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The DC area is the perfect place to live and raise a family — if you’re a tick

By John Domen

Ticks love it around here and they are having a field day.

While it’s hard to quantify exactly how many more ticks there are, D.C. area researchers say the population is growing and thriving.

“If you were watching them over the last 10 years, they’re really kind of exploding, especially in the Mid-Atlantic to northeast area,” Grace Hummell, a University of Maryland faculty researcher, told WTOP. “And it’s different species.”

And the little bugs find the region has a lot of what they’re looking for in a perfect home.

“It’s hot and humid and ticks love hot and humid areas,” Hummell said. “We’re having longer springs and falls, so there’s more interaction with the ticks when you’re going out. And then, of course, we have a lot of white-tailed deer here, and host species that are really good at keeping those abundances high of ticks.”

Plus, one tick can make a lot more.

“One female lone star tick or one female deer tick can lay up to like 3,000 to 8,000 eggs in one go,” said Hummell’s colleague Logan Owens, a graduate research assistant. “So it’s not only that there’s more ticks. They just are incredibly efficient at reproducing, and so that doesn’t help either.”

The ticks’ range is also expanding. The warming climate means ticks that were once found only in the southeastern United States can survive in places like Maine.

Avoiding the little bloodthirsty hitchhikers

If it’s raining out, ticks will hide out, but they are more likely to hitch a ride on you or your dog on hot and humid days without any rain.

“If you have longer stints of two weeks of hot, humid days, they’re out every day trying to get on a host, so that could be a possibility of why we’re seeing more,” Hummell said.

But it’s best that people be on guard “anytime that they’re outside,” Owens added, “even if they’ve just gone outside, to like take out the garbage or something like that, and they brushed across the grass.”

Hikers and people working in their yards and gardens should take extra precautions.

“You could go out to a park and there’s nothing and then maybe go to your neighbor’s yard and there’s hundreds of ticks,” Hummell said.

“Taking the time to actually check — look over your pants, making sure that you’re covering any excess skin that you can. So wearing pants, wearing long socks, tucking your socks into your pants, those are going to be the things, unfortunately, that you have to do,” Owens said.

States seek to lower drug prices by targeting the companies that manage them for health plans

By The Associated Press
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — As consumers worry about medication costs, states are trying to lower drug prices by reining in big companies that oversee prescription coverage for health insurers. Some of those companies, called pharmacy benefit managers, also own pharmacies, and one of them, CVS, has spent millions of dollars fighting the regulations. Affordability is a key issue ahead of this year’s midterm elections. Legislators in at least a dozen states passed laws this year to limit compensation to the companies, set minimum payments from the companies to pharmacists and require the companies to disclose more information to their clients, states and the public. A Tennessee law will bar pharmacy benefit managers from operating retail pharmacies as of July 1, 2028, though CVS Health Corp. has filed a federal lawsuit to avoid having to close its 136 pharmacies there.
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