One-month old contracts rare tick-borne illness
The Vineyard newborn hospitalized for days was diagnosed with Powassan.
Updated Aug. 5
About two weeks ago, West Tisbury resident Tiffany Sisco and her newborn daughter, Lily, were medflighted to Mass General Brigham for Children because the one-month old had a persistent fever of 102 degrees.
Within two days, on July 26, Lily was sent to the pediatric intensive care unit, suffering from lengthy seizures.
For days, doctors looked for clues for what could be causing the illness. The mother went to Facebook to share that “aggressive medication” was administered to stop the seizures, and that doctors had found inflammation of the brain from an infection caused by an unknown virus.
It wasn’t until two days ago that Sisco and her husband, Marcus, learned what caused their daughter’s health scare: a tick bite. Lily contracted Powassan, a rare tick-borne illness, which is only the second detection in a human on the Island in two decades.
“We all know the tick population has gotten extremely worse through the years with new viruses and diseases popping up,” she said in a social media post on Sunday, adding that the couple wanted to share the diagnosis to help inform others and potentially save lives.
“We certainly had no idea a 20-minute walk on the West Tisbury bike path beside our home, a walk we do most every day, could potentially cause my child her life,” Sisco wrote.
Powassan is a tick-borne illness that can be transmitted by the bite of infected Ixodes scapularis ticks, more commonly called deer ticks. The virus can be transmitted within 15 minutes of a tick bite, much faster than other tick-borne pathogens, and there is no specific treatment, vaccine, or cure for the disease.
This case comes at a time when alpha gal is advancing on Lyme’s disease as the number one threat associated with tick bites, the hospital and the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital is seeing a significant rise in tick-related visits to its emergency room, and people are changing their outdoor habitats to avoid a host of tick-related diseases.
Martha’s Vineyard health officials are investigating the Powassan case. The Inter-Island Public Health Excellence Collaborative — made up of town health departments from the Vineyard and Nantucket — announced Monday that they are reviewing preliminary results of an infection in a Vineyard resident and that they are closely monitoring the situation.
Sisco took to social media to repost articles from Island newspapers Monday and confirmed that her daughter was that case.
The press release from the collaborative said that severe cases of Powassan can even be potentially life-threatening and could cause encephalitis, confusion, seizures, and long-term neurological complications.
Sisco said on social media that the nymph tick was the size of a needle tip, and no rash or bullseye was detected. She urged people to check themselves, their children, and their pets and seek medical attention if symptoms after a bite include fever, nausea, headache or confusion, loss of coordination, speech difficulties, or seizures. These symptoms are also listed by the Center for Disease Control (CDC).
Sam Telford, the Tufts University professor with decades of research on Martha’s Vineyard, said in the release that “fortunately, severe disease remains very rare,” and the virus is present annually in a small percentage of deer ticks.
“Between 1 and 2 percent of nymph deer ticks on Martha’s Vineyard are infected,” Telford said. “This is a similar rate to that seen elsewhere in New England. This suggests that many people who are exposed may successfully fight off the virus without ever knowing they were infected.”
Telford told The Times that Powassan is a relative of West Nile Virus, which also only sees a small percentage of symptomatic patients, and an even smaller number that develop a neurologic disease. It’s just really bad luck, he said. Some strains of Powassan don’t travel to the brain or cause neurological impacts, and Telford suggested that local strains and host factors may lead people to be susceptible to severe disease.
In the last two decades, CDC data shows an increase in illness caused by the Powassan virus across the country from one reported case in 2004 to 57 cases in 2024.
With no cure or vaccine, health officials are encouraging prevention.
“Because Powassan virus can be transmitted so quickly—and because there is no treatment—the most effective protection is to prevent tick bites in the first place,” Lea Hamner, contract epidemiologist for Dukes County, is quoted in a release sent out Monday. “With deer ticks, Lone Star ticks, and American Dog ticks all present on Martha’s Vineyard, it is possible to encounter ticks during any month of the year. Tick bite prevention needs to be a year-round habit.”
While there’s only been one confirmed case of the virus on the Vineyard in the last 20 years, the collaborative notes that there have been three cases confirmed in other parts of Massachusetts this year.
Powassan is carried by both nymph and adult deer ticks. While the peak season for the nymphs is from May to July, adult deer ticks are active from fall through early spring whenever outdoor temperatures rise above 40°F.
