Pennsylvanians need to take precautions against Lyme disease as 90 percent of all cases last year were reported by people living in the Northeastern United States.

Westchester County, just north of New York City, has the highest concentration of cases, with one quarter, or 1,400 cases, reported there, explained a noted expert on Lyme disease earlier this week.

Durland Fish, director of the entomology laboratory at the New York College of Medicine, said, "It's definitely of interest to Pennsylvanians."

Lyme disease is caused by a spirochete bacterium that is transported by the tiny deer tick. A human bitten by an infected tick may experience flu-like symptoms followed by headache due to swelling of the brain lining, facial paralysis, fatigue, arthritis, and extreme cases congestive heart failure.

"The trademark symptom of Lyme disease is a skin condition known as erythema migrans, which is simply a red blotch around the bite. It may show up a few days after the bite and may take weeks to clear up," Fish said.

Fish said personal protection from tickbites is the only way to prevent contracting the disease, because most environmental efforts such as insecticides and reduction of the deer population have proven ineffective and dangerous to the environment.

He partly blames the federal government; although $6.6 million have been allocated for Lyme Disease research, much of this goes for medical purposes such as arthritis research.

"But we're not doing anything for prevention. This country likes to study the hell out of something before it does anything about it. Right now the Russians are decades ahead of us in research of tickborne diseases."

The disease is not a fatal one, he said.

"Only three of 10,000 cases have been fatal, and two of these had complications associated with them," he said.

However, if left untreated, the arthritis-like stiffening of the joints may become irreversible in up to half the cases as the patient's cartilage erodes, Fish said.

It was an unusually high concentration of rheumatoid arthritis symptoms near Lyme, Conn., that first caught the attention of Harvard professors in 1975 and sparked an investigation of the outbreak; thus its original name, Lyme arthritis.

Fish added that he believes the disease has always been existent, but "It's because of the growing tick population in North America that it has become an epidemic."

He said although the deer tick, Ixodes dammini, was rare in this area before 1980, it is now the tick most often found on medium-sized animals in New York.

"Many people are not familiar with being bitten by something that small," he said.

The Lyme disease lecture was co-sponsored by the Undergraduate Entomology Club and the Department of Entomology. Greg Hoover, faculty adviser for the Entomology Club, expressed some disappointment at the audience turnout of about 50.