Talking Health with the Clinton County Health Department

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have probably heard that the North Country is Tick Country . Actually, you could probably throw a rock at most parks and trails in our area and hit a tick. The ‘ticky’ (see what I did there) part of housing so many tiny visitors in our community is that many come with disease that can make you really sick. In fact, the number of reported tick-related illnesses in Clinton County has more than tripled in the past five years. So what can we do to protect ourselves? This month we are ‘ticking’ (oops, I did it again) the brain of Dr. Lee Ann Sporn, a professor at Paul Smith’s College. Her research focuses on monitoring and surveillance for ticks and the diseases they carry in the North Country. Dr. Sporn, it seems like we hear more about ticks than we did when I was growing up. Is that because there are more of them or we are just talking about them more? It used to be said that “there are no ticks, poison ivy or rattlesnakes in the Adirondack...