Ticks, Lyme Disease, and TBE Risk for Berlin Families Hiking in Brandenburg: Why the City Itself Isn't an RKI Risk Zone

Two Questions Families Actually Have, and Why They Get Tangled Together

A family in Berlin planning a weekend hike in Brandenburg is usually really asking two separate questions at once: is the place we’re going an official tick-borne encephalitis risk area, and does that even matter if what we’re actually worried about is Lyme disease? The two questions get tangled together because both diseases come from the same tick bite, but they’re answered by two completely different systems: an official, statistically-defined map for FSME (Frühsommer-Meningoenzephalitis, the German name for tick-borne encephalitis, TBE), and no official risk map at all for Lyme disease (Borreliose), which is far more common but isn’t classified by region the same way.

Why Berlin Itself Has Never Made the Risk-Area List

The RKI’s methodology is deliberately strict, and it’s applied at the level of individual Kreise, which for Berlin means each of the city’s twelve boroughs separately. The RKI’s own definition requires that, in at least one of 20 rolling five-year windows between 2002 and 2025, a Kreis or its Kreisregion (the Kreis plus every neighboring Kreis) must have a case rate statistically significantly higher than one FSME case per 100,000 residents. Berlin’s own Kreis-level data lists exactly seven FSME cases with a likely infection site inside the city across those 23 years: three in Lichtenberg (2017, 2024, and 2025), and one each in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf (2025), Spandau (2021), Steglitz-Zehlendorf (2013), and Treptow-Köpenick (2021). Spread across five separate boroughs over more than two decades, that never comes close to the statistical bar, which is why the RKI groups Berlin with Bremen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Schleswig-Holstein as states with only “vereinzelt auftretende autochthone FSME-Erkrankungen” (isolated, locally-acquired cases) rather than any designated risk Kreis.

That doesn’t mean ticks, or even the FSME virus, are entirely absent from the city. Ticks live wherever there’s grass, forest edge, or brush, which in Berlin includes large inner-city green spaces as much as its outer forests. Local reporting on ticks in Berlin quotes a NABU expert noting ticks exist “überall dort, wo es größere Grünanlagen gibt” (wherever there are larger green spaces), and the isolated FSME cases confirmed by RKI’s own data (in outer, leafier boroughs like Spandau, Steglitz-Zehlendorf, Treptow-Köpenick, and Lichtenberg) fit that pattern. The risk-area classification is a statistical threshold for population-level policy, like vaccine recommendations, not a guarantee that a given city or county has zero ticks or zero disease risk.

Brandenburg’s Five Official Risk Kreise Are Clustered Far From Berlin, Not in Its Ring Counties

Only five of Brandenburg’s 18 Kreise meet RKI’s risk-area definition, and the number hasn’t changed since 2024. RKI’s 2026 Kreis table names them as Elbe-Elster, Frankfurt (Oder), Oberspreewald-Lausitz, Oder-Spree, and Spree-Neiße. Geographically, all five sit in the state’s far southeast and east, along the Lausitz coalfield region and the Polish border, roughly 60 to 130 kilometers from central Berlin. None of them are the counties immediately ringing the city that most Berlin families actually visit for a Saturday hike.

Those ring counties, Barnim, Oberhavel, Havelland, Teltow-Fläming, Dahme-Spreewald, and Märkisch-Oderland, are not official risk areas, but RKI’s own case tables show every one of them has recorded at least one isolated FSME case in recent years. Teltow-Fläming had four (2023, twice in 2024, and 2025), Dahme-Spreewald has had cases in 2006, 2017, 2022, and 2025, Märkisch-Oderland had three since 2020, and Barnim, Oberhavel, and Havelland have each had one. None of these counties’ rates have crossed the statistical significance threshold yet, but the pattern of isolated cases spreading closer to Berlin over the past few years is exactly the kind of trend RKI’s own bulletin flags as worth continued monitoring nationally.

One genuinely useful, concrete detail for families planning a Spreewald day trip: the two halves of the Spreewald sit in different Kreise with different official status. Lübbenau, the more touristy base for the classic Kahnfahrt boat trips, sits in Landkreis Oberspreewald-Lausitz, one of the five official risk Kreise. Lübben, the other traditional gateway town, sits in Landkreis Dahme-Spreewald, which is not an official risk area, despite recording isolated cases as recently as 2025. It’s a reminder that “we’re going to the Spreewald” isn’t precise enough to answer the risk-area question on its own.

Photo by Lauri Poldre on Pexels

The FSME Vaccine Exists and Is Under-Used, Even Inside Risk Areas

Nationally, 2025 was Germany’s third-worst FSME year since data collection began in 2001, with 693 reported cases, just behind 2024’s 695 and well below the record 718 set in 2020, but still far above the two-decade median of 420. RKI’s 2026 bulletin reports that 57% of 2025’s cases involved neurological complications (meningitis, encephalitis, or myelitis), no deaths were recorded in 2025 (three were in 2024), and the risk rises sharply after age 40, with men affected roughly 1.5 times as often as women.

