In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Virginia Barbatti moved with her family to Martha’s Vineyard full time.
It’s an idyllic beach island off the coast of Massachusetts, a summer retreat for presidents from Ulysses S. Grant to Barack Obama.
In the evenings, around dinnertime, deer roamed Barbatti’s yard. “That was really exciting for us when we first moved here,” Barbatti says. “It felt like we were connecting with nature and the outdoors.”
Fast-forward a few years, and Barbatti’s feelings have changed. “Knowing that there are thousands of ticks potentially on a deer as they’re walking through your yard, and they’re dropping and moving them across the landscape — it really starts to shift perspective.” She’s now director of a nonprofit, started in December 2025, called Tick Free Martha’s Vineyard.
Barbatti’s island haven is plagued with ticks — small arachnid parasites that live in the grass and woods, hitch rides on roaming animals and drink their blood.
When some types of ticks bite humans, they can provoke life-threatening allergies to red meat. Others can transmit bacteria that cause Lyme or other diseases.
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The months of May and June are, unfortunately, primetime for them. “According to our Tick Bite Tracker, ticks are out everywhere,” says Alison Hinckley, epidemiologist and Lyme disease expert with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We’ve seen a real uptick in areas where Lyme disease occurs.”
Almost all Lyme disease cases come from the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Upper Midwest, Hinckley says.
While it won’t be clear how this tick season compares with others until it’s over, it’s shaping up to be among the top three in the past decade, Hinckley says: “So it’s an important time to watch out for tick bites.”
Deer diary
The rise of tick bites and their diseases came with the resurgence of white-tailed deer, especially in the Northeast.
A hundred years ago, the white-tailed deer population was nearly wiped out in the region, says Lea Hamner, an epidemiologist focused on tickborne diseases. Many celebrated their return to the forests as a success for conservation efforts. Now, “we’ve overshot that comeback story significantly,” she says.
Hamner works with the Martha’s Vineyard Tick Program, an initiative of the local government. The island has an average of more than 50 deer per square mile — three to four times what state wildlife officials recommend.
Excess deer can damage forests by overforaging and increase the risk of collisions with cars. They also help grow tick populations. While ticks feed on various mammals and birds, they often find their mates crawling around on the broadside of a deer. “We like to call them the party bus or the singles bar for ticks,” Hamner says.
The ticks drop off the deer and lay eggs, wherever the deer roam. So more deer means more ticks.
For decades, it was deer ticks. Parasites that can transmit bacteria that cause Lyme disease.
Then, in 2011, the lone star tick moved up from the Southeast — probably on the backs of migrating birds. Their appearance sparked a new wave of panic, Hamner says.
Lone star tick bites are itchier and more unpleasant than deer tick bites, and they can gather in what Hamner calls a “tick bomb”: “When they’re babies, they stick together and they get on you all at once. They’re very, very small. But to have hundreds of tiny ticks on you is terrifying,” she says.
Then, there’s the alpha-gal syndrome. Lone star ticks have a sugar in their saliva that can cause life-threatening allergies to certain foods. “Red meat, mammalian meat, is the common denominator,” Hamner says. “Less people are also reactive to dairy products, which come from mammals as well.” Some also develop sensitivities to gelatin capsules used in medicines, and certain soaps and shampoos.
On Martha’s Vineyard, local chefs are trying to offer alpha-gal friendly food options, piecing their new menus together from the internet. “They don’t want to be armed with Google,” Hamner says. “I literally had a restaurant ask me, ‘Is there something better? Because I feel like this is not good enough for me just to be Googling to protect my patrons from having an allergic reaction.'”
Right now, there isn’t. The science and regulatory requirements are still catching up.
The ticks’ slow march
A few years after lone star ticks arrived on Martha’s Vineyard island, they came ashore to mainland Cape Cod — probably also on birds.
“The risk of developing an alpha-gal allergy is not consistent across all of the state,” says Catherine Brown, state epidemiologist at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
In April, the state became the 14th jurisdiction to require cases of alpha-gal syndrome to be reported, Brown says, in an attempt to track where the risks are high and where the condition is emerging.
In a cozy office space in South Yarmouth, Mass., where the walls are covered in posters of beetles and butterflies, Escher Cattle keeps his tick collection. He’s an entomologist and tick educator for the Cape Cod Cooperative Extension program in Barnstable County, which covers Cape Cod.
He pulls out glass vials with ticks preserved in alcohol. Some are from a nearby farm. The ticks are small — ranging from the size of a poppy seed to a sesame seed, depending on their life stage.
