Updated Aug. 5
About two weeks ago, West Tisbury resident Tiffany Sisco and her newborn daughter, Lily, were medflighted to Mass General Brigham for Children because the one-month old had a persistent fever of 102 degrees.
Within two days, on July 26, Lily was sent to the pediatric intensive care unit, suffering from lengthy seizures.
For days, doctors looked for clues for what could be causing the illness. The mother went to Facebook to share that “aggressive medication” was administered to stop the seizures, and that doctors had found inflammation of the brain from an infection caused by an unknown virus.
It wasn’t until two days ago that Sisco and her husband, Marcus, learned what caused their daughter’s health scare: a tick bite. Lily contracted Powassan, a rare tick-borne illness, which is only the second detection in a human on the Island in two decades.
“We all know the tick population has gotten extremely worse through the years with new viruses and diseases popping up,” she said in a social media post on Sunday, adding that the couple wanted to share the diagnosis to help inform others and potentially save lives.
“We certainly had no idea a 20-minute walk on the West Tisbury bike path beside our home, a walk we do most every day, could potentially cause my child her life,” Sisco wrote.
Powassan is a tick-borne illness that can be transmitted by the bite of infected Ixodes scapularis ticks, more commonly called deer ticks. The virus can be transmitted within 15 minutes of a tick bite, much faster than other tick-borne pathogens, and there is no specific treatment, vaccine, or cure for the disease.
This case comes at a time when alpha gal is advancing on Lyme’s disease as the number one threat associated with tick bites, the hospital and the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital is seeing a significant rise in tick-related visits to its emergency room, and people are changing their outdoor habitats to avoid a host of tick-related diseases.
Martha’s Vineyard health officials are investigating the Powassan case. The Inter-Island Public Health Excellence Collaborative — made up of town health departments from the Vineyard and Nantucket — announced Monday that they are reviewing preliminary results of an infection in a Vineyard resident and that they are closely monitoring the situation.
Sisco took to social media to repost articles from Island newspapers Monday and confirmed that her daughter was that case.
The press release from the collaborative said that severe cases of Powassan can even be potentially life-threatening and could cause encephalitis, confusion, seizures, and long-term neurological complications.
Sisco said on social media that the nymph tick was the size of a needle tip, and no rash or bullseye was detected. She urged people to check themselves, their children, and their pets and seek medical attention if symptoms after a bite include fever, nausea, headache or confusion, loss of coordination, speech difficulties, or seizures. These symptoms are also listed by the Center for Disease Control (CDC).
Sam Telford, the Tufts University professor with decades of research on Martha’s Vineyard, said in the release that “fortunately, severe disease remains very rare,” and the virus is present annually in a small percentage of deer ticks.
“Between 1 and 2 percent of nymph deer ticks on Martha’s Vineyard are infected,” Telford said. “This is a similar rate to that seen elsewhere in New England. This suggests that many people who are exposed may successfully fight off the virus without ever knowing they were infected.”
Telford told The Times that Powassan is a relative of West Nile Virus, which also only sees a small percentage of symptomatic patients, and an even smaller number that develop a neurologic disease. It’s just really bad luck, he said. Some strains of Powassan don’t travel to the brain or cause neurological impacts, and Telford suggested that local strains and host factors may lead people to be susceptible to severe disease.
In the last two decades, CDC data shows an increase in illness caused by the Powassan virus across the country from one reported case in 2004 to 57 cases in 2024.
With no cure or vaccine, health officials are encouraging prevention.
“Because Powassan virus can be transmitted so quickly—and because there is no treatment—the most effective protection is to prevent tick bites in the first place,” Lea Hamner, contract epidemiologist for Dukes County, is quoted in a release sent out Monday. “With deer ticks, Lone Star ticks, and American Dog ticks all present on Martha’s Vineyard, it is possible to encounter ticks during any month of the year. Tick bite prevention needs to be a year-round habit.”
While there’s only been one confirmed case of the virus on the Vineyard in the last 20 years, the collaborative notes that there have been three cases confirmed in other parts of Massachusetts this year.
Powassan is carried by both nymph and adult deer ticks. While the peak season for the nymphs is from May to July, adult deer ticks are active from fall through early spring whenever outdoor temperatures rise above 40°F.
“Their activity coincides with when we spend most of our time outdoors and, unfortunately, when our Island population grows for tourism season,” Patrick Roden-Reynolds, director of the Martha’s Vineyard Tick Program, said in the release. “This makes nymph deer ticks the main driver of infectious diseases such as Lyme disease, babesiosis, anaplasmosis, borrelia miyamotoi, and Powassan virus.”
Lily is doing better. Sisco announced yesterday that Lily is off the nasogastric feeding tube, gaining weight, and awake enough to feed herself.
A gofundme was started by Ashlee Moreis on behalf of the Sisco family that has already raised over $20,000.
Prevention is key
Local health officials say prevention is the key to avoiding tick-borne illnesses and provided a list of tips for Islanders:
Treat your clothing and gear with permethrin
- DIY sprays last approximately 6 weeks or 6 washes. Follow label instructions.
- Buy pre-treated clothing to get longer effectiveness; in some cases up to 70 washings.
- Send your own clothing to InsectShield.com to get the longer effectiveness (use code MARTHASV2025 for 15% off).
Dress “tick-smart”
- Tuck pants into socks, shirts into pants.
- Wear light-colored clothes to spot ticks more easily.
- Leggings and snug-fitting clothing can prevent ticks from reaching the skin.
Use EPA-registered tick repellents
- Effective ingredients include: DEET, picaridin, IR3535, 2-undecanone, and oil of
- the lemon eucalyptus tree.
