Can We Do Anything About Tick-Borne Diseases Like Alpha-Gal Syndrome?

From 2017 to 2022, according to the C.D.C., Suffolk County, which includes Shelter Island, had the highest number of suspected cases of alpha-gal syndrome of any county in the United States. In 2023, it had the highest number of new cases of Lyme disease in the country. And in May, the first known case in New York of the tick-borne Bourbon virus, a potentially lethal infection that can bring on multiple organ failure, was reported in Suffolk County. Some Long Island landscapers now wear pantyhose under their clothes to stave off ticks. For people bitten by a tick, the general advice from Stony Brook Southampton Hospital’s Regional Tick-Borne Disease Resource Center & Clinic, as from most experts, is to seek medical care only if a rash or flulike symptoms develop.

Long Island is not only lousy with ticks; it maps the gothic story of the bug’s rise to power. Years before Lyme disease was named to describe what was at first mistaken as juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, locals on the East End had a name for the rashes and mysterious joint-swelling that some residents experienced: “Montauk knee.” It was on Shelter Island in 1981 that a microbiologist named Jorge Benach gathered the ticks in which the bacterium responsible for Lyme would first be identified. And the mere three miles separating Plum Island and mainland Long Island’s East End is the kernel of proximity around which the there-are-no-coincidences crowd has wrapped its lab-leaked bioweapon theory.

Shelter Island’s booming popularity over the past decade has meant more land cleared, more building, more people, more deer and rodents and therefore more ticks. Ticks, in turn, are starting to alter the character of the Hamptons and other vacation spots on the East Coast. Erin McGintee, an allergist in East Hampton, has had a seasonal patient tell her she is going to stop coming to the Hamptons in favor of staying in Florida year-round. (Florida has ticks, too; they just aren’t nearly as big of a problem.) “Why would people want to come vacation here when they have to worry about getting bitten by ticks out on the golf course and in their backyard, when there’s other places they could go where there aren’t ticks?” On Martha’s Vineyard, restaurants now offer alpha-gal-safe menus, and fears of alpha-gal syndrome, Bloomberg reported, are depressing Airbnb bookings. (It’s not just a problem for elite coastal enclaves; as The New Yorker reported this summer, “the syndrome now threatens farmers, ranchers, hunters and foresters across the South and the Midwest.”)

Weisenberg’s archery students arrived and took their places on a line 12 yards from the targets. A whistle sounded. Arrows flew. During a break, a woman named Gina, who had lived on the island for 49 years and signed up for the archery class with family members, told me she had been bitten by six ticks this summer alone. She had Lyme disease in the past, and she knew all about its bearer. “There’s a difference between larval ticks and ticks,” she said. “This is going to sound sick: I’ve had well over a hundred larval ticks by walking into a tick’s nest. I saw them. It was like hordes of soldiers coming over a hill.”

Her husband, Gerry, looked at my ankles disapprovingly. “Are you sprayed?” Like Weisenberg, he sends his clothes away to be treated with permethrin. “The whole family’s gotten Lyme disease,” Gerry said. As we stood there, his son-in-law Cori, who was wearing flip-flops, found a tiny tick on his toe. Another archer said that her mother once had Lyme and that she herself once had Rocky Mountain spotted fever; her friend volunteered that she’d had Lyme and that her mother has alpha-gal.