BARNSTABLE, Mass. (AP) — A Cape Cod man who contracted rabies from a bat’s bite late last year has died of the illness, the first confirmed case of human rabies in Massachusetts since 1935, according to public records and officials.

The Cape Cod Times reports that Kevin Galvin, 63, president of the Marstons Mills Historical Society and owner of a historic home in the center of that village in Barnstable, died Monday in a Boston hospital of the neurological illness.

The state Department of Public Health cited patient confidentiality laws in declining to confirm Galvin’s identity as the person who had been hospitalized, but the newspaper reports that it obtained his death certificate and it lists rabies encephalitis as the cause of his death.

Rabies is a deadly virus that spreads to humans from the saliva of infected animals. The disease affects the central nervous system and brain.

State officials said in December that a Massachusetts man had been hospitalized as the first confirmed case of human rabies in the state in decades, and Barnstable’s health director later elaborated that the victim was a local man in his 60s.

Tests conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that the disease was transmitted by a common species of brown bat, although it was unknown exactly when and where Galvin was bitten. Officials have said they believe he was bitten on his own property.

Lee Mannillo of the Cape Cod Rabies Task Force told the Cape Cod Times that Galvin had undergone an innovative treatment called the “Milwaukee protocol.” It treatment involves administering a cocktail of sedatives while allowing the body to produce natural antibodies to fight off the infection.

He died last Monday, and his funeral took place Saturday.

Galvin’s siblings told the Cape Cod Times that they did not want to talk to the media about their brother’s death, and his wife indicated the same through a friend.

Galvin was widely praised by fellow residents who said he was devoted to the Marstons Mills village, where he had lived for 11 years and was active in environmental issues, loved history and enjoyed restoring his 231-year-old home.

To some fellow residents like Al Baker, Galvin was jokingly known as “the mayor of Marstons Mills.”

“I found him to be a very good guy,” said Baker, who said he was shocked by Galvin’s illness and death, finding it “very sad and disheartening.”

Barnstable Health Director Thomas McKean did not return phone calls, and had said earlier in the week that the victim’s family members had requested privacy.

The last confirmed case of human rabies contracted in Massachusetts was in 1935, with the victim believed to have been a teenager from Saugus.

In 1983, a 30-year-old Waltham man died after being exposed to rabies, apparently from a dog bite in Africa. The man developed symptoms, including high temperature, difficulty breathing, sore throat and excessive salivation, about three months after returning to the U.S., and was admitted to Waltham Hospital, according to CDC records. He died a few weeks later.

There have been other instances over the years in which individuals infected elsewhere have received treatment in Massachusetts because of the state’s highly-regarded hospital system.

The CDC said rabies-related human deaths have fallen dramatically in the U.S. from 100 or more annually at the turn of the century to no more than 2 or 3 per year, most but not all involving bats.

The CDC reported two other fatal human rabies cases this year, one in New York and one in New Jersey, with both victims believed to have acquired the disease from dog bites outside the U.S., Haiti in one case and Afghanistan the other.

While U.S. cases are rare, worldwide an estimated 55,000 people die from rabies each year.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The state is seeing a shocking increase in the number of deer ticks that can carry Lyme disease, prompting concerns that it will lead to more cases of the illness, insect experts said Wednesday.

A group that includes the state health and wildlife agencies is working to sort out what risks may be posed by last year’s spike in confirmed deer ticks, also known as black-legged ticks, and how best to spread the word and keep people safe. The experts believe the higher numbers are a sign of tick population growth, not simply the result of more active searching last year.

It’s unclear what spurred the increase, though researchers suspect one factor is favorable weather conditions that helped more of the tick population survive and thrive.

“We got kind of a red flag, a warning that something really unusual was happening with the tick population, and maybe we’re out front of it a little bit” because the number of human cases of Lyme disease in Ohio hasn’t shown a matching spike, said Glen Needham, an associate professor of entomology at Ohio State University who has studied the ticks and worked with the state to identify them.

More than 1,800 black-legged ticks were found on deer heads collected from hunters last year, and 183 more submitted to the state for identification were confirmed, compared with 29 found on deer heads the year before and 45 that were submitted and confirmed, according to the Ohio Department of Health. The ticks, some carrying Lyme disease, have especially shown up in eastern and southern Ohio.

The deer tick was first found in Ohio in 1989, and in the following two decades, only about 50 of the thousands of ticks found in the state were identified as black-legged ticks, state public health entomologist Richard Gary said. In 2010, 45 deer ticks were confirmed, giving officials their first indication of a change.

“We think that they’ve probably been there for a while, just in numbers too low to be detected, and that’s what’s changing,” Gary said.

One of the problems with deer ticks is that they can be active throughout most of the year. And, unlike other ticks that are more finicky eaters, they’ll feed on a variety of creatures found throughout Ohio, including deer, mice, birds and lizards — and sometimes humans, Needham said.

Bites from infected ticks can lead to rashes, fevers and joint pains. If left untreated, damage to the heart and the nervous system can result.

