Island health boards are urging a newly aggressive approach to combating Lyme disease, proposing a five-year comprehensive study that would examine, among other things, drastically reducing the Island’s deer population.

The Vineyard study would piggyback off a recent report from the Nantucket Tick-Borne Disease Committee, which argues for culling its herd of approximately 2,500 deer to 500 or fewer animals, a process the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife expects to take roughly a decade.

Edgartown health agent Matt Poole, who recently appeared before the all-Island selectmen to ask for their support on the study, said deer management will be a crucial component in any serious effort to tackle Lyme disease.

“It’s the most controversial piece, but I think it’s really clear that as long as there are large numbers of deer there’s going to be a high incidence of Lyme,” he said in an interview at his office in the Edgartown town hall this week.

In the coming months the boards of health are expected to apply for state grant money to carry out the research.

The effort to produce the comprehensive Vineyard tick study is being led by Michael Loberg of the Tisbury board of health and will synthesize existing Island data on the disease, including a 2008 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) study in Aquinnah, gather more epidemiological data where appropriate, and borrow heavily from the Nantucket study.

The impetus behind the effort came from several public discussions on proposed uses of community benefits grant money that will be made available by the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital this fall through the Department of Public Health. In those discussions Lyme disease was continually singled out by Islanders as a problem requiring additional resources.

“At these meetings Lyme kept coming up to the point where someone said, we’ve got to take this on,” Mr. Poole said. “We can’t dodge this any longer.”

The Island boards of health hope that their proposed study will attract further grant money from the CDC and National Institutes of Health to study Lyme. The disease, caused by the transmission of the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi from black-legged or deer ticks, is the most common vector-borne disease in America. Although it can be treated effectively with antibiotics, if left untreated Lyme can lead to arthritis as well as neurological and cardiovascular problems weeks to months after transmission. Along with other tick-borne illnesses, such as babesiosis and ehrlichiosis, Lyme disease is believed to have reached epidemic levels here some years ago. The bacterial disease is so familiar to many Islanders that its prevalence may now be under-reported or treated informally.

Mr. Poole sees the study as a first step in getting a handle on just how serious the problem is.

“I’m from a family of five,” he told the all-Island selectmen. “Four of us have been treated for Lyme, and I suspect if you go around the table that many of us have either personally been treated for it or we know many people who have. To date we’ve been very passive about living with Lyme and we need to attack it with a much more aggressive process than we have.”

What that aggressive process looks like has already been largely sketched out by Nantucket, whose tick-borne disease committee finished a comprehensive report in November. The report, which Mr. Poole presented to the selectmen, identifies a number of strategies to combat the abundance of the disease-carrying ticks, but one stands out as the most effective: an aggressive campaign to reduce the Island deer herd.

For years Vineyard hunters have pleaded for a longer hunting season but the recommendations of the Nantucket study go even further, advocating, if necessary, a team of professional sharpshooters to help eliminate the animals in order to reach acceptable levels. It’s method that has already been employed in some communities overrun with deer.

The Massachusetts Department of Fish and Wildlife estimates the number of deer on the Vineyard at 50 deer per square mile, though some put the figure even higher. The Nantucket report calls for a reduction over several years to fewer than 10 deer per square mile. As the report says, “Deer density, tick levels and human disease incidence are directly linked.”

Any program to thin the herd on the Vineyard would require killing thousands of deer, but the effort would not be unprecedented. At Great Island in West Yarmouth the herd was reduced to fewer than six deer per square mile, from 30 to 50 per square mile. And Monhegan Island in Maine went a step further, eradicating its entire deer herd in three seasons from 1996 to 1999.

Unsurprisingly, the incidence of tick-borne disease was drastically reduced. To achieve its own population goals Nantucket aims to harvest 35 per cent of the deer herd every season for 10 to 12 years.

At the all-Island selectmen’s meeting Mr. Poole advocated a similar reduction.

Other preventive measures against Lyme disease discussed in the Nantucket report, including a Noah’s Ark-style relocation of the animals and a comprehensive birth control program, have proven either less successful or less practical. Efforts to reduce the population of white-footed mice have proved similarly problematic.

One program often advocated by animal lovers is the so-called Four Poster device which works by rubbing permethrin, a tick-killing substance (or acaricide), on the head, neck and ears of the animal while it feeds on a baited bin of corn. The downside of this approach is twofold: the corn can attract rodents, and permethrin is a neurotoxin that is extremely toxic to marine life. On an ecologically sensitive Island, it poses obvious problems but the Nantucket report argues that it should play at least a part in any tick reduction strategy.

About its principal recommendation, the Nantucket report acknowledges the potential for controversy, noting, “Long-term community support must be measured and obtained before starting any reduction strategy”.

For Mr. Poole the choice is simple, “We’ve got to reduce the herd.”

Gazette reporter Remy Tumin contributed to this story.