Dan Salkeld doesn鈥檛 like plunging toilets, filling out tax forms, or clipping his children's toenails. But he loves collecting ticks in Colorado.
The northeast, he says, is humid and chock full of ticks and mosquitoes. 鈥淗ere, we have snow covered mountains and pine forest and the ticks are not in the same numbers. It's pleasant,鈥� says the with Colorado State University. He estimates he鈥檚 collected about 7,000 ticks over his career.
When it comes to ticks people tend to think of the east coast, where the pests are everywhere and they carry Lyme disease. But we have ticks, too -- well into the Rocky Mountains -- and they might be carrying their own disease cargo. That鈥檚 what Salkeld and his colleague, Alyssa Beck, have come to Rocky Mountain National Park to find out.
Salkeld dressed in a short sleeve T-shirt and a baseball hat. Beck, a student at the Colorado School of Public Health and (on this day) an apprentice tick-hunter, took a different tack. The Wisconsinite says she鈥檚 collected far too many ticks by accident, so she鈥檚 zipping into a full-body Tyvek suit. It even has a hood.
鈥淚t's like the marshmallow in Ghostbusters,鈥� Salkeld tells Beck. 鈥淚f you just direct it for the wind, you should inflate.鈥�
They pull out white flannel flags that they鈥檒l use to entice the ticks out of the grass and bushes and head off down a well-trafficked trail through Ponderosa pine forest. They aren鈥檛 as interested in the ticks themselves as they are in what might be hiding inside the bugs -- specifically, two viruses. One of them is called .
鈥淎pparently it's horrendous,鈥� says Salkeld.
There鈥檚 no treatment. The virus gives people fever, chills, aches and fatigue, but it goes away.
鈥淵ou don't have chronic impacts later on,鈥� he says, unlike with something like Lyme disease.
But the researchers are also looking for something much worse, . It鈥檚 a nasty disease currently sickening people in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the virus can give people anything from a fever and headache to brain swelling, confusion, seizures and even memory loss. Luckily, it鈥檚 very rare. Only about 100 cases were reported in the U.S. since 2007.
鈥淲e don't know if that's affecting people here. But that's one of the new poster children of tick-borne disease because it's seems to be coming south and affecting more people than it has done. And it can be fatal,鈥� says Salkeld.
Way before Powassan became a problem in other parts of the country, scientists out here in Colorado.
鈥淏ut few people have looked ever since,鈥� says Salkeld. Until now.
Salkeld and Beck are hiking through Ponderosa pine forest, dragging those white flannel flags across the ground. They鈥檙e at about 8,000 feet of altitude, with a backdrop of stunning mountains, a herd of elk lounging about in a golden meadow complete with meandering stream, and 15 minutes in, no ticks.
And then, there it was: the first tick, clinging to the flannel that it thought would provide its next blood meal. Salkeld used tweezers to drop it into a glass vial. From there on out, it was pretty much tick galore.
By the end of the day, the researchers had nearly 100 of the creatures, sorted by location. They were crawling on top of each other, in writhing balls.
鈥淵eah, that鈥檚 a little tick orgy,鈥� said Salkeld.
The tick orgies will eventually make their way to the lab bench of a scientist named Alex Byas, the official tick grinder and virus extractor.
鈥淭hat is my job today, yes,鈥� says Byas, who is also a veterinarian and a at CSU studying West Nile virus.
Byas opens a lab fridge to reveal a Ziploc bag full of vials of ticks. They look dead, but they aren鈥檛. She needs them alive to keep the potential viruses inside them fresh.
鈥淭hey're all balled up because they're really cold. But once you take them out and bring them back up to room temperature they'll get really active, which makes them sometimes kind of hard to pull out of the tube,鈥� she says. 鈥淭hey can be surprisingly fast.鈥�
Byas will wrangle the reawakened ticks into little tubes, with some liquid and a metal ball that looks like a BB. Then she鈥檒l plop those into a machine that will grind them into the consistency of fine coffee grounds, or as Byas calls it, 鈥渢ick smithereens.鈥�
She鈥檒l take the smithereens and separate out the liquid, the part that might have viruses floating around inside. Finally, she鈥檒l run a series of tests for Colorado tick fever and Powassan virus. She鈥檚 keeping her mind open to other possibilities because, she says, you never know what you might find.
鈥淵ou don't know exactly what's going to be in there, so you can look at a very large library of possibilities,鈥� she says. 鈥淭hat's how -- sometimes -- viruses that we don't even know about are discovered.鈥�
Byas and her colleagues should know by the end of the summer if these Rocky Mountain wood ticks contain Colorado tick fever and Powassan virus. They鈥檒l keep collecting and checking in coming years because things are always changing.
鈥淗istorically we really haven't had much of a tick problem here in Colorado. However, we know that climate change is dramatically influencing the distribution and rates of tick-borne diseases in other parts of the country,鈥� says , a veterinary epidemiologist with the National Park Service and a public health officer with the U.S. Public Health Service.
There are other changes afoot in the Rocky Mountains. Deer and elk are coming down with chronic wasting disease.
Researchers in other parts of the country have noticed that when deer populations drop, Buttke says, 鈥渢he following year and sometimes the next year we have a really, really high number of ticks looking for blood meal hosts.鈥� Instead of biting deer, they turn to people. Buttke says it鈥檚 all speculation whether chronic wasting could lead to a temporary spike in tick-borne disease here in the Mountain West, but it鈥檚 a possibility.
鈥淎nd that's a concern particularly in this area because people aren't practicing the preventative behaviors needed to prevent these diseases,鈥� she says, probably because people tend to forget there are ticks here in the first place.
Luckily, the diseases they carry are completely preventable. Buttke says people just have to remember that there are ticks out there in the mountains 鈥� as high as 10,000 feet in altitude 鈥� and check themselves for the parasites when they return from a hike.
This story was produced by the Mountain West 暗黑爆料 Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, Yellowstone Public Radio in Montana, KUER in Salt Lake City and KRCC and KUNC in Colorado.
