How Bad Will the Ticks Be This Summer?

Lately these drags have turned up new species of tick, such as Gulf Coast ticks, common across the South. How these ticks got to New York is not clear, but they probably hitched rides on migratory birds, said Dr. Waheed Bajwa, who leads the city health department’s efforts to control disease from insects and ticks.

Over the past five years, health department investigators have discovered growing numbers of Gulf Coast ticks at Fresh Kills, once the world’s largest landfill that is soon to become a park on Staten Island.

Researchers have found that many of Staten Island’s Gulf Coast ticks carry a pathogen that causes a form of spotted fever. Fortunately, it’s a milder form than Rocky Mountain spotted fever, a sometimes fatal tick-borne illness. (Though most common in a few southern states, New Yorkers have been infected in small numbers.)

So far, the Gulf Coast tick does not appear to have transmitted the milder form to any New Yorkers, but Dr. Bajwa expects that won’t last.

“We may see some cases in the future,” he said.

In June 2018, a Yonkers man removed a tick from his right leg and saved it to bring to his doctor. It wasn’t a typical New York tick, but rather the Asian longhorned tick, whose arrival in the United States had only been detected the year before.