MONROE—Over the last 15 years Orange County has been hit hard by an outbreak of Lyme disease, but with greater awareness and education about the tick-borne illness, reports of cases are slowly declining.
In 2013, 95 percent of confirmed Lyme disease cases were reported from 14 states, mostly on the East Coast, according to The National Center for Biotechnology Information. New York State has been hard-hit.
The National Institutes of Health’s Library of Medicine reports New York accounted for approximately 30 percent of all Lyme disease cases nationally in 1996. In 2014, Orange County reported 546 probable and confirmed cases.
In 2009, the county documented a record 1078 confirmed cases. Orange County epidemiologist Jackie Lawler says that figure is partly due to a more inclusive definition of a Lyme disease case—probable, suspect, or confirmed.
An August 2015 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that Lyme cases in the Northeast alone have spiked by over 320 percent since 1991— a surge that researchers attribute to a rainy spring, as well as the ecology of the region, which favors mice, rodents, and deer that commonly carry the disease-borne ticks.
Lawler says the insects can be found anywhere there is grass. Since we are at the height of tick season, Lawler declined to give a figure for new cases as reports are coming in every day and any figure given would be low.
