For video and more: https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2019/10/03/ticks-in-pittsburgh-parks/
New Study Shows Lyme Disease Can Be Found In City Parks
Excerpted from CBS Pittsburgh : (10/03/2019)
“We found about 50 percent of the adults infected and around 20 percent of the nymphs,” Simmons said. “So that would be an area that’s highly endemic of Lyme disease.”
Not much is known about ticks in urban settings.
“Nobody’s done work on insular parks that are surrounded by populated areas, right in the heart of cities,” said Tom Simmons, tick researcher at IUP.
Every year, more than 6 million people use Pittsburgh’s parks.
Researchers at IUP looked at the issue in a systematic way, dragging a 1-square-meter cloth on randomly determined 10-square-meter sections of parks, collecting ticks.
They found lots of black-legged ticks, also called deer ticks, which transmit the spiral-shaped Lyme disease bacteria.
For every 100 square meters, one adult rick and three nymphs — the less mature form of ticks — were found.
Lyme Handbook 