MONROE COUNTY, Pa. — It was the perfect day to take a hike along the Appalachian Trail in Delaware Gap National Recreation Area.
A family from Canada is exploring the trails in Pennsylvania, but they're well aware of the pesky visitors that may try to come home with them: ticks.
"In the center of the path, so I try to stay away from the foliage as much as you can. We do our check when we get home just once over. We have the same problem in Ontario, so we're kind of used to it," said Adrian Berman from Ontario.
"I remember I had one on my neck, and it was like really hard to get out, and it was like really scary," said Emily Berman, from Ontario.
Nicole Chinnici is the lab director of the East Stroudsburg University Tick Research Lab in Smithfield Township.
She says the need for the lab's tick testing services increased dramatically this year.
"We've had a little bit of a different summer to this year's, or winter sort of died off a little earlier, so the tick season started much earlier this year than a pretty previous year. So that could be an indicator of why were seeing an increase in exposures because individuals were being exposed in February and March when we typically have snow cover. So we're still diving through why, but we are seeing more tick bites this year than in previous years," said Chinnici.
Just to put into perspective how bad tick season has been this year, Chinnici says earlier this summer, the lab was receiving 800 ticks a day.
"We're still finding the same type of tick-borne illnesses," Chinnici said. "Lyme disease is the most common that we find in our tick population. We still see higher rates of Anaplasmosis and Powassan virus in our tick population, about 12 percent of the ticks submitted are co-infected, so they carry more than one tick-borne illness."
Chinnic tells us one out of every two ticks could be infected, so she urges people to send them to the lab for testing.
For tips on how to prevent tick bites, click here.
To submit your tick for testing, click here.
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