Fieldwork along the lower Connecticut River revealed that Ixodes scapularis ticks were far more numerous in small woodlands and brush on the east bank of the river—the bank on which sat the village of Lyme—than on the west bank. That finding, combined with the fact that human cases also were far more common on the east bank, pointed further suspicion at the “deer tick” as a vector of what even Steere and his rheumatologist colleagues, having dropped the term “Lyme arthritis,” were now calling “Lyme disease.”