For someone who goes looking for ticks, Cattle has a good track record: “I’ve only gotten bit by ticks once in my time here so far,” he says.
His main tips are to pretreat outdoor clothing, starting with shoes, socks and pants, with an insecticide called permethrin, to wear EPA-approved insect repellent on exposed skin and to do a full-body tick check after you’ve walked through potential tick habitat. “Get really familiar with your different raised moles and everything so that you can really tell if a tick has attached to you,” he says.
Getting ticks off quickly lowers your chances of getting disease.
Beyond personal measures
Public health leaders say the onus can’t just be on individuals.
“Some people are very good about paying attention and doing the tick checks and using repellent,” says Brown with the state of Massachusetts. “But at the same time, we’ve continued to see the number of tickborne diseases, the types of diseases, and the numbers [of tick bites] generally increasing.”
In the near future, she hopes that a Lyme disease vaccine, developed by Pfizer, will be effective at preventing Lyme disease and approved by federal regulators. “It’s not a solution to the tick problem, but it could be an important tool to help reduce the most common tickborne diseases,” she says.
In the long term, she hopes researchers can figure out how to reduce tick populations.
But research on tick control lags behind mosquito control by decades. “We’ve been studying mosquitoes as a disease vector since the 1900s, so we know a lot of different things about what works on them,” Cattle, with Barnstable County, points out. “But for ticks, we’ve only really been studying them in this kind of capacity since the 1980s,” when the bacterium that causes Lyme disease was identified.
In the past few decades, researchers have tried multiple strategies, says Stephen Rich, executive director for the New England Center of Excellence in Vector-borne Diseases (NEWVEC) at UMass Amherst.
“We’ve tried spraying ticks on the yard, we’ve tried treating ourselves and even tried making nest boxes for mice where the mice can go and get treated. Nothing has worked the way we want it,” he says. They haven’t made big dents in the tick population or the number of tick bites people get.
Rich is adapting an idea from an oral medicine that protects pets, by making their blood toxic to fleas and ticks, for deer. “There’s some tricks to that,” he says. “There’s differences in the digestive system of white-tailed deer versus dogs and cats. And there’s also the fact that these are game animals, so they have to be treated as a food source.”
In New York City, Staten Island is trying a different solution for deer: controlling the population by sterilizing them. “Every male — or at least most of them — have had vasectomies,” says Maria Diuk-Wasser, a professor in the department of ecology, evolution and environmental biology at Columbia University who tracks tickborne diseases.
The bucks are tranquilized and sterilized in the procedure. She says they’re even watching for new deer coming in from New Jersey, to give them vasectomies too.
The project, which started in 2016, appears to be stabilizing the population. Very few new babies are born, “but the deer can live many years, so it’s not yet a drastic decline overall,” Diuk-Wasser says.
In late May, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced new federal investments in preventing, diagnosing and treating tickborne diseases.

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Chronic inflammation, the kind that hangs around, has been linked to a slew of health problems including diabetes and heart disease. However, the most effective strategies for combatting inflammation, such as limiting your intake of the foods that cause inflammation, are surprisingly simple.
“In respect to healing and immunity, we describe inflammation as a state when the body’s immunity is revved up or working to fight off something and this can be a simple cold/flu or chronic disease, pain, or just dealing with something in the environment,” explained Amy Lee, M.D., a medical nutrition specialist. That’s the natural, acute form, which is a temporary response that subsides when it’s no longer needed. “Acute inflammation helps to protect and heal our bodies,” said Lauren Harris-Pincus, M.S., R.D.N., author of The Protein-Packed Breakfast Club and The Everything Easy Pre-Diabetes Cookbook. “Chronic inflammation, however, is a prolonged state that can damage healthy cells, tissues, and organs, contributing to various diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, and certain cancers.”
Meet the experts: Amy Lee, M.D., a medical nutrition specialist; Lauren Harris-Pincus, M.S., R.D.N., author of The Protein-Packed Breakfast Club and The Everything Easy Pre-Diabetes Cookbook; Scott Keatley, R.D., of Keatley Medical Nutrition Therapy,
Making changes to your diet is a powerful step you can take to reduce chronic inflammation. Read on for the top foods that cause inflammation in the body, plus the key foods to include in an anti-inflammatory diet.
Foods that increase inflammation
“Inflammation can be acquired from the foods we eat or the liquids we drink,” said Dr. Lee. Here are the most common ones that you may want to limit or avoid in order to reduce inflammation.
