Ticks warm to the park

Soon after he began taking Lee Ann Sporn’s introductory biology course in the fall of 2018, Bryan confided to his professor that he frequently felt sick, as though he was fighting a mysterious disease that wouldn’t go away. A freshman at Paul Smith’s College near Saranac Lake, Bryan sometimes asked during class to be excused, which Sporn later learned was due to fevers that would spike without warning.

One weekend he was suffering severe abdominal pain and urinating blood. Worried that he was gravely ill, he sought emergency care at Champlain Valley Physicians’ Hospital in Plattsburgh.

“Tests revealed abnormal liver function,” Sporn said, “but he was released with no diagnosis and no treatment plan.”

Sporn, a biology professor and coordinator of the college’s Human Health and the Environment program, had been doing research on ticks and tick-borne illnesses in the Adirondacks for several years. With her field work in the back of her mind, she began to doubt that Bryan’s doctors were on the right track—they had suggested he might have leukemia—and told him that it seemed to her like an infection.

“I thought of tick-borne diseases because I study them,” Sporn recalled, “but thought this was likely too much of a coincidence, so I let it go.”

That changed when