UMass study: Ticks behind serious bacterial infections, meat allergies are in New England (2025)

Technology

Two types of ticks found in Maine could infect people with rare, sometimes fatal sicknesses.

By Emilia Wisniewski

April 28, 2025

2 minutes to read

Tick season is upon New England — and some unexpected visitors have come up north to join the usual crew, one study found.

A University of Massachusetts Amherst center has found and studied two ticks in Maine that are capable of infecting people with rare, possibly fatal, sicknesses.

The New England Center of Excellence of Vector-borne Diseases, led by UMass Amherst microbiology professor Stephen Rich, scans residential backyards in New England as a part of an ongoing study in its third year to develop better practices for tick control, according to a press release.

“In one of the sets of properties that we looked at in Maine, we found some rather extraordinary ticks that we don’t usually see,” Rich said.

The usual ticks found in the Northeast are deer, dog, and human ticks that often carry Lyme disease. In this survey, which catches ticks by placing down a white cloth and then extracting them, researchers found a “preponderous” amount of uncommon rabbit ticks.

Further, some of these ticks carried a unique, rare microbe called Rickettsia similar to a strain found in California that has led to people contracting potentially fatal Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

Rich said that rabbit ticks don’t often feed on humans, but a likely scenario is that a more common tick feeds on an infected rabbit that can then transmit to humans.

“It’s a low risk factor, but it is something that we didn’t know about until now, and it’s something we want to understand a little bit better and make sure that it is infrequent, and that it’s not something that has the potential to bridge over,” Rich said.

The second case found does not cause disease, but rather an allergy — to red meat. Alpha-gal syndrome is becoming increasingly common in areas where the Lone Star tick, the usual culprit, is established.

However, this year, alpha-gal syndrome has been found in 57 residents in Maine, whose climate is not typical for the Lone Star tick. The allergy was recently found to have been linked to the black-legged tick after a woman reported being bitten by one and then developing an intolerance to red meat.

“This finding of not a tick but a patient that had alpha-gal … was what made that finding quite notable,” Rich said.

Rich said the most effective way to avoid tick bites is to treat clothing with permethrin, a chemical that can kill ticks and other arthropods within minutes.

If a tick does bite, the time it takes for it to infect a person differs from case to case, but Rich said the average time for Lyme disease to enter a person’s body is 48 hours.

“If you take the tick off earlier, you can greatly reduce the risk of exposure from the stuff inside that tick,” Rich said.

Rich said the finding of both of these “relatively rare events” within the same time period is likely due to there being more surveillance —the team is able to look “more carefully than we did in the past,” thanks to the study, which received $10 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he said.

“We’re doing the testing to provide impactful information to homeowners,” Rich said. “Because we’re doing that, and that wasn’t taking place before, we’re bound to make new discoveries of this kind.”