Biologist Hokit Grant He visited the tick and arrived at the meadow in the mountain of Condon, Montana. The road crossed the fields filled with high grass and bushes with strawberries.
While walking along the road, Hokit carried a homemade tool with a plastic tube that fixes a huge white flannel rectangle.
He teased his device’s “elaborate”, but scientific research was very serious. The fabric passes over the bushes and the grass, and the tick is hoping to catch it.
During the summer, this tick hangs on the leaves and stretches the legs until the mammal passes by.
Hokit said, “We have one.
“This has left this bush,” he explained. “We simply collect them with fingers. We have a disease that keeps them.”
The captured tick is checked to Hokit’s laboratory in Helena, the capital. Most of them will probably be classified as “wood mites” of the Rocky Mountains.
But Hokit also wanted to know if he arrived at a new paper.
Climate change caused by humans is shortened in winter, which spends less time in maximum power saving mode and is more active to fall into animals and people. Sometimes ticks move disease They carry to a new area of the country.
This year, Hokit He found a deer mite for the first time. (Or black leg mites) Montana or northeast. This species is known to spread the lime bottle Other pathogens.
It is very important for doctors, knowing that new paper, such as deer mites, arrived in another state with Montana.
Neil batHe, an epidemic specialist at Billings Clinic in the eastern part of Montana, explained that most patients do not go to the doctor immediately after being cut into ticks.
In general, they pay attention later when they feel that they are already sick due to diseases transmitted by this parasite.
“Ten, chills, they feel bad, like many infections that can happen throughout the year,” he said.
It is rare for people to relate the symptoms with mites, and it’s rarely rarely to stab the tic. Therefore, it can be complicated for someone to identify a person with a mite disease.
KU said that the doctor knows what kind of mites they have in areas that help to identify new diseases related to this water.
That is one of the reasons why the state is looking for a new mites.
“The more you know about Montana’s content, the more you can inform your doctor and provide better interest.” Devon CosateAnimal disease transmitted by the epidemiologist of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the vector (vector) of the Ministry of Health and Welfare (infection that spreads from animals to human beings, infected animals and spread to humans to humans).
Cozart collects and analyzes the ticks obtained from Montana’s field studies to detect whether to carry a pathogen.
The ability of ticks to gain people depends on the species, but also affects the type of mammal.
“For example, rodents like macular fever of the Loki Mountains,” he explained. “Mites eat that rodent and get a pathogen.”
Since the presence of the disease may vary depending on the population of the mammal, some ticks of the state can represent or write more people’s risks. Cozart is also related to health experts.
This type of surveillance and analysis is not performed in all counties or all states. 2023 SurveyThe department, produced by nearly 500 health departments in the United States, found that only one quarter of the mite monitoring was performed.
Not all Monitoring work They said they were the same Chelsea Gridley-SMITHUrban and County Director of Environmental Health.
On -site research can be expensive. Therefore, many main and local health departments rely on a cheap and passive approach. Concerns, veterinarians and doctors must collect and send ticks for identification.
Gridley-Smith said, “This provides some information about ticks in contact with humans and animals, but it doesn’t know how common or how often it is in a certain area.
He added that more health departments want to monitor ticks, but it is difficult to raise funds. If the Federal Fund for public health is reduced, such as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), it can be more complicated.
Montana receives about $ 60,000 a year through federal subsidies, but most of the money is used to monitor mosquitoes, which is more intensive and expensive. The remaining is used to perform the goal.
Hokit says that his small team has no enough funding so that he can study throughout the state. In other words, I can’t monitor the rising ticks of the deer as I want.
He found this new tick in two counties in Montana County, but there is no enough data to check there and form a local population there.
Hokit, on the other hand, uses data on climate and vegetation to predict which regions of the country can prosper with these ticks. He observes a particular area of Western Montana, such as Flaterhead Valley.
He said his team would focus on search and help VCIER to inform the public when ticks and diseases that could be transmitted.
