Getting outside, breathing fresh air into your lungs, getting your heart rate up, and being one with nature on a wilderness hike is one of life’s simple pleasures. Unfortunately, the prospect of getting bitten by a tick turns that simple pleasure into a gamble with your health. Trying to avoid ticks while hiking is like trying to avoid cars while driving, the chances are you’ll at least come close to a tick.

The trick is figuring out how to enjoy nature, without interacting with it too much. In order to hike and avoid ticks, you have to take a lot of precautions and also know that no matter how much you protect yourself, there’s always a chance you’ll still get bitten. So understanding as much as you can about ticks, where they like to hang out, how they find their way onto your body, and how to properly remove them and care for yourself if you do get bitten is the key.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2017, there were 42,743 reported cases of Lyme Disease and nearly 18,000 addition kinds of tick-borne illnesses in the U.S. alone. The number is more than 10,000 more than 2016, which scientists believe is both due to an increase in ticks and an increase in awareness about tick-borne illnesses in general. Chances are, there will be an ever-increasing number of cases each year, so take ticks seriously, and protect yourself from illness by following these simple, but important steps…

Across the United States, tick- and mosquito-borne diseases, some potentially lethal, are emerging in places and volumes not previously seen. Climate change almost certainly is to blame, according to a 2016 report by 13 federal agencies that warned of intensifying heat, storms, air pollution and infectious diseases.

Last year, a coalition of 24 academic and government groups tracked climate-related health hazards worldwide. It found them “far worse than previously understood,” jeopardizing half a century of public-health gains.

Climate’s role in intensifying diseases carried by “vectors” — organisms transmitting pathogens and parasites — isn’t as obvious as in heat-related conditions or pollen allergies. But it poses a grave threat. Of all infectious diseases, those caused by bites from ticks, mosquitoes and other cold-blooded insects are most climate-sensitive, scientists say. Even slight shifts in temperatures can alter their distribution patterns.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a tripling of the number of disease cases resulting from mosquito, tick and flea bites nationally over 13 years — from 27,388 cases in 2004 to 96,075 in 2016. Cases of tick-related illnesses doubled in this period, accounting for 77 percent of all vector-borne diseases.

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Ticks carrying Lyme disease are rampant in the forests of the northeast, and the Appalachian Trail goes straight through the thick of them. This year (2017), a host of variables is coming together that could increase the likelihood of contracting the disease while hiking the trail, says Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist and senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York.

In 2005, Ostfeld and his team compiled 25 years’ worth of data into one of the most comprehensive field studies on the connections between blacklegged ticks (the main vectors of the disease) and environmental conditions, and how that relationship affects the risk of humans contracting the disease. “We expect the risk of coming into contact with a tick harboring Lyme disease will be higher in 2017 than in the average year, probably along large parts of the Appalachian Trail,” he says.

The core of the problem starts with a seemingly innocuous event: a bumper crop of acorns. During the summer of 2015, a spell of warm, wet weather in the northeast accelerated oak trees’ ability to produce acorns, which happen to be the primary food source of the white-footed mouse, a rodent that’s ubiquitous across the forests of the northeast. The mice are one of the main hosts of blacklegged ticks, and a carrier of Lyme. Ostfeld says the influx of mice in the middle of summer last year made it easy for ticks to find a host, which will lead to an abundance of infected nymphs in 2017. Ticks in the nymph stage are of highest risk to transmit diseases to humans because they’re hard to spot—no bigger than a poppy seed.

In addition to the bump in mice natality, the blacklegged tick has expanded its range. The bugs are now found in nearly 50 percent of counties in the U.S., whereas in 1998, they were only present in 30 percent. They’re especially prominent in wooded areas east of the Mississippi.

Exactly which sections of the AT will be most affected is hard to predict, but much of the mid-Atlantic and New England regions—the Hudson Valley in particular—could be unusually fruitful incubators for the disease beginning in May and June, when nymphs emerge from their winter slumber. Most thru-hikers will enter those areas at that time.

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Lyme disease has been spreading across the United States over the past several decades, and a new study has confirmed that ticks carrying the disease are present in eastern national parks.

According to the study published in the Journal of Medical Entomology, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Park Service (NPS) collected ticks along hiking trails in nine eastern national parks. They found blacklegged ticks (Ixodes scapularis), also called deer ticks, infected with the bacteria that causes Lyme disease in all nine parks. The study is the first to confirm the presence of these ticks, which researchers already suspected because Lyme disease has been reported in the region.

The nine parks the researchers studied were Acadia National Park, Catoctin Mountain Park, Fire Island National Seashore, Gettysburg National Military Park, Manassas National Battlefield Park, Monocacy National Battlefield, Prince William Forest Park, Rock Creek Park, and Shenandoah National Park.

And how can park visitors reduce risk? Here are some of the best ways, according the CDC and NPS:

• Use repellents that contain 20-30 percent DEET on exposed skin and clothing.
• Use products that contain permethrin on clothing.
• Shower within two hours of leaving a tick-prone area to wash off ticks that may be crawling on you.
• Check yourself for ticks and remove attached ticks.
• Dry clothes in a dryer on high heat for 10 minutes to kill any ticks on your clothing.
• Check pets and gear for ticks.
• Hike in the center of trails.
• Avoid sitting down or leaning on logs or bushes along the trail.

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The geographic areas where Lyme disease is a bigger danger have grown dramatically, according to a new government study published this week. U.S. cases remain concentrated in the Northeast and upper Midwest. But now more areas in those regions are considered high risk. “The risk is expanding, in all directions,” said the lead author, Kiersten Kugeler of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There are now 260 counties where the number of Lyme disease cases is at least twice what’s expected, given the size of each county’s population. That’s up from 130 a decade earlier, the report shows.

Lyme disease is most common in wooded suburban and far suburban counties. Scientists aren’t sure why high-risk areas are expanding, but it likely has something to do with development and other changes that cause the deer and ticks that carry the bacteria to move, Kugeler said.

Overall, 17 states have high-risk counties. The entire state of Connecticut, where the illness was first identified in 1975, has been high-risk for decades. Now, high-risk zones encompass nearly all of Massachusetts and New Hampshire and more than half of Maine and Vermont. Other states that saw expansion of high-risk areas include Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York along the Eastern seaboard, and Iowa, Michigan and Minnesota in the Midwest.

Some counties have dropped off the high-risk list, including those in Virginia, Georgia, Missouri and North Carolina where significant clusters were reported in the 1990s. Scientists now think those were a different condition caused by a different tick’s bite, Kugeler said.

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