Ticks that cause Lyme and other diseases have migrated south. Are doctors ready? - NBC News

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Angela Newnam of Biltmore Forest, North Carolina, remembers the “bizarre” symptoms she began experiencing almost a decade ago. Blurry vision, a stiff neck, hypersensitive skin, numbness and weakness that would come and go.

She saw a variety of medical specialists, undergoing an MRI, CT scan and psychiatric assessments. The doctors often dismissed her symptoms as anxiety or depression, Newnam, 57, said.

Finally, at a college reunion she mentioned her illness to a friend who recognized the mysterious symptoms as a possible case of Lyme disease.

When she called her primary doctor for a Lyme disease test, he told her, “I don’t think you have Lyme. We don’t really have that around here,” Newnam said. “I said, ‘I don’t care what you think. I want you to test me.’”

The results were positive, a diagnosis that took five years to make. Within days of receiving antibiotics, her symptoms started to abate. It took nearly a year to feel like her usual, energetic self.

“I knew I wasn’t crazy,” she said. “It’s frustrating to have people basically say, ‘I think you need antidepressants.’”

Newnam never found a tick but had noticed a welt on her leg that looked a little bit like a spider bite.

At the time Newnam was infected in North Carolina with Lyme, the disease was believed to be largely limited to the Northeast. New research published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention underscores how the bugs have gained a foothold in unexpected places farther south.

“It was always thought that Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which is caused by different bacteria, was our major tick-borne disease,” said University of North Carolina School of Medicine’s Dr. Ross Boyce, the CDC study’s author and a researcher who specializes in tick-borne diseases.

The new research “is the slam dunk,” he said, proving that Lyme disease should be considered a major threat to areas farther south than previously thought.

Boyce and his colleagues focused the research on Biltmore Forest, a small mountain town nestled along the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway. From November 2024 through August 2025, they canvassed 22 household lawns, collecting 373 ticks.

The majority, 76.9%, were blacklegged, or deer, ticks. Those are the ones known to carry bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi, which causes Lyme disease in humans.

More than a third, 39.6%, of the adult blacklegged ticks tested positive for the bacteria. “That is a number that you might see in places like Pennsylvania, New York, New England states where Lyme is common,” Boyce said.

The research also found, for the first time, North Carolina ticks with other types of disease-causing bacteria.

Four of the ticks were found to carry Anaplasma phagocytophilum, and four others carried Borrelia miyamotoi, a bacterium that causes hard tick relapsing fever and is almost always thought to be concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest. Both types can cause flu-like symptoms in humans.

The discoveries, particularly of the new bacteria in North Carolina, are “significant,” said Mark Soloski, senior adviser of the Lyme Disease Research Center at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “Physicians and healthcare workers, especially in that region, need to be very mindful and aware that ticks infected with this bacteria have moved in.” Soloski was not involved with the new research.

Biltmore Forest is a small town, with just under 1,500 residents. While the new research found 17 Lyme disease cases in the area, Biltmore Forest town manager Jonathan Kanipe said he’d been hearing anecdotal reports of the illness for years.

The ticks that cause it were clearly abundant.

“We’ve had public works employees pulling ticks off of them at what I would call a pretty steady rate,” Kanipe said. He recalled a time when he was simply walking around a parking lot to survey where a planned trail would be built, and finding ticks on his hands. “It freaked me out because I wasn’t even walking in the woods. I was just next to grass,” he said.

Newnam and Kanipe mobilized a community group to raise awareness of the tick-borne threat. The efforts caught the attention of UNC’s Boyce and led to the research published Thursday; Kanipe and Newnam are citizen co-authors.