A New Hampshire man is battling a serious tick-borne virus that has left him in critical condition.
According to friends and family, John Reagan, 66, is nonverbal after he was bitten by a tick while walking his dog.
He was hospitalized in Boston, where his condition deteriorated quickly after he was admitted.
“When he first went into the emergency room, he was sitting up and talking to me, and I was there with his wife,” Regan’s longtime friend Tom Wright told CBS News. “And the next day, we went to see him, and he was like nonverbal, and his muscles wouldn’t move right.”
Testing confirmed that Regan had contracted the Powassan virus.
“Most of the people I’ve talked to have never even heard the word before,” Wright said.
Indeed, Powassan is less common than other tick-borne illnesses like Lyme disease, but its effects are devastating, and cases are increasing.
Emergency room visits for tick bites jumped more than 25% nationwide in April compared to the same time last year, according to CDC data.
Last year, the CDC reported seven cases of Powassan, while a record-busting 39 cases were reported in 2019.
Wright and other friends of Reagan are fundraising to help support his recovery and to raise awareness about the dangers of Powassan.
In a bit of good news, Regan reportedly opened his eyes earlier this week and is now breathing without assistance.
What is Powassan virus — and who is at risk?
Powassan belongs to a group of viruses that can cause infection of the brain or the membranes around the brain and spinal cord, and is typically spread to humans after they’re bitten by an infected woodchuck or deer tick.
Those who live or work near brushy or woody areas, or are avid outdoorsmen like Regan, are more likely to be exposed to potentially infected ticks.
Powassan is particularly worrisome because of the ease with which the illness spreads: A tick attached to a human needs 36 to 48 hours to transfer Lyme disease, but it can transfer the Powassan virus in just 15 minutes.
What are the symptoms of Powassan virus?
People with the Powassan virus don’t always show symptoms. If they do, they can look like the flu, with fever, headache or vomiting.
Symptoms can appear one week to one month after the patient is bitten. Severe infections are characterized by a faster onset and more serious symptoms, including brain or spinal inflammation, confusion, seizures, tremors, difficulty speaking and issues with coordination.
Powassan is diagnosed based on clinical symptoms and tests of blood or cerebrospinal fluid that detect antibodies produced by the immune system against the virus.
How deadly is Powassan — and how is it treated?
Because there’s no cure for Powassan, nor a vaccine to prevent it, doctors prescribe rest, fluids and over-the-counter painkillers for most cases, which can last up to a month.
More serious cases like Regan’s can require hospitalization for breathing support and to reduce brain swelling.
About 10% of people with severe Powassan die, while 60% have permanent disability, according to the CDC.
Survivors may have long-term health problems like headaches, memory problems, and a loss of muscle strength.
While anyone can develop serious complications from the Powassan virus, older adults, children and people with weakened immune systems are at a higher risk.
Some health experts have noted that a warming climate helps spread Powassan and other tick-borne diseases, since milder winters and earlier springs create ideal conditions for warm-weather pests like ticks.
Most cases of Powassan virus have occurred in the Northeastern US — from Maine south to Virginia — and westward across the Great Lakes region to Minnesota. Other cases have been reported in Russia and Canada. The first known case occurred in Powassan, Ontario, in 1958, giving the virus its name.
The primary season for tick activity — and reports of tick-borne illnesses — typically starts in March and peaks in May and June, with a second, smaller increase in mid-autumn.
The most efficient way to protect against tick-borne diseases is to use insect repellent and wear clothing that covers your skin in areas with high tick populations, and to check yourself and your pets for ticks.

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.

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.

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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.

Rail-thin and hiding under a fake beard, a former Army intelligence analyst walked into a Medford pharmacy 15 years ago Friday, fatally shot all four people inside, but stole neither the cash in the register nor the valuables on the dead. Instead, he stuffed his backpack with thousands of addictive painkillers and walked out.
That pharmacy, Haven Drugs, has since moved to another Medford strip mall. The killer and his getaway driver, also his wife, spend their days and nights in maximum security prisons.
