Tick Boom: A Biography of Lyme Disease, the Growing Epidemic Lurking in Plain Sight

"Tick Boom is at once a history of Lyme disease and a harrowing account of living with it. You’ll never skip a tick check again.” —Graydon Carter, New York Times bestselling author of When the Going Was Good

At once a breathtaking work of investigative journalism and a searing personal testimony, Tick Boom tells the comprehensive story of an illness that affects half a million Americans every year—but is still roiled by controversy: Lyme disease.

Cancer can kill you. Everyone knows as much. Lyme disease, if untreated, can make you wish you were dead.

One August morning, Amanda Fairbanks awoke to a red, oval rash unlike anything she had seen. An urgent care doctor called it a skin infection and sent her home with ointment and a box of bandages. When her symptoms worsened, she bounced from specialist to specialist until one tested for something the others hadn't considered: Lyme disease.

A positive test, when it finally arrived, settled nothing. Still sick, Fairbanks found herself in the middle of a war she hadn't known was happening. She did the only thing she knew how to do: she started reporting.

The story began with a mother in Lyme, Connecticut, who spent a decade documenting her family's symptoms and gathering similar stories from neighbors before anyone would listen. Since its discovery in 1975, Lyme disease has grown from that mysterious cluster of cases into one of the most bitterly contested—and fastest-spreading—illnesses in American medicine. Doctors and scientists fractured over how to diagnose it, how long to treat it, and what to make of the patients who stay sick. The stalemate came with a cost: progress. Meanwhile, the list of tick-borne diseases keeps getting longer: anaplasmosis, babesiosis, and alpha-gal syndrome, to name a few.

Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews and years of immersive reporting, Fairbanks brings both the perspective of a patient and the skepticism of a journalist to the story of an unfolding public health crisis—the pioneers who named the disease, the doctors who fought over it, the patients still trying to find their way back, and the scientists using new tools to answer questions fifty years of argument couldn't settle. Why do most people walk away from a tick bite while others never recover? Why, half a century on, is the best advice still don't get bitten? And why, when this disease kills, is it the last thing anyone suspects?

Tick Boom is the life of a disease, told from inside it.