Since the beginning of our species we have been at war. It’s a continuous, neverending fight against the smallest of adversaries: armies of pathogens and parasites. As we have developed new ways to survive and stop them, they have evolved ever more complex and ingenious methods to thwart our efforts.
Humans have faced numerous attempts to challenge our dominance on planet Earth , and from the Black Death to the Spanish flu, we have weathered them all. However, since the start of the 21st century, with its trend towards global interconnectedness, these onslaughts are ever-increasing. In the past 17 years we have battled
Sars, the
Ebola virus,
Mers, and more recently the mysterious
mosquito-borne Zika virus. These diseases seeming to appear from nowhere and rapidly ravage our populations. One commonality is that they almost always originate in animals before jumping across to people, and few parasites are as good at jumping between animals and people as
the tick.
Ticks could be best described as the used syringes of the natural world due to their promiscuous feeding habits. Most ticks go through three stages in their lives and feed on a different host at each stage, whilst simultaneously collecting hitchhiking microbes in their blood meals. Ticks also have one of the widest distributions of any vector on Earth – they can be found on every continent, including frigid Antarctica. This combination of ubiquity and a bad habit for accumulating pathogenic microbes make ticks some of the most dangerous vectors on the planet.
So why ticks? And why now?
