The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

by Jeff Goodell

As temperatures rise, brown dog ticks that transmit Rocky Mountain spotted fever—a disease with a 4 percent fatality rate—are twice as likely to choose to bite people over dogs. In the US, ticks can carry more than twenty different pathogens—and more are being discovered all the time. “The more we look at ticks, the more viruses we continue to find,” Bobbi Pritt, a microbiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, told me. Lyme disease is emblematic of the threat ticks pose in a warming world. It is caused by deer ticks carrying the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi. Lyme was discovered in Connecticut in the mid-1970s. Today it is a major, and growing, health threat. According to the CDC, reported cases in the US have tripled since the late nineties. Lyme disease has become an almost “unparalleled threat to regular American life,” as Bennett Nemser, an epidemiologist who manages the Cohen Lyme & Tickborne Disease Initiative at the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, has said. “Really anyone—regardless of age, gender, political interest, affluence—can touch a piece of grass and get a tick on them.”