“Their activity coincides with when we spend most of our time outdoors and, unfortunately, when our Island population grows for tourism season,” Patrick Roden-Reynolds, director of the Martha’s Vineyard Tick Program, said in the release. “This makes nymph deer ticks the main driver of infectious diseases such as Lyme disease, babesiosis, anaplasmosis, borrelia miyamotoi, and Powassan virus.”
Lily is doing better. Sisco announced yesterday that Lily is off the nasogastric feeding tube, gaining weight, and awake enough to feed herself.
A gofundme was started by Ashlee Moreis on behalf of the Sisco family that has already raised over $20,000.
Prevention is key
Local health officials say prevention is the key to avoiding tick-borne illnesses and provided a list of tips for Islanders:
Treat your clothing and gear with permethrin
- DIY sprays last approximately 6 weeks or 6 washes. Follow label instructions.
- Buy pre-treated clothing to get longer effectiveness; in some cases up to 70 washings.
- Send your own clothing to InsectShield.com to get the longer effectiveness (use code MARTHASV2025 for 15% off).
Dress “tick-smart”
- Tuck pants into socks, shirts into pants.
- Wear light-colored clothes to spot ticks more easily.
- Leggings and snug-fitting clothing can prevent ticks from reaching the skin.
Use EPA-registered tick repellents
- Effective ingredients include: DEET, picaridin, IR3535, 2-undecanone, and oil of
- the lemon eucalyptus tree.
- Use the EPA’s Find the Repellent Right for You tool to find the best option.
Be ready with a tick kit
- Stock your home, car, and bag with:
- Repellent to prevent bites
- Sticky lint rollers to remove unattached ticks
- Tweezers to remove attached ticks
- Tape or baggies to secure removed ticks
- Alcohol wipes to clean the bite site
Daily tick checks are a must
- Lint roller your clothing after coming in from the outdoors to remove hitchhikers.
- Change clothes or shower soon after being outdoors.
- Put clothes in the dryer on high for 20 minutes to kill ticks.
- Do full-body tick checks with a mirror — don’t forget crevices.
Vineyard health officials also suggest submitting the tick to TickSpotters for a free expert identification and a bite risk assessment and to use the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Tick Bite Bot to get information on what to do after a tick bite.
FROM 2023:
New invasive tick discovered on the Vineyard
Tick expert says this is “not a huge concern” for people.
An invasive species of tick known as the Asian longhorned tick has been found on Martha’s Vineyard for the first time.
Tick expert Patrick Roden-Reynolds and his colleagues were sampling for deer tick nymphs at a private property in Chilmark on June 9 when they found the longhorn tick. “We happened to pick up a couple mysterious ticks,” Roden-Reynolds said.
Those two mysterious ticks were then sent to a lab for testing, where it was quickly confirmed that they were Asian longhorns.
About a week later, Roden-Reynolds collected a third one in Aquinnah. So far, there are only three confirmed longhorned tick nymphs on the Island, but Roden-Reynolds believes that there are more out there.
But he stressed that this is “not a huge concern.”
“Longhorned ticks aren’t really known to bite humans,” Roden-Reynolds said. “We’re still more worried about deer ticks, lone star ticks, and dog ticks.”
Longhorn ticks are more likely to bite cattle and other livestock, as well as deer and dogs.
The most common diseases carried by Asian longhorned ticks in other countries are bovine theileriosis and babesiosis. However, there are no reported cases of the tick carrying disease in the U.S.
It is unknown if this tick will transmit existing tick-borne pathogens in the U.S. According to Roden-Reynolds, it cannot carry Lyme disease.
Originating from East Asia, longhorned ticks were first reported in the U.S. in 2017, and in Massachusetts in 2022. Three weeks ago, they were also identified on Nantucket.
According to Roden-Reynolds, it’s impossible to know for sure how the longhorn ticks got to the islands, but there is suspicion that they were brought over by people’s dogs.
Asian longhorned ticks are light reddish-brown and approximately 0.1 inches long, about the size of a sesame seed. They do not have distinctive markings, compared with, say, the lone star tick. When fully engorged with blood, longhorned ticks grow to about the size of a pea, and turn gray.
Longhorned ticks are parthenogenic, meaning that the females can lay eggs without a male. One adult female can lay up to 3,000 eggs.
Roden-Reynolds emphasized that this should be considered “just another tick in the environment.”
He advised to continue with tick prevention strategies such as using repellent and doing tick checks.
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