The making of Lyme disease: a political ecology of ticks and tick-borne illness in Virginia

Abstract

ABSTRACTScholars often attribute the increases in the incidence of tick-borne diseases to anthropogenic factors such as climate change and shifting land use patterns. However, they tend to overlook the politics and economics underpinning such factors and, in turn, what is necessary to change them. To remedy these problems, I take a political ecological approach to understand why and when anthropogenic changes, such as sub- and ex-urban development, facilitate the emergence and spread of ticks, their hosts, and the diseases they carry. Examining the case of Lyme disease in Northern Virginia, I argue that the emergence and spread of Lyme disease to new locations is not only the result of climate change and sub- and ex-urbanization, but also the result of the adoption of liberal economic policies, specifically financial deregulation and the privatization of government services. To support this argument, I demonstrate how changing forms of housing finance and the rise in federal government subcontracting from the 1970s onward propelled the growth of large-lot suburbs south of Washington D.C. and resulted in the creation of a landscape in which tick-hosts, ticks, and tick-borne disease thrive.