Physician Supports Deer Control To Eradicate ‘Plague’ Of Lyme Disease

By John Voket

Representatives from one regional organization believe Newtown and other Connecticut communities can eliminate Lyme disease in their populations within just a few years by employing aggressive deer control programs including strategic closed hunts on public land.

Newtown Rotarians got a crash course in deer overpopulation dangers, tick biology, and Lyme disease during a talk August 15 featuring Dr Georgina Scholl, a physician and research chair with the Fairfield County Municipal Deer Management Alliance.

Dr Scholl presented strong evidence supporting aggressive local deer control programs as the only current and real means of significantly reducing and in some cases completely eliminating Lyme disease, while clarifying other important points the area’s deer population and the risk that rapidly increasing population is posing to the state’s environment, farming industry, public health, and safety.

She also pointed out that the health of Connecticut’s deer population is still relatively good, which means controlled hunting, or farming, of deer could feed thousands of the state’s the hungry and homeless for months following these organized hunting activities.

In a subsequent interview with The Bee following her Rotary presentation, Dr Scholl said that Fairfield County has the highest rate of Lyme disease in the United States, and the number of cases continues to rise despite all the measures that are recommended to try and avoid tick bites (such as spraying and landscaping with woodchips).

“The answer lies in seriously reducing the size of our deer herd,” Dr. Scholl said. “We need to return to the time before Lyme was recognized in 1975 and look at how few deer we had in Connecticut in those days.”

Since that time the deer population has been allowed to grow very rapidly. Lack of natural predators and the explosion of growth in suburban and outlying housing development in recent years has created the ideal habitat for deer while creating increased restrictions to state hunting practices.

“The state Department of Environmental Protection has until very recently been trying to increase the deer population for sport hunters,” Dr Scholl said. “Now the numbers are out of control.”

That out-of-control deer population is not only significantly enabling the spread of Lyme disease, but is creating millions of dollars in damage to household landscaping, and could eventually cause billions in losses to local farmers whose crops are being decimated by the foraging animals. The deer are virtually clear cutting the state’s open spaces up to the level of about seven feet, the height large adult deer can reach, to strip shoots from trees, and have already destroyed most of the ground nesting environment for many other species of birds and other animals that help balance the ecosystem.

From a public safety standpoint, Dr Scholl showed Rotarians statistics about the increasing number of auto collisions resulting from deer. These crashes have killed hundreds of people across the nation and may already be impacting overall auto insurance costs for related incidents, which are already topping millions of dollars in payouts right here in Connecticut.

She also took local Lyme disease support groups to task for downplaying the role deer play in enabling the illness to spread. She noted that many organizations still advocate dealing with the white-footed mice, which are known carriers of tick nymphs that eventually grow to feed on deer, and subsequently infect the human population.

“This is a common misconception,” Dr Scholl said. “The mice carry the Lyme bacteria and we know they have done so for at least 150 years, way before humans got Lyme disease. But it’s the deer that spread the infection to humans through the black-legged or deer ticks. Without the deer or a sufficiently large number of deer, there would be no deer ticks at all.”

She explained that the infected ticks cannot breed without the blood of the deer.

“Just think, without sufficient deer there would be no ticks to worry about — which means not only Lyme would cease to affect humans but that would also prevent the newer emerging tick borne diseases ehrlichiosis and babesiosis,” Dr Scholl said.

She said the worst affected towns including Easton, Redding, Newtown, and Greenwich have between 60 and 100 deer per square mile. But studies have shown that with fewer than eight deer per square mile the ticks virtually disappear.

The doctor acknowledged that it will be hard to achieve an eight-deer-per-square-mile ratio anytime soon, but many towns are already working on programs to reduce deer populations to between 12 and 20 per square mile.                  

Dr Scholl says there is an urgency to create local programs for several reasons: since deer can double their population in two to three years, the more ticks there are the more Lyme cases there will be.

“And some of these people will develop late Lyme disease with serious long-term complications, which they didn’t need to get,” she said.

Another problem that is on the horizon has to do with new illnesses cropping up in the deer population.

“If we don’t act soon the deer in Connecticut may become infected with chronic wasting disease,” she said. “This is a deer version of ‘mad cow’ disease that will make the venison risky for human consumption, therefore it will be impossible to donate deer meat to programs such as Hunters for the Hungry. It may be difficult to get hunters to harvest the deer for free if they cannot use the meat themselves either. Then there will be an enormous disposal problem as the deer get sick and die.”

Dr Scholl said communities like Newtown need help from federal and state bodies that are responsible for public health and the protection of the environment.

“We need a review of the hunting restrictions to enable more effective hunting, that is not for sport but for deer herd reduction,” she said. “We need state epidemiologists and senior public health directors to acknowledge the cause of the Lyme epidemic and to tell the towns that they need to effectively reduce their deer herds within as few as three years.”

She pointed out that Lyme disease, especially in communities like Newtown, can be considered approaching proportions where it can almost be looked upon like a “plague.”

“If it was rats causing the plague of Lyme disease we would be dealing with it right now,” Dr Scholl concluded. “We all recognize that the deer is a beautiful gentle creature and we want to control them in the most humane way possible. We aren’t talking about eliminating the species; we just want a small healthy herd of deer that live deep in the woodlands, not scavenging desperately on the edge of the highways where they pose even further risk to the environment and public safety.”