Somewhere along the line something changed. I was in the Marine Corps and we used to get covered with ticks, with no effect. Then in the early 1990s, Lymne's disease (and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and Human granulocytic anaplasmosis) hit Camp Lejeune with a vengeance.
In 1992, I was the executive officer of Marine Combat Training Battalion. We usually had about 1000 new Marines in the woods every day. That summer we had about five percent of our Marines come down with some type of ticks disease. It got so common that we did tick disease checks on a daily basis. It got so common seeing the Lyme disease "bullseye" that they didn't even send them to sick call, the corpsman would give them the pills and move on. Like someone else said, if caught early, no problem. However, if wait about six months, then big problems. My brother-in-law is a farmer in VA, and he started having some perplexing symptoms. It was determined that he had Lymes disease and had had it for a while (some people do not develop the bulls eye). His health is sorely compromised and he will never be fully healthy again.
One of the biggest problems we had was that there was no effective test (a lot of false positives and negatives- even if the bulls eye was present). Luckily, the treatment was tetracycline (4 pills a day for 14 days- cost $14).
I think what slowly changed is the lack of needed deer hunting, but there’s not a popular will to address it.
We, unfortunately, live in a neighborhood with an HOA that refusus to let bow hunters in. Houses are all on one acre. There were five deer in front of my house today.
I never had one tick bite growing up and I lived outside all summer in bare feet and bare legs.