Tick Bites Are Surging. The System to Track Them Isn't.
ER visits for tick bites have hit a ten-year high, and Lyme disease is only part of what ticks now carry.
A ten-year high, and it's only April
Last week, the CDC said that ER visits for tick bites hit their highest point for this time of year in at least ten years. In the most recent week, tick bites made up 71 out of every 100,000 ER visits. The usual rate is about 30. Tick season started early — and strong.
The advice you hear every spring is the same. Wear long pants. Use bug spray. Check your body for ticks. Throw your clothes in the dryer. This is all good advice. It is also pretty much the whole plan.
Why ticks are spreading to new parts of the country
But what’s driving these numbers goes beyond one bad spring. Ticks are spreading to new parts of the country. Much of the West and South had warm winters. Ticks die only when it stays below ten degrees for days in a row. That didn’t happen in many places this year. So more ticks made it through. More people are getting bitten. The Northeast has it worst, but this is now a problem across the country.
Lyme is only part of the picture
Most people think tick bites mean Lyme disease. That’s only part of the picture. Ticks in the U.S. now carry a growing list of diseases: anaplasmosis, babesiosis, ehrlichiosis, Powassan virus, and others. One type of tick bite can even cause a red meat allergy called alpha-gal syndrome. Cases of anaplasmosis and babesiosis have roughly doubled in the past ten years. Powassan cases grew four times over between 2004 and 2023. These diseases are showing up in new places, and many doctors still don’t think to test for them.
Why the U.S. undercounts tick-borne disease
Even Lyme disease is undercounted. The CDC thinks about 476,000 Americans get treated for Lyme each year. But the official count for 2023 was only about 89,000. That’s a five-to-one gap. The tracking system was built to spot trends, not count every case. It does the first job fairly well. It was never meant to do the second.
Tracking for other tick diseases is even weaker. Some states don’t require doctors to report babesiosis at all. Alpha-gal syndrome has no national tracking system. A few states have stepped up. Massachusetts puts out monthly reports on tick diseases. Maine watches ER data in real time. But many states don’t, and the system as a whole hasn’t kept up with how fast ticks are spreading.
A Lyme vaccine is in clinical trials for the first time in two decades
There is some good news. The CDC has better tools now, including the tracker that caught this spike in ER visits. And for the first time since the early 2000s, a Lyme vaccine is being tested in a large Pfizer/Valneva clinical trial. Last year, the CDC’s vaccine advisory group started planning for a possible decision on the vaccine. If it gets approved, it would be the first Lyme shot in more than twenty years.
How to protect yourself this tick season
Until then, the basics still matter. Treat your clothes with permethrin. It kills ticks on contact and lasts through several washes. Use bug spray with DEET or picaridin on bare skin. Walk in the middle of trails away from tall grasses and bushes. Shower within two hours of coming inside. Check your whole body for ticks: under your arms, behind your ears and knees, in your hair, around your waist. If you find one, pull it out with fine-tipped tweezers. Grab close to the skin and pull straight up. No twisting. No Vaseline. No matches. Then watch for a rash, fever, body aches, or tiredness over the next few days to weeks. If the tick was on you for more than 36 hours and you live in an area with Lyme, call your doctor. If you get a high fever or feel very sick after a tick bite, see a doctor right away. Some tick diseases need to be treated before test results come back.
What the federal budget tells you about tick preparedness
The part of the CDC that handles tick and insect diseases was already short on money before any cuts. In 2025, states asked for more than $30 million to fight these diseases. The CDC could only give them about $17 million — just over half of what they needed.
Now it’s getting worse. The proposed budget for 2026 would cut CDC funding by about half. Money set aside for tick diseases would go to zero. The military had its own tick disease research program that got $7 million in 2024. That program lost its funding in 2025 when Congress cut medical research by 57%. Some money came back for 2026, but less than before.
Ticks are not waiting for the budget to catch up. The country needs a system that can count what’s biting people, track what’s spreading, and pay for the response before the problem gets bigger.