Suffolk at the Center of New York’s Tick Crisis

“Suffolk County is the epicenter of tick disease in New York State,” declared Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine at a press conference at the start of this month, at which U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer announced he is seeking more federal money for confronting tick-borne diseases.

Romaine said ticks represent a “true public health crisis” and spoke of his experience with two bouts of tick-caused Lyme disease.

In addition to Romaine, also using the word “epicenter” at the event regarding the tick disease situation here was a leading scientist who investigates Lyme and other tick-borne maladies, Dr. Luis Marcos. He is a professor at the School of Medicine at Stony Brook University specializing in infectious diseases. He noted at the event, “We have more than 12 tick-borne diseases that may affect humans.”

Schumer, at the July 1 press conference at West Hills County Park in Huntington, said he is “pushing for” $273.5 million in the federal government’s 2027 budget to “track these ticks, treat the people they make sick, and tackle this threat at its root”—$90 million more than this year.

A Schumer press release that was distributed said, “According to new data, Suffolk County recorded 3,152…Lyme cases in 2024, the most of any county in the state, while the region from Montauk to Manhattan saw more than 6,600 cases…and many of the Lyme cases counted in New York City were actually acquired in Suffolk.”

Schumer, the Senate minority leader, is from a part of that region, Brooklyn.

“Time is tick-ing, and it’s time to beat back the bite,” the press release said.

Lyme disease is named for where it was first diagnosed in the 1970s, directly across Long Island Sound from Suffolk, in Lyme, Connecticut.

It has now spread far and wide in the U.S., as have other tick-borne diseases. There is, including in Suffolk County, the Lone Star tick, which causes what has been named Alpha-gal syndrome. A bite from it can result in people no longer being able to eat red meat or dairy, and if they do, “symptoms can range from mild to severe, and some may be life-threatening,” says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention online.

And there is Bourbon virus disease, spread also by the Lone Star tick. A victim of it spoke at the event in Huntington.

As a journalist, I’ve covered the tick situation—and dealt with it personally—ever since Lyme disease began appearing in Suffolk County in the early 1980s. (Indeed, last week I removed a deer tick, carefully with tweezers, from my wife’s back. Most readers by now, I’m sure, have had a tick-removal experience.)

My writing about the situation began when a neighbor where we live, in Noyac, came down with a bad case of Lyme disease.

I wrote about how a tick bite is sometimes not evident—that sometimes the telltale bullseye rash of a bite doesn’t appear. And if not stopped in time with antibiotics, chronic Lyme disease can develop and become a long-lasting medical nightmare.

The kind of governmental and scientific attention to Lyme disease (and now other tick-borne illnesses) was nothing like the huge focus it receives today.

Lyme disease was not a priority of the Suffolk County Department of Health Services then. Suffolk Health Commissioner Dr. David Harris told me Lyme must take “its place beside other diseases in the county,” and maintained it was “treatable.” The department then was highly active in dealing with the emergence of AIDS, often fatal before drugs were found to treat it. Then-Suffolk Legislator John Foley of Blue Point, chair of the panel’s Health Committee, advanced a resolution directing the department to put together an “action plan” for Lyme because, he said, its actions had not “been strong enough.”

I emphasized then in my journalism how Lyme could be very serious, citing cases of victims here.

In 1998, with this very much in mind and with LYMErix, the first vaccine for Lyme disease becoming available, I eagerly went to be vaccinated. I received a series of three shots from our very careful (now retired) primary care physician, Dr. Daniel Lessner, in Sag Harbor.

Then the producer of LYMErix, SmithKline Beecham, took it off the market.

A group of 121 individuals in 1999 brought a class-action lawsuit charging that they developed arthritis after being vaccinated with LYMErix.

SmithKline Beecham settled the lawsuit in 2003. Newsweek magazine reported, “The plaintiffs didn’t receive any compensation because their attorney said SmithKline Beecham’s voluntary removal of LYMErix from the market was sufficient enough.”

Subsequently, the investigative magazine Mother Jones published an article saying: “Influenced by now-discredited research…activists raised the question of whether the Lyme vaccine could cause arthritis. Media coverage and the anti-Lyme vaccination groups gave a voice to those who believed their pain was due to the vaccine, and public support for the vaccine declined. But there was a control group—the rest of the U.S. population. And when the FDA reviewed the vaccine’s adverse event reports in a retrospective study, they found only 905 reports for 1.4 million doses. Still, the damage was done, and the vaccine was benched.”

Subsequently, the investigative magazine Mother Jones published an article saying: “Influenced by now-discredited research…activists raised the question of whether the Lyme disease could cause arthritis.”

For what it’s worth, in the decades since taking the vaccine, I’ve been bitten dozens of times by deer ticks, and I’ve not come down with Lyme disease. (And a sizeable percentage of deer ticks here have been found to carry Lyme.)

In March of this year, the drug companies Pfizer and Valneva announced a new vaccine they have developed to prevent Lyme disease had “completed Phase 3 human trials.” The announcement said the trials found the vaccine “demonstrated more than 70% efficacy in preventing Lyme disease…was well tolerated with no safety concerns identified…Overall, results strengthen confidence in the vaccine candidate and Pfizer is planning submissions to regulatory authorities.”

The tests, the announcement said, were “conducted at sites in areas of high incidence of Lyme disease across the U.S., Canada and Europe.”