Inside Out: A plea for a 4-poster program to prevent disease

I’ve allowed myself to get drawn in to a political effort to bring the 4-poster to North Haven. I’m helping with publicity and some strategizing. I’m also helping to arrange a conference on the 4-poster set for October 5 at Pierson High School in Sag Harbor featuring Mat Pound, one of its inventors.

I wouldn’t try if I didn’t believe, despite all recent signs to the contrary, that good public policy can be fostered through engagement and reason.

I live in that village just across the channel from Shelter Island, for which it was the control site when the Island — under the state DEC’s guidance and the Cornell Cooperative Extension’s management — conducted a three-year study of the 4-poster’s effectiveness and environmental impact.

Most people over here seem to think of the 4-poster as some kind of bizarre creation from outer space that will destroy the ecosystem if it is deployed, even though it’s old hat now on exotic, far-away Shelter Island.

Never mind the fact that thousands of properties on the East End are repeatedly sprayed with permethrin, the same insecticide used in the 4-poster.

Never mind that the county runs a “Vector Control” department whose job it is to spray insecticides in sensitive environments all over the county to kill mosquitos. It should be trying to kill ticks, too, which present a well documented and immediate health threat, but it doesn’t.

No, the 4-poster, with its concentration of permethrin in an oily base that is applied by paint rollers to the heads and necks of deer (where ticks concentrate) is a nightmare that will wreak environmental catastrophe.

Never mind that the oily base and the paint-rollers of the 4-poster provide a precisely targeted application system. Never mind that scientists who conducted the Shelter Island study found no traces of permethrin in the environment there but did find it in the environment at the control site, North Haven, where no 4-posters had been deployed but plenty of people spray their yards.

They also found that traces of the pesticide turned up in the tissue of deer on Shelter Island no more than they did in North Haven.

Not only that, the scientists found the Island’s 60 4-posters dramatically reduced the population of ticks on the Island after a three-year deployment. There’s no other way to kill them so effectively, short of burning down the village. So why don’t we use it?

North Haven is loaded with ticks, just like Shelter Island was and may be again if more 4-posters aren’t deployed. The big scourge these days seems to be lone star ticks. During the summer, my wife and I have found ourselves covered with red dots, just as we did for the first time last year. They are the bite sites of tiny lone star larvae, each smaller than a poppy seed and usually long gone by the time the little red welts have appeared.

Lone stars seem to be everywhere. Unlike deer ticks and dog ticks, lone stars can tolerate heat and dry conditions. They can survive out in the lawn. Mow the lawn, step in a recent hatch site, and say hello to those red spots.

So far, these bites — which many people, including doctors and pharmacists, erroneously call “chiggers” — have not caused an illness, unlike the bites of the deer ticks we and our dogs have suffered. We’ve both popped two doxycyclines as a prophylactic a couple of times this year after finding a deer tick on ourselves. When our dog this week began limping and developed a mild fever, the vet agreed it probably was his second case of Lyme disease in two years. So he’s on a three-week run of doxy now along with an anti-inflammatory drug.

A few years ago I had a bad case. I developed Bell’s Palsy. My left eye was blurry and itched. I also had trouble moving food from one side of my mouth to the other as I ate. It turned out the left side of my face was partially paralyzed; I couldn’t fully close my left eye and I couldn’t maneuver food to chew it on the left side. Weird!

Years later, there’s still a droop on the left corner of my mouth, as if I’d had a mild stroke.

So. I’ve got to act. Thanks to a neighbor who is leading the way, I’ve jumped into the fray to help her out.

I’ve always admired the people who have the guts and the energy to engage in politics. Even the people who aren’t very good at it or push agendas with which I do not agree. I am much more comfortable, however, playing the observer and reporting on the issues and personalities at play on the political stage. I’m good at that. I’m not sure I’m any good at politics. I lack the certainty in one’s own cause that political people need to lead and succeed.

But somebody’s got to do something.

I have city neighbors, very nice people who let their kids play all over the yard all day long. It’s lovely to hear their bubbly laughter but I worry about the ticks. “We spray,” they tell me. We did too, for years, but kept getting bites anyway, so this year we stopped wasting the money.

I mentioned having had erlichiosis once (at the same time that I had Lyme and babesiosis), which made me pee pink because I was anemic, sloughing off red blood cells.

“Oh! Did you know? Fred had to go to the hospital last week because he was anemic and they don’t know why!”

Could it be that a smart young weekender couple in North Haven could have so little awareness of the tick threat?

“Have you guys found yourselves covered in little red welts this summer?” I asked.

“Oh sure. We thought they were mosquito bites,” Fred said as he played with one of his daughters out on the lawn.

Oh, brother.

Something is wrong with this picture. The lack of knowledge, the lack of understanding, the lack of awareness, and — in the case of the 4-poster — the hare-brained opposition all strike me as nutty as the Creationists and the people who believe global warming is a liberal conspiracy.

It seems so clear to me. It should be easy to make the case. But in this new anti-science world of babble and myth, this is going to be no easy task.