Dr. Sam Telford is an entomologist at Tufts Veterinary School, who has spoken twice at past Lyme disease educational forums in town. He emailed the chair of the Medfield Lyme disease study committee as follows:
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I am pleased to hear that Medfield is taking some steps to reduce the burden of Lyme disease. I was just out at Rocky Woods a couple of days ago…and noted that there is a sign up about hunting. By the way, in case people complain that there are lots of ticks this year, this is a regional observation. Adult deer ticks are up probably 3-5 times over what we have seen over the last 2 years. This extends down to RI and the Cape and I see it here in Grafton. Rocky Woods was very good collecting for me, I may have gotten 300 ticks in an hour. So people should take care to use personal protection right now. (My guess is that the wet and cool summer increased tick survival; and the number of grey squirrels was tremendous this summer, and because they feed a lot of nymphal ticks there may have been better feeding success to make all the adult ticks.)
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