On a balmy day in late June, Scott Williams waits for a white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus) to fall asleep. Williams, a wildlife biologist with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven, has just transferred the animal from a trap to a plastic bag containing a cotton ball doused in anaesthetic. As soon as the mouse’s breathing slows to one breath per second, Williams will take it out, draw blood, weigh it, put an ear tag on it for identification and check the animal for ticks, saving any that are engorged with blood. He must work quickly. The mouse will wake up in about two minutes, and she might be grumpy.
Williams is testing whether vaccinating mice against Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease in the United States, can reduce the proportion of ticks that are infected. Health officials are looking on with interest. Connecticut has one of the highest rates of human Lyme disease in the country, and June is peak time for transmission. Borrelia burgdorferi infects an estimated 329,000 people in the United States each year, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. And although most people who get prompt treatment recover quickly — Williams has had Lyme three times — up to one in five develops long-term and potentially life-threatening symptoms, including heart, vision or memory problems, or debilitating joint pain.
Williams’s approach is one of several strategies being tested in an attempt to thwart the spread of tick-borne diseases. Some, like the mouse vaccine, interrupt the pathogen’s ecological circuitry by targeting the wild animals that pass along and amplify the disease. Others, such as efforts to revive a human Lyme vaccine, aim to protect people from infection directly. A more radical approach could hamper the ability of ticks to bite humans or animals, potentially protecting against dozens of illnesses spreading across the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia.
That the field needs creative solutions is clear. Many long-recommended interventions, such as pesticide application or controlling populations of deer, which are an important host for adult ticks, have had mixed success in scientific studies. Even the time-honoured protective strategies that most people use are not evidence-based. “We tell people to wear repellents, to do tick checks and to shower if they’ve been in the field, but there’s very little data to show that these things reduce human illness,” explains Ben Beard, chief of the CDC’s bacterial-diseases branch in the division of vector-borne diseases.
Diseases spread by ticks are on the rise around the world, spurred by a combination of factors, including shifting climates and population sprawl into rural areas. Reported cases of Lyme, the most common US tick-borne illness, have nearly tripled in the country since 1992, although some of the increase could be due to heightened awareness. Lyme is also a growing problem in parts of Europe, Mongolia and China. Yet as bad as it is, there are nastier threats on the rise. In parts of Africa, the Middle East, Asia and southern Europe, ticks can spread Crimean–Congo haemorrhagic fever, which is fatal in 40% of cases. And a tick-borne relapsing fever afflicts as many as 1 in 20 residents in parts of Senegal. In the United States, ticks spread at least 16 illnesses, including anaplasmosis, babesiosis, ehrlichiosis and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, all “serious, life-threatening infections”, Beard says. And many are increasing in incidence more quickly than Lyme. In a July 2015 position statement, the Entomological Society of America argued for a national strategy to combat tick-borne diseases. “The recent confluence of environmental, ecological, sociological, and human demographic factors,” it said, “has created a near ‘perfect storm’ leading to more ticks in more places throughout North America.”
Backyard battlegrounds
Williams tags, weighs and releases his mouse just in time. It has no ticks to bring back to the lab for further analysis, but there will be other opportunities. Members of 32 Connecticut households have volunteered to place traps around their properties, and some will also get boxes of mouse treats laden with vaccine. The hope is that, over time, fewer mice and ticks will harbour the bacteria at the sites with the vaccine bait.
The plan is unconventional, because most Lyme-control measures focus on white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), which have exploded in number in the United States over the past century as young forests have become increasingly fragmented by human development and large predators have been all but eradicated. Adult blacklegged ticks (Ixodes scapularis) typically feed and mate on deer, so many scientists have argued that the only way to get rid of Lyme is to get rid of the deer.
But such efforts have had “an incredibly spotty record”, says Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, who has been studying tick-borne diseases for decades.
When Sam Telford, an epidemiologist at Tufts University in North Grafton, Massachusetts, and his colleagues cut the deer population on Great Island in Cape Cod by 50% in the early 1980s, they saw no drop in tick numbers — the number of tick larvae on the island actually increased1. Ostfeld argues that you do not need many deer to maintain a large tick population. When deer numbers drop, ticks can either crowd in on the remaining deer or find other hosts. Only when almost all of the deer on Great Island had been eliminated did tick populations plummet. But, says Telford, “it is a nightmare trying to get the deer population down that low”. And anywhere that is not an island, keeping populations down is practically impossible.
Danger mouse
Ostfeld and others contend that mice are a major driver for both the tick problem and the disease problem. Mice, like deer, flourish in fragmented woodlands — in part because predators such as foxes and opossums get displaced. Ticks then thrive on the rodents, which are poor groomers. Studies suggest that larval ticks have a 50% chance of surviving when they feed on mice, but only a 3.5% chance on opossums2.
And mice are typically where ticks pick up B. burgdorferi. Most mice in Lyme-endemic areas get infected with the bacterium at a young age and, for reasons that are not completely clear, they are particularly good at transmitting it to other ticks. Almost all young ticks that feed on white-footed mice become infected, compared with a mere 1% of ticks that feed on deer. Interrupting the tick–mouse infection cycle, says Ostfeld, could make ticks a lot less dangerous.
Maria Gomes-Solecki, a medical microbiologist at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, agrees — which is why she invented the mouse vaccine that Williams is testing. It primes the mice to make antibodies against outer surface protein A (OspA), a molecule that B. burgdorferi expresses when it is in a tick’s gut. A mouse eats the vaccine, then starts to produce OspA antibodies. The next time a tick feeds on the mouse, the antibodies attack the bacteria in its gut, clearing the infection. As the proportion of ticks infected with B. burgdorferi drops, it becomes less likely that the next generation of mice will pick up the parasite, even without vaccination.
Ostfeld and his colleagues reported the first field tests3 of Gomes-Solecki’s vaccine in 2014, and found that although only 28% of the mice in an area that they targeted for 5 years developed protective levels of OspA antibodies, the prevalence of infected blacklegged-tick nymphs (the life stage between larvae and adults) dropped by 75%. The bait-based vaccine is also attractive because it is less ecologically destructive than other strategies — it does not kill animals or even ticks, just the pathogens.
Gomes-Solecki, who licensed her technology to a company she founded, US Biologic in Memphis, would like to see homeowners putting walk-through bait boxes for mice around their gardens. Or, she says, local governments could disperse the bait in parks or forests, much as they do with bait-based rabies vaccines for raccoons and coyotes. “The rodents seem to love them,” Williams says of the vaccine-laced treats. One of his colleagues calls them “Fritos for mice”.