A Queens painkiller clinic operator, who had illegally prescribed the killer more than 2,500 oxycodone and other pain pills, was convicted and died in state prison.
New legislation, including tighter restrictions on access to prescription opioids, stepped-up law enforcement and a heightened awareness of opioids on Long Island and across the country also followed the robbery. As for Long Island overdose deaths, they have fallen in recent years.
A senseless tragedy
For James Manzella, the violent scene he walked into on June 19, 2011, seemed so senseless. He spotted the killer, David Laffer, leaving Haven Drugs that Sunday morning, felt something was suspicious and exited his vehicle. Inside the mom-and-pop pharmacy, he found his fiancee, Jaime Taccetta, dead, along with another customer, a pharmacist and a clerk.
“I have no mercy for that guy,” Manzella, 51, of Farmingville, told Newsday, referring to Laffer.
“The guy could have robbed the store, left everybody intact and got a slap on the wrist. … Maybe he would have got caught, maybe he wouldn’t have, but at least four people would have walked away with their lives.”
New York City Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget Brennan, who prosecuted Dr. Stan Li, a pain management specialist, for illegally prescribing narcotics to Laffer, told Newsday the Medford killings signaled a new brazenness rarely seen among pharmacy hold-ups.
“This was by far the boldest one that I recall seeing,” Brennan said, adding it was “clearly planned.”
“He was in and out relatively quickly and just fired the shots and killed people,” Brennan said. “It caught a lot of people’s attention and so I’m sure that it helped move some of the efforts to try to get this under control forward.”
In 2011, before the pharmacy killings, Brennan’s office established a Prescription Drug Investigation Unit. Investigators learned that Li, who treated Laffer for pain, was among several physicians doling out a “significant” number of oxycodone and hydromorphone scripts compared to years prior, she said.
It was a time when patients cut off from their opioids, “went to drastic means in order to get prescriptions to not be sick,” Dr. Jarid Pachter, who practices addiction medicine through the Stony Brook Medicine-affiliated Southold Family Medicine, told Newsday.
Other addiction specialists familiar with the case said it marked a “boiling point” of the opioid crisis.
“People began to understand this was an issue for the larger society,” said Jeffrey Reynolds, president and chief executive of the Family & Children’s Association, a Garden-City based nonprofit that provides help for substance use among other services.
“When people are walking around sick and desperate, that has implications for the entire community,” Reynolds said. “This now was seen as a public health crisis that can affect anybody on an average Sunday morning.”
At point-blank range
Laffer, a 1995 Patchogue-Medford High School graduate and former Army private who worked in intelligence, had lost his clerk job two weeks before the pharmacy killings.
At point-blank range, according to a Newsday story at the time, he executed pharmacist Raymond Ferguson, 45, of Centereach; store clerk Jennifer Mejia, 17, of Medford; customer Bryon Sheffield, 71, also of Medford; and Taccetta, 33, of Farmingville.
Ferguson was covering a shift so another pharmacist could celebrate Father’s Day with his family.
Mejia was buried with the high school diploma she would have received on her graduation day. Sheffield was picking up a prescription for his wife of nearly half a century. Taccetta, a mother of two, was also picking up a prescription. She was buried in her wedding dress.
Then-Suffolk County Police Commissioner Richard Dormer described the scene as “one of the most heinous, brutal crimes we’ve ever experienced.”
A three-day search — fueled by phone tips, a fingerprint Laffer left on a piece of paper at the pharmacy and even help from Brennan’s office — culminated in a successful raid at his Medford home on Pitchpine Place.
Laffer, 48, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and is serving a life sentence at the Elmira Correctional Facility with no chance for parole. His wife, Melinda Brady, 44, pleaded guilty to robbery and is serving 25 years at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. She could be released as early as 2032 following an appearance before the parole board, according to corrections department records.