Red meat
If you’re a burger lover or enjoy a steak a few times a week, it may be time to cut back. “Red and processed meats can increase inflammatory markers including C-reactive protein,” said Harris-Pincus. The C-reactive protein is produced by the liver, and may mean that there is inflammation in the body when levels increase, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Refined carbohydrates
Donuts, sodas, and other foods may taste good, but they could be wreaking havoc on your body. “Excess refined carbs and added sugars can increase blood sugar, which increases production of inflammatory cytokines,” said Harris-Pincus. Cytokines are signaling proteins that help control inflammation in your body, but too many can lead to excess inflammation.
Fried foods
Fried chicken, french fries, chicken parm—these favorites could be doing more harm than good. “Fried foods contain unhealthy fats and may produce [compounds known as] advanced glycation end products (AGEs) during high-temperature cooking, which can promote inflammation,” explained Harris-Pincus.
Ultra-processed foods
Research shows that diets that contain ultra-processed foods (like potato chips, candy, fast food, hot dogs, etc.) may be associated with more of a risk of immune dysregulation-linked diseases, like inflammatory bowel disease and maybe even autoimmune diseases.
“Most inflammatory foods are ultra-processed foods such as things in a bag or box that have been created from a machine,” said Dr. Lee. “Processed foods are notorious for having ingredients that are not natural, preservatives that help it stay on a shelf for a long time, or texturizers/additives to make foods taste better,” which may contribute to inflammation.
That said, “All ultra-processed foods are not created equal. Some are nutrient-dense and health-promoting,” said Harris-Pincus, such as protein powder or canned beans. “Yet others can promote inflammation through different mechanisms,” she added.
Alcohol
Studies show that alcohol consumption, especially in excess, may disrupt the body’s immune response, leading to chronic inflammation. Cutting back on your alcohol intake can have loads of benefits beyond this, though. The World Heart Federation (WHF) suggested that no amount of alcohol is good for heart health. The American Heart Association (AHA) also warns that drinking too much may elevate fats in the blood known as triglycerides, which may increase your risk of heart attack or stroke.
Key foods that help combat inflammation
Just as there are foods that cause inflammation, there are ones that help fight it as well. That’s where the anti-inflammatory diet comes into play. “An anti-inflammatory diet is the selection of foods that reduce the chronic inflammatory response, while at the same time providing the building blocks for use by anti-inflammatory pathways,” Scott Keatley, R.D., of Keatley Medical Nutrition Therapy, previously explained when detailing the eating pattern. “A diet structured to do this has been shown in some human research to help reduce the impact of diabetes mellitus, coronary artery disease, and asthma.”
The eating pattern focuses on whole foods and plant foods that are nutrient-dense. According to experts and the Mayo Clinic, these may include:
Whole grains
Fruits
Vegetables
Oily fish
Nuts
Seeds
Despite what you may have heard, eggs are smart to include as well. “Eggs are not considered an inflammatory food for most people unless they have an egg allergy or specific sensitivity,” said Harris-Pincus. “In fact, several nutrients found in eggs are known to have anti-inflammatory properties including vitamin D, vitamin C, antioxidants including lutein and zeaxanthin, and high-quality protein.”
According to the National Library of Medicine, an anti-inflammatory diet, like the Mediterranean diet, has been shown to reduce your risk of heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and certain cancers, so why not give it a try?
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Ask anyone with a younger sibling, and they will tell you life was infinitely more peaceful before the new arrival. A hilarious Instagram video uploaded by the popular account @goldenchilidog perfectly shows this exact family dynamic, albeit with two Golden Retrievers, in real-time.
A handsome pup named Chili enjoys a gorgeous lake life out in New Jersey. But his daily relaxation routinely gets interrupted by a chaotic younger sibling named Stevie. This high-energy puppy clearly dedicates her entire day to making her big brother’s life difficult.
Golden Retriever falls prey to ‘annoying little sister’ and her actions
The laugh-out-loud footage starts on a sunny lakeside beach where Stevie is aggressively digging a massive hole in the sand. However, poor Chili is sitting right in the splash zone behind her and gets pelted with flying dirt.
The clip quickly cuts to a pier where Chili leaps gracefully into the water. And Stevie jumps immediately after him, landing almost squarely on his head and forcing him to swim away.
This eager-to-please breed is famously patient, but Stevie constantly tests his boundaries. Later, Chili is simply minding his own business by the house when his little sister launches a surprise attack. She hops around frantically and tries to chew on his fluffy cheeks until he literally runs away in defeat. Naturally, she chases him down.
