photo by: University of Kansas

A female Lone Star tick.

A peaceful walk with her dog led to Sandra Issa acquiring a tick bite — and, ultimately, to her having to stay away from red meat and dairy products.

“I removed the tick and didn’t think too much about it, and then I was having stomach problems,” Issa said.

” … And then on the Fourth of July I ate part of a hamburger,” she said. “As the evening went on, I started thinking, ‘Wow, I don’t feel good.'”

Issa later vomited and broke out in hives. After researching her symptoms, she discovered she may have alpha-gal syndrome — an allergy to red meat and other mammal products triggered by a Lone Star tick bite. A doctor performed a blood test, and, indeed, it came back positive.

Now, Issa doesn’t consume these products and often spends more time reading labels in grocery stores, adjusting recipes and avoiding going out to eat. She doesn’t even drink her coffee with half-and-half anymore.

The truth is, ticks and the diseases they spread are becoming more common, and Kansas has not been a major focus in research on local tick populations. Most investigations into ticks and tick-borne diseases have centered on Lyme disease — primarily linked to deer ticks, or black-legged ticks — which are more prevalent in northern and eastern regions.

photo by: University of Kansas

Several researchers survey for ticks.

In an effort to help medical professionals better diagnose tick-related illnesses, A. Townsend Peterson, a distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at KU, and a team of researchers sampled ticks from sites across Kansas for two years and documented the pathogens they carry.

While the CDC maps show that ticks with Lyme disease – the most common tick-borne illness – are rarely present in Kansas compared to other parts of the U.S., the actual number could be higher due to underreporting. Lyme disease causes a range of symptoms, like a red rash, fatigue and fever. If left untreated, it can lead to serious complications affecting the joints, heart and nervous system.

According to the CDC, 62,551 cases of Lyme disease were reported in 2022 by state health departments and the District of Columbia, which is 1.7 times higher than the annual average of 37,118 cases reported between 2017 and 2019.

However, recent estimates suggest that about 476,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed and treated for Lyme disease each year, including some who may not actually have the disease.

The increase in tick-borne illnesses is likely linked to climate change allowing ticks to expand into colder regions and human development encroaching on their habitats, raising the risk of bites. But a partnership between KU researchers and a biotechnology firm, Design-Zyme, is focused on creating a Lyme disease vaccine with the intention of making it available across the country.

“There is not an approved Lyme disease vaccine for humans,” said Peter Petillo, founder and CEO of Design-Zyme. “That’s the problem.”

A vaccine to slow the spread of Lyme disease

The vaccine currently under development will be funded by a $3 million Small Business Innovation Research award, and Scott Hefty, a professor of molecular biosciences at KU, and Petillo will be collaborating on the project.

The goal of the SBIR grant that was recently awarded to the pair is to have a “self-adjuvanting” Lyme disease vaccine – or a vaccine that stimulates the immune response without needing additional substances to enhance it – ready for preclinical development.

The vaccine will work by targeting multiple strains of the pathogen Borrelia burgdorferi, which is the primary bacterium that causes Lyme disease. It will use hyaluronic acid as the substance to create a stronger immune response.

“That’s one of the key things with the vaccine formulation, is it is developed so that it would be protective against strains that are not just prevalent in the United States, but worldwide,” Hefty said.

photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

From left to right: Peter Petillo, Scott Hefty, Dwight Deay III, and Erik Naylor.

Hefty recruited Kathryn Reif, an associate professor in parasitology at Auburn University, and Robin Orozco, an assistant professor in molecular biosciences at KU, to complete the team. Hefty and Reif are concentrating on challenge studies, while Orozco brings her expertise in immunology.

This isn’t the first time a vaccine has been created to reduce the cases of Lyme disease. The last vaccine, LYMErix, was 75% effective and was discontinued in 2002 after manfacturers cited insufficient consumer demand, even though the incidence of the disease was rising and deer ticks’ geographical area was expanding.

With climate change advancing rapidly, ticks are encroaching on new areas, prompting questions about what diseases from these blood-sucking creatures might be a threat to humans.

Understanding ticks in Kansas

Peterson and his team at KU, in collaboration with researchers from Pittsburg State University, the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University and the University of Central Oklahoma, collected around 25,000 ticks from various sites in Kansas and Oklahoma.

The team did this by waving a flannel flag across vegetation or dragging the flannel between two poles. Another method included the use of dry ice traps because ticks are able to find their hosts not just by movement, but also by detecting exhaled carbon dioxide.

According to the team’s research, the most common ticks – and diseases they potentially carry – found in the Kansas sites are the Lone Star tick, which can transmit ehrlichiosis, Heartland virus, tularemia, alpha-gal syndrome and STARI; the dog tick, which may carry tularemia and Rocky Mountain spotted fever; the Gulf Coast tick, associated with Rickettsia parkeri rickettsiosis; and the deer tick, which transmits Lyme disease, anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis, babesiosis, Borrelia miyamotoi, and Powassan disease.

photo by: Screenshot

Map of Kansas and Oklahoma showing the locations of the 10 sites that were sampled for ticks. Some of the site names have been abbreviated or nicknamed: Lake Arcadia (Arcadia), Cheney Wildlife Area (CWA), Deer Creek Wildlife Area (DCW), Kanza View Park (KVP), Rutlader Wildlife Area (WOP) and Webster State Park (WSP) Circle size indicates the number of ticks captured, which ranged from 2 ticks/day to 382 ticks/day across the sites.

Peterson said that the researchers have begun to notice a pattern in the active periods of different tick species. The Lone Star tick is often active in the summer months, while the deer tick has only been looking for hosts from mid-October to mid-March.

While the ticks that can transmit Lyme disease are here, Peterson said they did not find the Lyme disease pathogen out of all the deer ticks that were collected in Kansas and Oklahoma. However, depending on the location throughout the U.S., anywhere from less than 1% to more than 50% of the ticks are infected with it.

“So either it’s very rare, much rarer than out east, or it’s not here,” Peterson said. “It could be either of those things.”

Tick-borne illnesses are often misdiagnosed

Peterson said that for a place like Kansas, there’s not much awareness in the medical community for tick-borne diseases, and there are often misdiagnoses or missed diagnoses.

“These bacterial pathogens transmitted by ticks are not necessarily on the radar of the medical community,” Peterson said. “And part of that is just there’s not good information about it. We set out to fix that, and I think we’ve made very good progress.”

Lyme disease can be challenging to diagnose, since its early symptoms can be similar to those of many other illnesses. Additionally, blood tests for diagnosis may not always be reliable, especially in the early stages of the disease.

photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

The tick-borne illness cases documented by Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health from 2021 to 2024.

While Peterson and the researchers didn’t find the Lyme disease pathogen in their collected ticks, Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health reported three cases out of the 31 documented tick-borne illness cases this year. These illnesses were identified through a blood test, and the leading reported illness was Rocky Mountain spotted fever, at a total of 12 cases in 2024.

Additionally, Issa said that oftentimes, people can get misdiagnosed with alpha-gal syndrome because there’s such a lag time between when you ingest food and when the symptoms appear.

“The symptoms don’t turn up until like two to six hours later, which makes it very hard to diagnose because people don’t pin it necessarily to what they ate hours ago,” Issa said.