Nearly 40 percent of adult blacklegged ticks collected from residential yards in a small town outside Asheville tested positive for the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, a rate comparable to parts of the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, and upper Midwest where the illness is long established. The finding was published this week in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
The number carries a second, harder implication for families in western North Carolina. Many clinicians practicing in the region were trained when Lyme disease was considered a northern problem. That training gap is how symptoms get attributed to something else for years.