The absolute best part of the video happens while the older Golden Retriever is napping belly-up on the wooden dock. Stevie charges toward him, causing a startled Chili to scramble backward, lose his footing, and tumble straight into the lake. The chaotic clip cuts off right before the final splash, racking up over 3K likes from amused fans.
Viewers are completely cracking up in the video’s comments section over the older Golden Retriever and his incredible patience. One person joked that Chili is probably wondering where he can officially return her. Another fan questioned whether he was actually pushed off the dock or just clumsy.

Soon after Philadelphia hosted America’s bicentennial celebrations in late July 1976, more than 200 attendees of the American Legion Convention at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia fell ill with pneumonia symptoms, including fever, cough and trouble breathing.
Thirty-four of them died.
One of us was a newly minted pulmonary fellow at Hahnemann University Hospital. The hospital was just a mile from the hotel and received some of the first cases.
At the time, no one knew what caused the illnesses. Scientists considered bacterial or viral infection, heavy metal toxins or some combination of environmental causes.
Early days of Legionella pneumophila
Several months later, Dr. Joseph McDade, a microbiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, discovered the organism that was responsible after doing detailed microbiological investigation and animal testing.
The newly recognized bacteria was named Legionella pneumophila after the outbreak at the Legionnaires’ convention.
Legionella pneumophila differed from infectious respiratory organisms known at the time since it multiplied in an environmental water source and was not spread by person-to-person contact.
It was also atypical because these bacteria do not have cell walls and appear colorless with the usual laboratory staining methods – making them difficult to identify.
The CDC found that this same organism had been responsible for earlier, milder clusters of respiratory illness in Pontiac, Michigan, that occurred in 1968. This milder disease form was named Pontiac fever.
Legionella can thrive in pipes, whirlpools and humidifiers
Legionnaires’ disease puzzled epidemiologists and microbiologists because it came from a type of exposure that had not received much attention.
The bacterium was found to multiply in biofilms – slimes that grow on wet surfaces. The air conditioner cooling systems at the Bellevue hotel in 1976 hosted such biofilms.
We now know that household pipes and plumbing fixtures, whirlpools, humidifiers and many other places can provide a habitat for Legionella pneumophila.
From these engineered systems, particles containing the bacteria can become airborne and be inhaled by nearby people. Disinfecting these systems can reduce growth of Legionella, while new designs can reduce the spread of aerosols.
Scientists now also know that Legionella pneumophila is just one of dozens of species of microorganisms that can cause respiratory illness from airborne water particles.
One of us, a professor of environmental engineering, has developed ways to assess the risk for many different environmental microorganisms. Students at Drexel University in Philadelphia used the methods to calculate critical concentrations of Legionella for water management.
Today, there are also consensus guidelines for managing building water systems, especially to reduce the risk of Legionnaires’ disease. For example, it is very important to keep buildings’ hot water lines above critical temperatures and to avoid stagnant zones in which chlorine in water can decay.
Evolving treatments for Legionnaires’
In the early days of treating Legionnaires’, the standard treatment became an antibiotic called erythromycin.
However, erythromycin had many side effects.
Today, doctors typically treat Legionnaires’ and other cases of severe community-acquired pneumonia with newer antibiotics like azithromycin or levofloxacin, which are commonly used for a variety of infections.
Legionnaire’s disease runs a spectrum from very mild disease or with moderate symptoms such as cough and chest congestion to severe cases that require prolonged hospitalization. Fortunately, rapid diagnostic tests have been developed that can detect the organism in urine. Hospitals use these tests to determine whether a patient with respiratory symptoms has Legionella.
Cases are rising and outbreaks continue
Much has been learned about the microbiology, clinical response, ecology and engineering factors linked to Legionella. Still, numerous outbreaks have occurred in the years since 1976.
Notable ones include contamination at a whirlpool spa at a flower show in the Netherlands in 1999 that caused at least 188 illnesses and 21 deaths. In 2015, a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in multiple building cooling towers in the South Bronx in New York resulted in 138 cases and 16 deaths.
More recently, a Legionnaires’ outbreak that began in late July 2025 in the Harlem neighborhood of New York caused 90 hospitalizations and seven deaths.
Reported cases of Legionnaires’ disease in the U.S. have increased in recent decades. Currently there are about 2.5 confirmed cases per 100,000 people per year. According to the CDC, that’s a fivefold increase since 2000.
The CDC estimates that the U.S. economic burden from Legionnaires’ disease is likely more than US$1 billion per year.
