You may think that the transmission of Lyme disease is very easy - you get it from the deer bites of the deer. That information is inherently true and if you want to avoid Lyme disease, that's all you need to really know. However, it is interesting to see what is in the forest, and it helps explain why Lyme disease spreads and becomes more common.
Infection with Lyme disease begins with a white-footed mouse, a common forest creature possessing Borrelia burgdorferi, the causative fungus of Lyme disease. In the most common scenario, newly hatched larvae Ixodes sp. Ticks fed the mice and infected the organisms. Mites grow from larval stages to adult mites and feed as other hosts aging.
In both the nymph and adult stages, it is attached to the open forest, the same kind of environment that the white tail deer likes, and the high grass at the edge of the forest. When the deer wanders, the tick goes up and eats another blood meal. Men who wander around, or even dogs, raccoons, and even birds, are not annoying. Deer ticks easily eat these hosts and other warm-blooded animals.
Borrelia burgdorferi is handed over to the new host as a mite's bait. Many animals are not affected by living things, the immune system simply kills it. White tail deer and some bird species are lucky animals that do not become Lyme disease. However, human beings suffer from long and debilitating diseases.
Deer is responsible for supporting many ticks. A deer can eat hundreds of ticks at any time. People who have driven the roads of Northeast North America at dusk or dawn in the summer know that the population of the white tail deer has increased so much more than ever. The deer grazes on the roadside and wanders in cities and gardens. Many of the deer mean a lot of mites, and deer in the human community means the transmission of lime to humans.
Deer does not spread Lyme disease to a large geographical distance, but the bird does it. When a deer tick is bitten by a bird, two things happen. If birds are already infected, if you are bitten by an infected tick, new ticks will be infected and you can spread that creature to other hosts. If the ticks are already infected and there are no birds, the creatures pass other ways, and the ticks take days to finish the meal, so both ticks and birds will come from the departure point before the ticks descend It may be several miles away. Both can continue lime transmission. Birds migrating are thought to have spread B. burgdorferi to many new regions.
The last factor to consider is global warming. A temperate climate pioneers a new field for deer ticks and survives in an area that could not bear the cold winter temperatures in the past. In this way, the ticks taken over by migrating birds are increasingly likely to survive on a trip.
