Life In The Age Of Lyme

Guinea hens are bald, wattled and graceless. They resemble feathered footballs. Worse, they are surly, loud and unmusical, often at 3 in the morning. But they are voracious gobblers of bugs and are especially fond of the tiny deer ticks that carry the spirochetes of Lyme disease. Which is why model Christie Brinkley, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED's swimsuit sweetie some years ago, learned to love them. She has installed a flock on her estate in East Hampton, N.Y., and hands out chicks (called keets) to her neighbors.

Before she got the hens, Brinkley had taken to wearing high fishing boots when she walked to the beach. "We were really infested," she says. "It seemed as if every blade of grass had a tick hanging off it." Her hen patrol has reduced the local tick population, although that has not prevented her from contracting the tormenting ailment that she and millions of other householders routinely take elaborate pains to avoid. The tick that infected her with what was diagnosed last week as Lyme disease probably, she thinks, bit her while she was horseback riding.

Fear of Lyme disease is justified, and harboring guinea hens is reasonable, if not terribly practical for most people. The nagging affliction often shows itself first as a rash and flulike nausea, fever and aches. Lyme mimics many other illnesses, and in later stages it can escalate to arthritis, meningitis, neurological damage and sometimes physical debility and racking pain. Some 30,000 cases had been reported in the U.S. by the end of last year. From 1986 through 1989, reported cases doubled each year, and a slight drop last year (7,995 cases, from 8,551 the year before) may reflect only a change in reporting criteria.

Thus when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control advises that anyone walking through grass or brush in tick-infested areas wear long-sleeved shirts and long pants taped into sock tops, many people actually do it, though the fashion statement is irredeemably tacky. The meticulous daily body inspection that is the most effective preventive is now a normal routine, like flossing teeth. What you are looking for is the nymphal stage of an arachnid (not an insect) that is louse-size only as an adult and that as a nymph has been compared to a dark freckle. Where you are looking is behind the knees, in pubic and scalp hair, under watchbands, in armpits. Yes, you need a partner for this, and perhaps, if you are no longer 25, a stiff drink.

Old Lyme, Conn., got an undeserved reputation as a pesthole when the disease later named for it was first identified there in 1975. But it is unlikely that the disease really was newly hatched in that area. Decades earlier, on Long Island in New York, a pesky swelling called Montauk knee was causing trouble. In 1908 something indistinguishable from Lyme disease was described in Sweden. Ticks hitch rides not just on deer, mice, humans and other mammals, but also on birds, which helps explain why Lyme disease has been reported in 46 states. (Only Alaska, Arizona, Montana and Nebraska have reported no cases.)

White-tailed deer are suburban creatures, and a surge in the deer population as forests have regrown in the Northeast offers one reason that Lyme disease has hit hard in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania and lower New England. Wisconsin and Minnesota have had smaller outbreaks, and so, though the ticks are a different species, has Northern California.