Cases peak during warm weather, especially in humid conditions or after rain. Legionella bacteria can grow in cooling towers, hot water tanks, hospital plumbing systems and decorative fountains. Today, hospitals, hotels, cruise ships and office buildings all have routine Legionella monitoring.
Also, different species of Legionella can cause other respiratory illnesses besides Legionnaires’ disease. Current clinical tests may miss much of the diversity of Legionella, but molecular biological tools are improving quickly, and DNA-based methods are expanding the diagnostic tool kit.

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Scientists continue to investigate the potential clinical use of psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in psychedelic mushrooms, for everything from a potential anti-aging treatment to therapy for depression and anxiety.
Some have even suggested it could even be an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, a devastating neurodegenerative condition that affects more than seven million Americans.
Case in point, a recent case report — published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience Neuropharmacology by a small team of researchers in Brazil —describes an experiment involving a woman, in her 80s and who had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for ten years, being given a staggeringly high dose of psilocybin.
After being given “five grams of orally administered psilocybin-containing mushrooms” — well over twice a typical recreational dose and orders of magnitude more than is conventionally prescribed in clinical settings — the team says that the woman experienced what could crudely be described as a reawakening.
In a matter of “days and weeks” — the report remains vague on the exact timeline — the patient went from “marked hypofunction and predominantly monosyllabic speech” to restored “urinary continence,” improved mobility, “increased emotional responsiveness” and “sustained social interaction.” Even her “contextual memory retrieval” allegedly improved.
The octogenarian must’ve gone through a lot, spending hours sweating profusely in a “deep sleep-like state” following the administering of the drug. The woman was even given a second, three-gram dose after a month due to “persistence of clinically meaningful improvements.” (Futurism has reached out to the authors about the woman’s ability to consent to the eyebrow-raising treatment given her state.)
To be perfectly clear, the whole thing is pretty dodgy, despite getting considerable breathless media coverage in the New York Post and the Dallas Express, which called the report a “breakthrough.” Beyond the hard-to-miss absence of scientific rigor and consent issues, the “report does not show that psychedelics reverse Alzheimer’s disease,” as University of Sheffield neuroscience PhD candidate Rahul Sidhu wrote in an essay for The Conversation,
The report wasn’t a controlled clinical trial, for starters, and its single subject’s diagnosis wasn’t “confirmed using biomarkers.” There was also no control group, no standardized testing of memory and thinking before the woman was given the shrooms, and observations were “largely based on reports from caregivers and family members,” Sidhu cautioned.
In short, the case report appears to be little more than a wild story of an elderly woman being given an enormous dose of drugs. In the words of the case report itself, it was an intervention that was “exploratory and observational in nature.”
Author and University of Sao Paulo neuroscientist Marcos Lago told Futurism in an email that he thought it was “important to frame the case carefully.”
“This was a single case report in a patient with advanced Alzheimer’s disease, and the observed improvements were transient,” he wrote. “The paper does not claim disease reversal, does not establish psilocybin as a treatment for dementia, and should not be interpreted as a protocol or recommendation for unsupervised use.”
“In my view, the scientific relevance of the case is that it raises a hypothesis worth investigating,” Lago wrote. “Whether psilocybin, under appropriate clinical, ethical, and regulatory conditions, may temporarily modulate communication, emotional responsiveness, social engagement, continence, and functional behavior in some patients with severe neurodegenerative impairment.”
Beyond the informal and inconclusive nature of the report, there are more reasons to be skeptical. The case report lists the medical department of the so-called “Associação Cruz de Ankh” in Sao Paulo, which appears to be a religious and philosophical organization.
An Instagram account for the group has been gushing about media coverage of the latest case report. The account’s previous activity doesn’t exactly inspire confidence: one previous post discusses Plato’s Cave as a “metaphor for awakening human consciousness amid the illusions of everyday life,” while another details how participants of a “group meeting” reported “introspective experiences with psilocybin use,” from “ancestral visions,” to “overcoming barriers of ego.”
That’s not to say that there isn’t a grain of something interesting in the case study. Scientists have previously found that “new connections can form and networks can change in response to experience,” as Sidhu points out in The Conversation. Previous studies have also found that psilocybin can temporarily reshuffle how these networks communicate with one another.
The drug has also been found to help with “nerve-cell growth, inflammation and brain-network activity,” but “whether these effects occur in people with Alzheimer’s disease remains unknown,” Sidhu wrote.
Add it all up, and the case study is both intriguing and a bit bizarre. As always, we’ll be watching for further investigation.