Lyme disease: it’s not deer, it’s the mice

Scientists have been getting it wrong about Lyme disease for more than 40 years.  The chief culprit are mice, and not deer populations.

Around 500,000 Americans are infected every year from the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, usually from the bite of an infected blacklegged tick.

Since the infections became more widespread in the 1980s, researchers have suspected the white-tailed deer of being the most likely spreader of the ticks.

But researchers from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, think we’ve been fingering the wrong culprit. Growing mice populations are responsible for more than 40 percent of cases, they say.

Researchers have been tracing the disease and its likely origins and spread—including from deer, mice, temperature changes and even oak trees—for 35 years.  An increase in deer populations didn’t correlate to a rise in cases, but they saw a rise if mice communities grew.  In turn, mice populations are governed by the abundance of acorns; good years mean there’s more food on the forest floor for mice, and more mice means more ticks that feed off them.  A heavy acorn crop will result in a peak in Lyme cases two years later, the researchers found.

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