Angela Newman of Biltmore Forest, North Carolina, remembers the bizarre symptoms she began experiencing almost a decade ago. Blurry vision, a stiff neck, hypersensitive skin, numbness and weakness that would come and go.

She saw a variety of medical specialists, undergoing an MRI, CT scan and psychiatric assessments. The doctors often dismissed her symptoms as anxiety or depression, Newman, 57, said.

Lyme Disease Diagnosis

Finally, at a college reunion she mentioned her illness to a friend who recognized the mysterious symptoms as a possible case of Lyme disease. When she called her primary doctor for a Lyme disease test, he told her, “I don’t think you have Lyme. We don’t really have that around here,” Newman said. “I said ‘I don’t care what you think. I want you to test me.’”

The results were positive, a diagnosis that took five years to make. Within days of receiving antibiotics, her symptoms started to abate. It took nearly a year to feel like her usual, energetic self.

Newman never found a tick but had noticed a welt on her leg that looked a little bit like a spider bite.

Ticks in North Carolina

New research published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention underscores how the bugs have gained a foothold in unexpected places farther south. The research found that Lyme disease should be considered a major threat to areas farther south than previously thought.

Dr. Ross Boyce, the CDC study’s author and a researcher who specializes in tick-borne diseases, said the new research “is the slam dunk,” proving that Lyme disease is a significant threat to areas in North Carolina.

Boyce and his colleagues focused the research on Biltmore Forest, a small mountain town nestled along the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway. From November 2024 through August 2025, they canvassed 22 household lawns, collecting 373 ticks.

The majority, 76.9%, were blacklegged, or deer, ticks. Those are the ones known to carry bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi, which causes Lyme disease in humans.

More than a third, 39.6%, of the adult blacklegged ticks tested positive for the bacteria. “That is a number that you might see in places like Pennsylvania, New York, New England states where Lyme is common,” Boyce said.

The research also found, for the first time, North Carolina ticks with other types of disease-causing bacteria.

Importance of Awareness

Mark Soloski, senior adviser of the Lyme Disease Research Center at Johns Hopkins Medicine, said the discoveries, particularly of the new bacteria in North Carolina, are “significant,” and that physicians and healthcare workers, especially in that region, need to be very mindful and aware that ticks infected with this bacteria have moved in.

Soloski was not involved with the new research.

Biltmore Forest is a small town, with just under 1,500 residents. While the new research found 17 Lyme disease cases in the area, Biltmore Forest town manager Jonathan Kanipe said he’d been hearing anecdotal reports of the illness for years.

The ticks that cause it were clearly abundant.

“We’ve had public works employees pulling ticks off of them at what I would call a pretty steady rate,” Kanipe said.

Newman and Kanipe mobilized a community group to raise awareness of the tick-borne threat. The efforts caught the attention of UNC’s Boyce and led to the research published Thursday; Kanipe and Newman are citizen co-authors.

Lyme disease is the most prevalent tick-borne illness in the U.S., with cases increasing dramatically since the mid-1990s. Most infections have been concentrated in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest, where blacklegged ticks are most prevalent.

As winters become warmer, deer, mice and other rodent populations move to different parts of the country. The ticks that feed on those animals go with them, expanding the tick-borne illness landscape and increasing infections nationwide.

An increasing number of communities are at risk “as infected ticks continue to expand geographically,” Lars Eisen, a research epidemiologist at the CDC’s Division of Vector-Borne Diseases in Fort Collins, Colorado, wrote in an email.

“It’s important people understand the changing risks for Lyme and other tick-borne diseases.”

Original reporting: NBC10 Boston — read the source article.