Tick Bites Hit a Decade High as Alpha-Gal Meat Allergy Spreads Across the Country

Ticks are having a very good year. Emergency room visits for tick bites are running at their highest level in nearly a decade, according to CBS News, which cited Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. Local case counts reflect the same trend.

On Martha's Vineyard, residents describe an actual behavioral shift. "It's gotten to the point now that grandparents are not allowing their grandchildren to come visit them," Sam Telford, a professor of infectious disease and global health at Tufts University, told CBS News. Ben DeForest, who grew up roaming the island's woods and fields, told CBS he now sticks to "asphalt and concrete."

The disease getting the most attention isn't Lyme. It's Alpha-gal syndrome, an allergy to red meat triggered by a molecule transferred through a tick bite, most commonly from the lone star tick. Adriana Stimola, a Martha's Vineyard resident, described waking up in gastric distress and hives five hours after eating a hamburger on the beach. Her husband and children have since developed it too; her husband, she told CBS, "shot out of bed" at midnight with swelling lips after eating a burger.

Alpha-gal reactions aren't limited to burgers. CBS reported that some sufferers react to dairy, to the smell of cooking meat, or to products containing animal derivatives like marshmallows, Doritos, and gel medicine capsules. Severe cases can trigger anaphylaxis. DeForest, who owns the Red Cat Kitchen on the island, now runs an "Alpha-gal friendly" menu built around fish rather than red meat, so customers don't have to explain a tick-borne allergy to a server.

Telford told CBS the syndrome isn't new. It was identified in the mid-to-late 2000s. What's changed is visibility, driven partly by its prevalence in wealthy vacation towns like Martha's Vineyard and the Hamptons.

The deer connection

The root cause isn't mysterious, and it isn't primarily about ticks reproducing in a vacuum. It's about deer. Blacklegged ticks rely on deer as reproductive hosts, and where deer populations are large, tick populations follow.

Southold, on New York's North Fork, is a case study. Town Supervisor Al Krupski told a packed crowd at his State of the Town address, as reported by the Riverhead News-Review, that the town is "losing the war" against its deer population. "We have to take out about 60% of the deer population every year, just to maintain the population," Krupski said. That represents 60% removed annually just to hold steady, not reduce numbers.

The consequences go beyond ticks. Southold police logged 183 deer-vehicle collisions in 2025, following 227 in 2024 and 207 in 2023, according to data the Riverhead News-Review obtained from Police Chief Steven Grattan. Suffolk County recorded 3,152 Lyme disease cases in 2024, per county health data cited by the outlet, though officials caution a 2022 reporting methodology change complicates year-over-year comparisons. Suffolk has also logged probable cases of tularemia, a rare bacterial disease, this summer.

It's not just the East Coast

The Los Angeles Times reported that California is seeing its own surge, and not just from ticks. Marin County shut down a park in July after it was found infested with fleas capable of carrying plague and typhus. Rickettsia, a rare tick-borne bacterium, turned up in a Sonoma County resident in April.

West Nile virus, spread by mosquitoes rather than ticks, is the bigger California story this year. Matt Willis, a former Marin County public health officer and ex-CDC epidemiologist, wrote in a July Substack post that Los Angeles County's positive mosquito samples were running ten times higher than last year. As of mid-August, California had logged 373 West Nile-positive dead birds statewide compared to 76 at the same point in 2025, the LA Times reported. Nationally, the CDC has confirmed 181 human West Nile cases, 129 of them neuroinvasive, per the LA Times.

Janet Foley, a disease ecologist at UC Davis, told the LA Times there's no single explanation but that warming conditions are part of it. Pathogens and the insects that carry them are shifting into regions where they didn't used to survive. Willis made a similar point about temperature driving northward range expansion for insects and the diseases they carry.

What's disputed and what isn't

The LA Times noted that some of the disease-surge narrative is amplified by better tracking and heavier media coverage, not just an actual increase in cases. Disease reporting and public attention both introduce bias into how "worse" something looks year over year.

The core numbers stand. ER visits for tick bites are up. West Nile-positive dead birds in California are up nearly fivefold year over year. Southold's deer-collision and Lyme figures are hard county records, not estimates.

What's unresolved is the fix. Deer culling programs face local political resistance, hunting restrictions, and suburban sprawl that limits where lethal control is even legal. Southold's own numbers show the town isn't close to solving it: a 60% annual cull just to tread water. Until that math changes, tick populations on the East End, and the diseases riding along with them, aren't going anywhere.