N.Y. County Sick and Tired of Long Bout With Lyme Disease

This is a place where hikers wear long pants on the hottest days, a place with its own Lyme disease hot line and Lyme disease walk-in clinic.

This is a place where tick-eating hens patrol front lawns, and where full-body tick inspections are a standard evening routine.

This is Dutchess County, a national hot spot for Lyme disease. Last year, 1,385 cases were reported in this leafy Hudson Valley county 60 miles north of New York City. A lot more cases could result this summer--the prime Lyme season--because of a bumper crop of the deer ticks that spread the disease.

If that weren’t bad enough, residents are bracing for the potential spread of the mosquito-borne West Nile virus from the metropolitan area. People accustomed to watching where they walk are now watching the skies with trepidation too.

“My concern is people will be afraid to go out,” said Barbara Butler, who walks local woods regularly with a bird club.

Lyme disease, which can cause fever, fatigue, headaches and arthritis-like symptoms, has been a scourge of many suburban areas surrounding New York City through the 1990s. Reported cases in Dutchess over that time have skyrocketed. The Centers for Disease Control does not yet have county breakdowns for last year, but Dutchess topped all counties nationwide in 1998 with 1,537 reported cases.

Why is Dutchess County a Lyme disease hot spot?

Blame geography, experts say. Deer and white-tailed mice, which ticks latch on to, are plentiful in the county’s many pockets of undeveloped land. The local suburbs often stand on the edge of those fields and woods.

The result: plenty of interaction between ticks and humans.

“It’s getting to the point in Dutchess County where just about everyone knows a neighbor or friend who’s had Lyme disease,” said John Nowakowski, director of the Hyde Park Lyme Disease Walk-in Center.

Annie Berthold-Bond got it. So did her husband. And her daughter. Bond, an author of books on nontoxic living, said the short-term memory problems associated with her bout were so severe she stuck Post-it Notes to her sleeve.

She now avoids walking in the woods around her rural home.

“It’s very sad not to sit on the grass and to feel like you can walk on your bare feet,” she said.

Families with pets face additional worries. Raymond Winchcombe of Verbank said it’s common to feel engorged ticks under the fur of his dog. One hunter, who didn’t want his name used, recalled a horrifying glimpse of a deer he shot last fall: “Under his muzzle, his neck, under his belly, on his back, he was a mass--honest to God--he was a mass of ticks!”

People still enjoy the countryside here; they just take precautions against tick bites. Butler says members of her bird club wear light-colored clothes and tuck their pants in their socks, and she sprays her pants with a tick repellent.

Like a lot of area residents, Butler checks herself in a full-length mirror after coming inside, looking for ticks that can be as small as a poppy seed.

The Lyme disease vaccine is also popular, so much so that the town of Poughkeepsie is considering offering Lyme disease vaccinations to its employees.

Other residents have taken the battle to their front lawns--buying guinea fowl in the hopes their endless pecking will eradicate the bugs or having their lawns sprayed.

“Our client base for deer tick spraying has been increasing on a regular basis over the last five years,” said Mike Ignaffo of Bug Busters Pest Control in Hyde Park.

With the ticks’ busy season looming, predictions of a bad year are often based on the mild winter. David Weld of the American Lyme Disease Foundation in Westchester County has predicted a “horrendous” year for the whole area.

Richard Ostfeld of the Institute of Ecosystem Studies bases his prediction on another indicator: acorns.

A healthy local crop of acorns in 1998 provided a feeding bonanza for mice. That meant more mice in the summer of 1999. And that meant more mice for larval ticks to feed on. Those are the ticks that will be out to feed this summer, he said.

“Our prediction is for the highest number of cases yet for Dutchess County,” Ostfeld said.