STIKO, Germany’s Standing Vaccination Commission, recommends the FSME vaccine specifically for people with tick exposure inside a designated risk area, and vaccination rates there remain strikingly low. Brandenburg’s own 2024 vaccination rate among people living in its risk-area population was just 18.7%, similar to most other states with risk Kreise. Nationally, 98% of the people who caught FSME in 2025 were unvaccinated or incompletely vaccinated, a gap RKI explicitly says drives a large share of preventable cases, particularly since older adults, who face the highest risk of severe disease, also have some of the lowest vaccination rates.

There is no equivalent vaccine for Lyme disease anywhere in Europe. RKI’s official Lyme-Borreliose guidance confirms a recombinant vaccine candidate is still in clinical trials, not an approved option today. For Lyme disease, prevention rests entirely on avoiding bites, checking the body promptly, and removing any tick correctly, not on a shot.

Berlin’s Own 2025 Numbers: a Record Year for Lyme Disease

Berlin’s state health office, LAGeSo, reported a record 1,406 Lyme disease (Borreliose) cases in the city through mid-December 2025, according to Tagesspiegel’s reporting, the highest since Berlin’s mandatory laboratory reporting requirement began in 2013. A typical year had brought 700 to 800 cases; 2023 was the first year to top 1,000. LAGeSo epidemiologist Julia Bitzegeio pointed to a wet 2025 summer favoring tick populations, layered on top of several years of milder winters that let more ticks survive and stay active longer into the season.

The same LAGeSo report also counted 9 FSME cases in Berlin residents for 2025, versus an average of roughly 3 a year from 2020 to 2024. It’s worth being precise about what that number does and doesn’t mean: it reflects diagnosed Berlin residents, which can include people infected while traveling outside the city, rather than RKI’s stricter, national Kreis-of-infection dataset, which attributed only one 2025 case specifically to a Berlin Kreis (Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf). The two figures use different methods and answer slightly different questions, and neither changes the fact that no Berlin borough has ever met RKI’s statistical bar for risk-area status.

Speed Matters Differently for Each Disease

The FSME virus lives in an infected tick’s saliva glands and can transfer to a bite wound within minutes, sometimes before a person even notices the tick. That’s the key reason vaccination, not fast removal, is the meaningful protection against FSME for someone regularly exposed in a risk area: by the time a tick is found and removed, transmission may already have happened.

Lyme’s Borrelia bacteria live in a tick’s gut instead, and generally take somewhere between 12 and 24 hours of attachment to migrate into the wound. That difference is exactly why a same-day, correctly-performed tick check and removal meaningfully lowers Lyme risk specifically, even though it does little for FSME. Both fears point to the same practical habit, checked promptly after every hike, but for two different underlying reasons.

Step by Step

1. Check the whole body after any time in grass, forest edges, or brush, not just after an obvious forest hike. Pay particular attention to the knees, groin, armpits, scalp, and behind the ears, favorite spots on children especially.
2. Remove any tick found immediately, with fine-pointed tweezers, a tick hook, or a tick card. Grip as close to the skin as possible, ideally right at the tick’s mouthparts.
3. Pull straight upward, slowly and evenly, without twisting or jerking, and never squeeze the tick’s body. Skip oil, vaseline, nail polish, glue, or alcohol entirely; all of them can make the tick regurgitate saliva and pathogens into the wound, raising infection risk rather than lowering it.
4. Disinfect the bite site afterward and note the date. A doctor visit isn’t normally needed just to remove a tick, but see one if you’re unsure about the removal or the tick is somewhere hard to reach safely.
5. Watch the site for at least four weeks. An expanding, ring-shaped red rash at least five centimeters across (erythema migrans, Wanderröte) is the classic early sign of Lyme disease and calls for a prompt doctor visit.
6. See a doctor promptly, regardless of a rash, for fever, flu-like symptoms, a severe headache, or facial paralysis appearing in the days or weeks after a tick bite.

Compliance Note

This page describes FSME/TBE risk-area classifications, Lyme disease (Borreliose) case data, and tick-removal guidance as published by the Robert Koch-Institut, Berlin’s LAGeSo, and other cited sources, current as of mid-2026. RKI updates its FSME risk-area map roughly annually, and Kreis-level classifications, case counts, and vaccination rates can and do change; confirm current details directly with RKI or a doctor before making a vaccination decision. This page is general information, not individual medical advice; anyone with symptoms after a tick bite should contact a doctor rather than relying on this page alone.