So far, there’s no parallel spike in cases of the disease in Ohio, which gets 40 to 50 cases annually, Gary said. There were 37 cases in 2010 and at least 51 last year.

As researchers and state officials wait to see if that changes for this year, they are trying to educate physicians, veterinarians, public health workers and residents about avoiding and identifying the ticks. They also plan to seek information from neighboring states including Pennsylvania, which has a higher incidence of Lyme disease, a bacterial infection.

It’s familiar territory for Needham, who has been teaching workshops about ticks for decades and wondered as he approached retirement age whether Ohio would ever see more of them. He said residents who find a tick they consider suspicious should contact their county health departments or local extension offices.

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — White-tailed deer populations in parts of eastern Montana and elsewhere in the Northern Plains could take years to recover from a devastating disease that killed thousands of the animals in recent months, wildlife officials and hunting outfitters said.

In northeast Montana, officials said 90 percent or more of whitetail have been killed along a 100-mile stretch of the Milk River from Malta to east of Glasgow. Whitetail deaths also have been reported along the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers in western North Dakota and eastern Montana and scattered sites in Wyoming, South Dakota and eastern Kansas.

The deaths are being attributed to an outbreak of epizootic hemorrhagic disease, or EHD. Transmitted by biting midges, EHD causes internal bleeding that can kill infected animals within just a few days.

“I’ve been here 21 years and it was worse than any of us here have seen,” said Pat Gunderson, the Glasgow-based regional supervisor for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. “Right now it’s going to take a few years to get things back to even a moderate population.”

In North Dakota, state wildlife chief Randy Kreil described the outbreak as the most extensive and deadly in two decades.

Mule deer, bighorn sheep, elk and pronghorn also are susceptible to EHD, but it is particularly damaging to whitetail herds, animal health experts said. Livestock can be infected but typically show few symptoms.

Researchers say the virus that causes EHD does not infect people and there is no risk of eating or handling infected deer,

More precise estimates of the number of whitetail killed are expected after agencies conduct winter population counts and survey fall hunter success.

Periodic outbreaks of EHD occur in whitetail herds across the country. Wildlife officials say the outbreak in the Northern Plains stands out for the high number of deaths and wide area affected.

Animal health experts suspect it was triggered by an exceptionally wet spring that led to lots of muddy breeding habitat for the biting midges that carry the disease. A warm fall meant the midges lingered and continued transmitting EHD to deer.

The outbreak followed a harsh winter that already had knocked down deer numbers across the region.

In response to those winter deaths, Gunderson said the number of hunting tags offered in northeast Montana was reduced from 5,000 to 4,000. After the EHD outbreak began in late summer, sales of another 2,000 tags were suspended.

In western North Dakota, 1,500 licenses were suspended and the state offered refunds for deer tags already sold. More than 630 people took advantage of the refunds, said Randy Meissner, license manager for North Dakota Game and Fish.

Hunting outfitter Eric Albus in Hinsdale, Mont., said his business ran one archery hunting trip along the Milk River this fall, compared to 40 or 50 hunts in prior years.

“It was horrendous,” Albus said, “especially when you couple it with the fact that we lost 40 to 45 percent of our whitetail in the winter.”

To satisfy his customers, Albus said he leased alternate properties to hunt on that were up to 350 miles away from Hinsdale.

In southern states where deer have a history of exposure to EHD, death rates from the disease are relatively low, said David Stallknecht with the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study, which has been tracking EHD for more than 30 years.

Whitetail in northern states are more likely to die because they lack the antibodies from previous exposures needed to help fight off the disease, said Stallknecht, a professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia.

He said a better picture of the outbreak will come later this year, after state wildlife agencies from across the country submit annual animal mortality data to the Southeastern Cooperative

Notwithstanding the disease’s economic impacts to the region’s hunting industry, Gunderson said the loss of so many deer along the Milk and Missouri rivers could have an upside.

Along some stretches of the river, a combination of animal grazing and ice jams scraping the riverbank each winter have prevented cottonwood trees from regenerating for decades.

After the region’s record spring floods allowed seedlings to take root high up on the banks, where they are more protected, Gunderson said a new crop of trees could thrive with so many whitetail gone.

“We won’t have the tremendous deer population browsing on them, so hopefully we’ll get the cottonwoods along these river bottoms that will take us through the next 100 years,” he said.

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — The Nebraska Game and Parks Commission says chronic wasting disease has been found in three central Nebraska counties for the first time.

The commission says a total of 26 deer carcasses tested positive for the disease in Buffalo, Custer and Holt counties during the November firearm hunting season. Nearly 1,600 lymph node samples were taken. One mule deer carcass in Garden County tested positive.

In 2010, 51 positives were found in the more than 3,600 test samples.

The 2011 testing was curtailed by budget issues, so it was concentrated on central Nebraska, which the commission says is the leading edge of the disease as it spreads from west to east.

The disease affects deer and elk and is always fatal. No human cases have ever been recorded.