Spotlight on the crisis
Laffer, and the havoc unleashed by his .45 caliber pistol, “absolutely” raised awareness that opioid addiction was a public health crisis, said Ann-Marie Foster, president and CEO of Phoenix House, which helps Long Islanders and New York City residents with addictions overcome them.
“When you’re addicted like that, your body is craving it, and you’ll do all sorts of things to get it,” Foster said. “It was a wake-up call.”
Newsday reported that Laffer and Brady had been prescribed almost 12,000 pain pills from various doctors in the four years preceding the Haven Drugs hold-up, including more than 2,500 from Li, whom Brennan later prosecuted. During that same time, robberies at pharmacies in which addictive painkillers were stolen were on the rise on the Island and across the country.
The day after the Medford homicides, Brennan said her office investigated whether any of Li’s patients ever filled prescriptions at Haven Drugs. Two did: Laffer and Brady. That information was passed along to the Suffolk District Attorney’s Office, which helped build the case against the couple, Newsday previously reported.
Li was eventually arrested, charged and convicted on two counts of manslaughter, six counts of criminal endangerment and 180 counts of illegal sales of prescriptions for controlled substances, including selling to Laffer. Li was sentenced to up to 20 years in prison in 2014. He died in 2020 at Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon, according to the state corrections department.
Significant legislation
Advocates for substance abuse treatment told Newsday the most significant state legislation aimed at restricting opioids since the killings was the Internet System for Tracking Over-Prescribing Act, known as I-STOP. The law requires medical providers to check a state-created system for their patients’ histories of receiving prescriptions for controlled substances.
As a result, Pachter said, “I never get patients coming in specifically for these prescriptions anymore.”
When physicians consult the prescription monitoring program and catch a patient “doctor shopping,” or getting addictive pills from various providers, Pachter said, they should “do a more thorough investigation” before deciding the best care to offer.
“If that person has opioid use disorder, then you discuss treatment for that as opposed to something that could enable the addiction or make them worse,” he said.
To further restrict the prescription opioid supply, in 2016, doctors were barred from writing scripts by hand.
“Prescription pads were being stolen,” Brennan said. “Sometimes the pads or the paper was sold rather than prescriptions or pills.”
Memories never fade
Manzella, the first to enter that scene and who testified against Laffer, said that while he never married after the death of Taccetta, he chose “to not let one man basically ruin my life.”
“Me and my friends and my family, we all have good memories of her,” he said of Taccetta. “We had good times. She was a wonderful woman, an unbelievable mom. … I got to go forward in some way, shape or form. I had no choice. But you can never get back what those people took from everybody.”
To this day, Manzella said he still feels for the other families who were forever changed on that Father’s Day.
For Lesly Gonzalez and her family, she said “even though time has passed, a part of us has frozen in time.” Gonzalez was 16 when Mejia, her older sister, was killed in a manner “that’s so sudden and so violent,” Mejia’s job at Haven Drugs helped her earn money to send to her grandmother in El Salvador and others in need there.
“People always ask me, ‘do you have any siblings?’ I always mention her,” Gonzalez, 31, of East Patchogue, said. “I’m like ‘yes I do,’ but then I have to tell them, and it’s something that becomes a part of you. You learn to live with the pain of losing someone and you don’t forget them. You don’t just move on from something like that.”
In recent years, experts said the state invested into local nonprofits; police departments continued to not only seize drugs, but introduce communities to the opioid overdose-reversal nasal spray naloxone, more commonly known as Narcan; and opioid settlement funds made treatment more widespread. But there was “a lag time” between the crackdown on the pill problem and the bolstering of treatment, substance use advocate Reynolds said.
“If the state had created that treatment availability at the very same time it restricted the supply, we might have seen a faster resolution, we might have seen fewer overdose fatalities,” Reynolds added. “There was a shortage on the street, the price of prescription pills went up, people turned to heroin, to fentanyl, to other drugs. … Now we’ve resolved some of that because treatment availability is far better than it’s ever been in Long Island’s history, but it’s probably still not enough.”