- Use the EPA’s Find the Repellent Right for You tool to find the best option.
Be ready with a tick kit
- Stock your home, car, and bag with:
- Repellent to prevent bites
- Sticky lint rollers to remove unattached ticks
- Tweezers to remove attached ticks
- Tape or baggies to secure removed ticks
- Alcohol wipes to clean the bite site
Daily tick checks are a must
- Lint roller your clothing after coming in from the outdoors to remove hitchhikers.
- Change clothes or shower soon after being outdoors.
- Put clothes in the dryer on high for 20 minutes to kill ticks.
- Do full-body tick checks with a mirror — don’t forget crevices.
Vineyard health officials also suggest submitting the tick to TickSpotters for a free expert identification and a bite risk assessment and to use the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Tick Bite Bot to get information on what to do after a tick bite.
If you’re not using permethrin to protect yourself and your family at this point you should probably reconsider your life choices. At some point we need to get past this whole “save the other bugs” thing and start protecting ourselves.
There is an entire study published by the NIH (cited below) that shows just how ineffective these natural oils are that people are selling.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10756381/
Permethrin is THE most effective thing against ticks. Natural oils like citronella, eucalyptus, or tea tree oil have weaker repellent effects, often lasting only a few hours, and lack consistent scientific evidence proving efficacy against ticks.
Would have been nice to include what the symptoms are.
I am a close friend of the 1 woman who got this on the Vineyard a few years ago. She basically woke up in a near coma one morning after feeling normal the night before. It nearly killed her, and brought her life as she knew it to a screeching halt. For those of you who also know her, she is in a memory care unit in Newburyport and was doing well — she remembered me — when I last saw her in November of 2024.
The woman who contracted Powassan was an otherwise healthy 70+ Vineyard Haven resident who lived adjacent to the Tisbury Meadow where she and her partner walked at least once daily. Both were extremely careful and practiced all the tick preventative methods and checks regularly. She survived the encephalitis because of excellent care in Boston-area hospitals and rehabs (she had to relearn how to eat, speak, walk, etc.). She is living out her years in a lovely but locked memory care unit.
“seek medical attention if symptoms after a bite include fever, nausea, headache or confusion, loss of coordination, speech difficulties, or seizures. These symptoms are also listed by the Center for Disease Control (CDC).” Basically, if you are definitely not right and have any of these symptoms, go to the ER.
The symptoms are Fever!
This island has to let Guinea Hens , turkeys , and chicken fowl loose on the island when we had horses they used to have ticks in their manes until we got Guinea hens. It’s the most natural way to rid us of theses blood sucking insects!!
Good advice on the guinea hens, but ticks are arachnids, not insects.
Sadly, it’s also possible that it wasn’t the walk on the bike path, but just the walk from your car to your door, or your garden, that you picked up the tick that transferred to your lovely daughter.
I would love to contribute, but I don’t do any social media, including gofundme, would you consider publishing a P.O. Box where we old farts could send a check?
Number one don’t walk near grass if at all possible ever number two don’t touch foliage with your legs. Garden or otherwise. Perron is horrible for small children, and I would not advise putting pesticide on your children. It can lead to seizures. And lastly, I empathize, but if they have insurance except for travel and living up in Boston, why do people need to GoFundMe is their healthcare not being covered completely by their insurance? The whole situation is so scary and awful. I empathize completely, but I’m warning everybody do not walk near the grass. You’re playing games and choosing a pesticide is not the best option and completely contraindicated in small toddlers Dr. Lisa Nagy pesticide expert and environmental medicine chairman of Health and Environment Alliance at the American medical women’s Association and if you’re a doctor go on Vumedi for environmental medicine lectures on the subjects which will be starting this week for 500,000 physicians! I’m also on the Massachusetts medical Society environmental medicine committee. The experts in medicine should also weigh in in these articles in the newspaper because we have PhD’s not MD’s who are advocates of preventing disease with pesticides only and this is not the best avenue.
I personal would drink OFF if I had to…after the severity of my daughter’s Tick Borne Illness that lasted almost a decade even after treating with some of the best LLMD’s. I guess there should be more concerted effort to rid the population of ticks…..We are all sitting ducks for these diesease. I was at the beach at Aquinah MV and there was a tick crawling on the giant rock in the middle of the sand where people were resting there heads. These ticks are everywhere, you simply cannot avoid them. There was also one on my front door last summer, after mowing the lawn. I do recognize what you are saying about the danger of repellents for children, but seems to be no viable answer to this devastating problem.
Please reconsider the definition of “empathize completely.” Because your “empathy” is in need of resuscitation.
These Tick borne Illnesses are still being denied and neglected by the regular medical field. It is a pure and unethical travesty. There should be huge signs on the Vineyard alerting people to the risk. My daughter suffered from Lyme, Babesia, Mycoplasma Pneumoniae, and don’t forget Bartonella (extremely difficult to eradicate), She became ill at 14 and it has taken almost a decade to cure her, but she if finally cured. It took 2.5 yrs of the triple combo of Rifabutin Doxy and Azithromycin along with Nystatin. We were gaslit for almost a year by 20 MD’s in 3 different states, including NC, MA and RI .
A Lyme lIterate MD or NP is crucial. Read our story on LymeDisease.org just type in Janice Sutton in the tiny searchbar
Ok, I won’t use go fund me or other online donation sights,( they take a fee) , but anyone who has ever had an extremely ill family member should know that even with the best insurance, travel expenses, lost wages and much more can add up to a financial hit that most families cannot survive, especially here. That’s why donations are important