Discover Magazine: Dec. 2013 – The Confounding Debate Over Lyme Disease in the South
The debilitating tick-borne disease is well-documented north of the Mason-Dixon line, but does it exist beyond that?
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.