Combating The Lyme Epidemic

To the Editor:

It’s easy to get emotional over a deer cull. We all saw Bambi. Indeed, The Bee’s letter pages have been full of righteous indignation over the possibility the town will sanction a reduction of the deer population to combat the Lyme disease epidemic.

Opponents hyperbolically label this option — something that many other towns and government agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have endorsed — as an approved “bloodbath.”

 But town officials need to put aside emotions when confronting what is a matter of public health and safety. Nearly half of residents participating in the Newtown survey reported having someone treated for Lyme in their home, and 80 percent said they’d been bitten by a tick.

That sounds about right — both of my children have contracted the disease. My son Ethan spent the weeks surrounding Thanksgiving hobbling around on crutches — a positively Dickensian sight to befall an athletic nine-year-old.

 It’s the not the fault of our white-tailed cohabitants that this blight has come to our region. Blame the government officials over the years that led towns including our own into pursuing ill-conceived planning and zoning policies, goaded on by McMansion cookie-cutters and their realtor enablers.

Newtown is now overdeveloped. As a consequence, the deer’s natural habitat has shrunk, without the benefit of natural predators to keep their population in check (I’d wager nobody would endorse bringing back mountain lions and wolves as an option).

This would be little more than a matter of traffic safety if deer weren’t the primary carriers of ticks bearing Lyme and other diseases. Like bees pollinating flowers, our cloven-hoofed friends sprinkle these accursed varmints on our lawns, in our gardens and on our playgrounds where they lie in wait for a warm-blooded human to feast upon. Only by focusing on the carriers of the insects will we effectively cease Lyme’s march.

 Thankfully, Lyme disease is no bubonic plague, but its mitigation — a necessity for public health — will require a dramatic thinning out of its carriers, including but not limited to deer. Opponents argue that no cull can be truly effective unless it reduces the population to fewer than 20 animals per square mile from as many as 70 today. Perhaps — but that’s not an excuse for inaction. If anything, it is an ambition this town should embrace.

 True that would mean killing deer — an unfortunate aspect of this least bad of an unappealing set of options before us. But the town can make a virtue of this necessity by asking hunters who fell deer on public land to donate as much of the meat as feasible to local food shelters and soup kitchens.

Let’s be clear — nobody who supports a deer cull does so to fulfill some sort of bloodlust. Rather it is a measure that must be taken for the town’s overall public health and the well-being of our children. Not everybody will be happy with town officials ultimately making this difficult decision to support a cull, but that’s what leadership is about.

Rob Cox

136 Castle Hill Road, Newtown                                                                     January 19, 2010