildfire throughout California,” Ben-Aderet said.
Health and vector control researchers aren't sure how bad it will get in California. Some say there may be limited outbreaks, while others predict dengue could get much worse. Sujan Shresta, a professor and infectious disease researcher at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, said other places, like Nepal, experienced relatively few cases of dengue in the recent past but now regularly see large outbreaks.
There is a vaccine for children, but it faces discontinuation from a lack of global demand. Two other dengue vaccines are unavailable in the United States. Shresta’s lab is hard at work on an effective, safe vaccine for dengue. She hopes to release results from animal testing in a year or so; if the results are positive, human trials could be possible in about two years.
“If there's no good vaccine, no good antivirals, this will be a dengue-endemic country,” she said.
TITLE: Climate change is changing the geography of infectious disease
https://www.france24.com/en/environment/20250701-climate-change-changing-geography-of-infectious-disease-environment-global-warming
EXCERPTS: “Over half of all infectious diseases confronted by humanity worldwide have been at some point aggravated and even strengthened by climatic hazards,” says Dr Aleksandra Kazmierczak, an expert on the relationship between climate change and human health at the European Environment Agency (EEA).
Kazmierczak says that climatic conditions have made Europe more suitable for vector and water borne disease. ‘There is a northward, temporal shift because the current climate is more suitable for pathogens. Disease season is longer – ticks, for example, are now active all year round in many places.”
One of the fastest growing infectious diseases in Europe is dengue. 304 cases were reported in Europe in 2024 alone – compared to 275 cases recorded in the previous 15 years combined.
The numbers have jumped so dramatically that scientists now believe that the diseases carried by Aedes albopictus will become endemic in Europe. Some researchers even say that the number of dengue and chikungunya outbreaks could increase five-fold by 2060 compared to current rates.
Climatic conditions have contributed to a geographic range expansion of several other vectors like ticks and other species of mosquitos and flies, which carry their own diseases like West Nile Fever, Lyme disease and tick-borne encephalitis.
Climate change could also increase the occurrence of water-borne disease. In recent years, Europe has experienced the devastating impact of extended period of rain and floods, which wreak havoc on water treatment and distribution systems. Water can gather several pathogens from dumps, fields and pastures and flush them into water treatment and distribution systems.
Kazmierczak also warns of pathogens carried in the sea: "As the arctic melts salinity in seawater decreases, making it ideal for pathogens like vibrio. It’s been seen more in the Baltic and North Seas. It is transferred from seafood or even exposure in an open wound if you’re swimming in infectious water."
Permafrost covers almost 15 percent of the northern hemisphere, a significant portion of which is concentrated in Siberia, Alaska and Greenland. As the name implies, permafrost is soil and rock that stays frozen for at least two consecutive years. It acts almost like a cold storage for history: mammoths, saber-toothed tigers and long extinct plants have been preserved, almost entirely intact.
Some of what's stuck in frozen limbo isn't even dead – it's just dormant. Numerous ‘zombie microbes’ have been discovered in melting permafrost over the years, some after millennia. Researchers have raised fears that a new global medical emergency could be triggered – not by an illness new to science but by an ancient disease which modern human immunity is not equipped to deal with. The melting permafrost could also release old radioactive material and banned chemicals that had been dumped as waste.
This was the case in 2016, when over 2000 reindeer were found dead in Siberia because of an anthrax outbreak. Melting permafrost thawed the carcass of a reindeer that had died decades ago and unleashed the dormant virus into the modern world. Dozens of people living nearby had to be hospitalized.
This bizarre new threat may be another consequence of warming global temperatures, despite sounding like it’s been pulled from the pages of a science fiction novel. But Kazmierczak says that the research is still in its nascent stages and permafrost exists in isolated regions with little habitation.
The changes in the geography of infectious disease, to a large extent, cannot be undone. Temperatures in Europe have already risen by over 2 degrees in the last decade alone, with no sign of it slowing down.