Kerry Clark never wanted to show that Lyme disease exists in the Southern United States by catching it himself.
Clark is a medical entomologist at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. A wiry man with graying brown hair, he is most at home in a kayak on the ponds behind the wooded Jacksonville campus. He jogs and lifts weights, when he is well enough to do so.
Clark has spent years all over the South crawling through underbrush and kicking up leaf litter to collect ticks that transmit infections. Despite innumerable tick bites, Clark never had a medical problem until the day he dragged for ticks in the town of Fayetteville, a suburb south of Atlanta.
Clark was giving a talk on Lyme disease at a gathering of the Dougherty County Medical Society in Albany, Ga., where he met Fayetteville resident Liz Schmitz, president of the Georgia Lyme Disease Association. When he heard how many people from Schmitz’s town had been sickened after tick bites, he agreed to come up and investigate.
As Clark dragged for ticks with a white flannel cloth on a pole, hungry, aggressive lone star females with their distinctive white spots seemed to burst out. In less than an hour, he had collected hundreds of adults and younger nymphs. He remembers one practically leaping from the cloth onto his finger. And that, Clark guesses, is when a lone star tick nestled in his hair. When Clark found it several days later, it had already deposited its bacterial load into his body.
