The estimated 2,000 deer roaming Staten Island are not just an inconvenience, they’re also a public health risk.

Dee Vandenberg says she used to think the animals were cute, until she was diagnosed with Lyme disease last year.

She suffers every day.

"Excruciating headaches, pains in the back of the neck, pains in the back, near the spine,” Vandenberg said. “Mine is mostly upper; I know of other people that can't walk."

Vandenberg is among the growing number of Staten Islanders infected with the disease.

Thirty-five cases in the borough were reported to the Centers for Disease control in 2012.

By last year, that number surged nearly four-fold to 123, the increase matching the explosion of the deer population.

The City Health department says as many as 60 percent of those who contracted Lyme disease were infected on Staten Island.

Researchers at Columbia University have been studying the tick problem here for two years, interviewing residents, searching for ticks in their backyards, and looking for the white-footed mice known to be carriers of the disease.

Male deer that have been receiving vasectomies to control the deer population also have been examined, some of them have been found with huge numbers of ticks.

“There's probably thousands. I mean it could be thousands,” said Maria Diuk, a research from Columbia University. “It’s a huge problem; it's a huge problem. And the deer are really the main hosts.”

Twenty-five percent of all the Staten Island ticks tested were found to be carrying Lyme disease.

And while the researchers are still compiling data, they hope their findings will help to shape a long-term plan for dealing with the problem.

This summer the city announced a $600,000 a year initiative to control ticks on Staten Island.

One idea being floated: catching mice with bait boxes, and spraying them with a pesticide that kills ticks.

That proposal could be implemented as soon as the spring.