National Public Radio, March 6, 2017

by Michaeleen Doucleff & Jane Greenhalgh

Last summer Felicia Keesing returned from a long trip and found that her home in upstate New York had been subjected to an invasion.

Rick Ostfeld and Felicia Keesing have been studying Lyme disease and ways to stop it for more than 20 years. The couple has come up with a way to predict how bad a Lyme season will be a full year in advance.

“There was evidence of mice everywhere. They had completely taken over,” says Keesing, an ecologist at Bard College.

It was a plague of mice. And it had landed right in Keesing’s kitchen.

“Not only were there mouse droppings on our countertops, but we also found dead mice on the kitchen floor,” says Keesing’s husband, Rick Ostfeld, an ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y.

The Hudson River Valley experienced a mouse plague during the summer of 2016. The critters were everywhere. For most people, it was just a nuisance. But for Keesing and Ostfeld, the mouse plague signaled something foreboding.

“We’re anticipating 2017 to be a particularly risky year for Lyme,” Ostfeld says. READ MORE.