ecowatch.com
Natural Resources Defense Council
By Clara Chaisson

In the summer of 2013, I was changing into pajamas when an irritated blotch of skin caught my eye. My rib cage looked like a miniature advertisement for Target: There was a near-perfect circle of red, a smaller, concentric ring of clear skin, and then a red dot right in the middle. Bull’s-eye.

In medical jargon this distinctive rash is called erythema migrans, and it’s the calling card of Lyme disease. Fittingly enough, I was spending this particular peak tick season in Old Lyme, Connecticut—where it was first discovered in 1975. Luckily, I knew to be on the lookout for this exact symptom, and a course of antibiotics knocked it out of my system. I experienced no further problems.

But cases of Lyme disease aren’t always so straightforward. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), somewhere around a quarter…