Dec 16, 2014

The words ‘good news’ & ‘ticks’ don’t usually appear together. But here’s an integrated tick management (ITM) success story. Between 2003-2012, with brown dog ticks as vectors and human cases of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (RMSF), including 19 deaths, spiraling upwards at >150 times the national average among residents living on the American Indian reservations of eastern Arizona, it was definitely time to take action. Beginning in 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and a host of partners, including Bayer Healthcare and PetSmart Charities, launched a multi-pronged RMSF Rodeo program to corral the dog carriers and tick vectors. Results of the two year pilot intervention were published recently in the open access journal PLOS One.

The hot, dry climate of eastern Arizona is a pretty inhospitable place for most types of ticks and tickborne disease. So, it came as quite an unsuspected finding that an explosion of RMSF among American Indians without any history of travel away from the reservations was caused by brown dog ticks. It was the first time brown dog ticks were shown to transmit the agent of this disease, Rickettsia rickettsii, in the United States.