If you live on the Vineyard and haven’t had Lyme disease, it’s a good bet you know someone who has. The risk of contracting the disease while hiking, gardening or just headed to the beach is at its peak right now, when the nymphal deer tick that carries it is most active.

As cases of the often-debilitating tick-borne illness continue to spread throughout New England and elsewhere, the Island — one of the earliest known hot spots for Lyme — should be an ideal laboratory for investigating, preventing and treating this frustrating disease.

Past efforts to combat Lyme through prevention and treatment have seemed uneven and inadequate. Among other things, the disease is tricky to diagnose absent the telltale bullseye rash that occurs in only sixty to eighty per cent of victims. Consider that two years ago the Centers for Disease Control reported only twenty-five confirmed cases of Lyme on the Vineyard, even though more than a thousand people had been treated.

A majority of tourists surveyed last year didn’t know that tick-borne ailments were a risk on the Vineyard.

And a Lyme disease support group, which draws hundreds of people, is replete with those who believe their long-term symptoms have not been taken seriously by the medical establishment.

Now, however, interviews with researchers, health agents and doctors conducted by the Gazette suggest that promising steps are being taken toward a more aggressive and coordinated approach to thwarting the disease.

In an op-ed published on the Commentary Page in today’s edition, leading infectious disease researcher Sam R. Telford 3rd cites the Martha’s Vineyard Tick-Borne Disease Initiative, a five-year project aimed at reducing exposure to Lyme disease through education, diagnosis and reporting, as a model for the entire state.

Among that project’s recommendations are some straightforward prevention techniques. People can avoid the disease by taking a number of simple steps: Use mosquito repellent, check for ticks every night (on your pets as well as yourselves), clean up homes and yards, and spray perimeters with insecticide. These precautions, combined with prompt doctor visits as soon as you suspect a tick bite, can theoretically stop Lyme disease in its tracks.

To attack the problem at its source, some experts, including Mr. Telford, lay out more controversial steps. They point to the historic landscape on the Vineyard when there was more open grassland, and say there are ways of cleaning up the forests so that ticks dry out from exposure to sun and wind. They also suggest more concerted so-called herd management of white-tailed deer because the ticks that cause Lyme are found primarily in dense herds.

Island doctors and other health professionals now routinely include Lyme disease in their constellation of possible diagnoses. And even if the patient appears not to have the disease this time around, doctors will sometimes dispense a prescription for Doxycycline or a similar antibiotic — the treatment of choice for Lyme disease — as a precaution.

There remains disagreement among medical experts on the prevalence of chronic Lyme, or indeed its existence at all, which infuriates those who suffer from devastating symptoms. But an increasing number of clinicians on the Vineyard and Cape Cod seem to agree that more research­ — and open-mindedness — is necessary.

The worst effects of Lyme disease seem most avoidable if the disease is treated in its early stages, and it is encouraging to see a concerted focus on education and sensible early treatment.

Visitors and residents who want to learn more about how to prevent tick-borne illnesses would do well to watch the excellent video produced by the Martha’s Vineyard boards of health at mvboh.org/tbioverview.