Maine researchers are looking at the growing tick population.

May is Lyme Disease Awareness Month, with the majority of cases occurring throughout the summer.

SCARBOROUGH, ME. (AP) – Scientific research may be a messy business.

This is particularly true when dealing with the tick, one of the most despised creatures of the animal world.

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Chuck Lubelczyk works at the Maine Medical Center Research Institute as a vector ecologist. He and his staff explore the woods in each county with a corduroy sheet, hunting for ticks to collect and send back to the Scarborough institute.

Maine has the highest incidence rate of Lyme disease in the country, with 1629 cases verified by the CDC in 2019. Ticks flourish in moderate springs and humid summers, according to Lubelczyk. The institute's experts, notably Dr. Rebecca Robich, have discovered that as Maine's climate changes, populations are migrating north and biting later.

"As you go farther north, different locations come up with a greater proportion of infection rates, and that's presumably attributable to the fact that the deer tick is moving northward," Robich said.

"Because of climate change, we now have a longer tick season," Lubelczyk remarked. "And you don't often think of December as a time when you have to worry about ticks, but you do in a lot of years now, at least in southern Maine."

Dr. Susan Elias, a fellow ecologist, has been keeping watch on the spread as well.

"You get bare land with early snowmelt," she said. "This is also beneficial to ticks since they need a blood meal."

Ticks may have a sluggish year if the spring is dry, according to Lubelczyk. The hunt for a blood feast might be more intense than ever if Maine receives an ordinary or severe amount of rain.

On Nantucket, MIT researchers suggest using mice to combat Lyme disease.

According to experts, tens of thousands of native white-footed mice modified to resist the bacterium that causes Lyme disease might help decrease disease spread.

To address the rising pandemic of Lyme illness, MIT scientists propose unleashing thousands of genetically engineered mice on the wealthy holiday spot of Nantucket.

The Mice Against Ticks initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab presented their concept to inhabitants of the island off Cape Cod during a recent meeting, according to The Boston Globe.

Hundreds of thousands of native white-footed mice altered to resist the bacterium that causes Lyme disease might help decrease disease spread, according to the researchers. They claim that if Lyme disease was less common in mice, fewer ticks would get it, resulting in fewer instances in people.

The concept would need to be approved by regulators, as well as local backing, but Joanna Buchthal, the project's research director, believes it is a "genuine, if novel" strategy to combat the illness.

"With so many individuals suffering from Lyme disease on a daily basis, we urgently need a solution," she told the newspaper.

According to the Globe, Nantucket is one of Massachusetts' hotspots for Lyme disease, which is now the island's most frequent infectious ailment.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, Lyme disease cases have almost quadrupled countrywide since 1991, with the biggest increases occurring in Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire.