Tick Talk 2025

Martha's Vineyard Medical

Everything you need to know about tick borne illness - prevention, what to do if you are bitten, current treatments and the latest research.

Katherine Cornell Theater

Welcome to Tick Talk 2025!Join us at the Katharine Cornell Theater upstairs at Tisbury Town Hall for a morning of informative talks with plenty of time for audience Q&amp;A. Our lineup of speakers includes medical doctors, biologists, researchers, inventors and more.Mark your calendars and get ready for an unforgettable experience at Tick Talk 2025! We can't wait to see you there.Special thanks to our sponsors: Project Lyme, the Johnson Family Foundation, the Island Tick-Borne Illness Prevention Fund, the Fledgling Fund, Martha's Vineyard Hospital and D. Best Construction for their generous support.

Agenda

Gerry Yukevich has been providing primary and urgent care to patients on MV since 1995 and has probably treated more patients with tick borne disease and allergy than any other doc on the Island. Gerry will be our emcee for the day and will kick things off by giving us a brief overview of what lies ahead.  

A Brief Overview

Aubrey is a registered PA and works in the ER at MV Hospital where she sees patients with tick bites and tick borne disease and allergy on a daily basis.  Ed is an ENT and allergist in West Tisbury who has more Alpha-gal patients than any other provider on the Island.

TBIs of the Vineyard

Gerry, Kathleen, Bill and Kelley all practice at Martha's Vineyard Medical, where they provide primary and urgent care to Island residents and visitors.  They are on widely considered to be the finest primary care doctors on the Island.

Panel Discussion: Diagnosing and Treating TBIs

Patrick runs the MV Tick Program and speaks frequently about ticks and preventing tick borne illness.  Paul is a field biologist and the founder of Ticktogs, a new product designed to offer everyone the protection from ticks that he had developed for his own family and island community on Naushon.  Check them out at ticktogs.com.

Preventing Tick Bites

Jake is the founder and owner of Vetcall, a veterinary clinic that provides house calls for all pets. He has deep experience treating pets with tick borne disease.

TBIs and Pets

Jo is Harvard Medical School professor and Chappy summer resident who contracted Alpha-gal in 2023 and will relate her experiences navigating through life in an Alpha-gal ignorant world. Georgi contracted Lyme in 2022. The disease was misdiagnosed, and she suffered a series of increasingly serious maladies. Her journey is an extraordinary one.

Personal Stories: Chronic Lyme Disease and Alpha-gal

Sam is a professor at Tufts and is one of the world's most respected experts on tick-bourne disease. Dick has been studying ticks on the Vineyard, and working to reduce the incidence of tick borne disease and allergy, since 2011. Isobel is a researcher at Harvard, where she is investigating the genetics and sexual biology of ticks associated with Lyme disease in the US.