Highest and lowest tick risk in Wood County

SOUTH WOOD COUNTY – TickZone, a free site that scores tick risk for every town in the country and updates every morning, has put Grand Rapids and Saratoga at the top of Wood County for tick risk. The county has a CDC Lyme rate of 134 per 100,000, many times the 10-per-100,000 mark CDC uses to flag a high-incidence county.
At the summer peak, tick risk across Wood County runs from Grand Rapids (high) at the high end to Milladore (moderate) at the low end. The difference is habitat: forest cover across the county ranges from 11% to 72%, and more forest and woodland edge means more places ticks can quest for a host.
Which towns in Wood County have the highest tick risk?
At the summer peak, Grand Rapids carries the highest modeled tick risk in Wood County, followed by Saratoga, Cary, Port Edwards, Hiles. Risk tracks how wooded a town is: forest cover across Wood County ranges from 11% to 72%, and the more forest and woodland edge a town has, the more habitat ticks have to quest from. Milladore sits at the low end.
What ticks live in Wood County?

CDC surveillance records two established tick species in Wood County: Deer tick, American dog tick. The blacklegged (deer) tick is the main carrier of Lyme disease in the Northeast.
Is Lyme disease common in Wood County?
Wood County reports about 134 Lyme cases per 100,000 people a year (U.S. CDC), the 151st-highest of 1268 counties in the Midwest and the 41st-highest of Wisconsin’s 72 counties. Lyme is the dominant blacklegged-tick disease, so TickZone uses this county rate as the disease baseline behind every town’s score.
About TickZone
TickZone was founded by Nathan Burnett with the mission to give every town a single, plain tick-risk score for the day, updated every morning. It exists because tick-borne disease is local and seasonal: the difference between a risky afternoon and a quiet one is mostly each town’s weather, habitat and season. Scores are built only from public data: U.S. CDC disease and tick surveillance, Open-Meteo weather, ESA WorldCover land cover and U.S. Census geography. TickZone is an exposure model, not an epidemiological forecast: it estimates where encounters are likely, not where infections will occur. The seasonal curves are heuristics built from CDC and state health department tick activity calendars. If you find an attached tick or feel unwell after a bite, contact a healthcare professional and see CDC tick-bite guidance.
Find more information about Wood County’s tick risk at www.tickzone.app/location/wisconsin/wood-county.