Ticks – Cesspools of Disease

• Deer Ticks – Lyme Disease, Babesiosis, Anaplasmosis, Bartonellosis, Mycoplasma, Borrelia Miyamotoi, Powassan virus

• Lone Star Ticks – Ehrlichiosis, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, STARI disease, Tularemia, Heartland virus

• American Dog Ticks – Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Ehrlichiosis, Tularemia, Tick Paralysis

• Avoid areas known to harbor ticks such as leaf litter (never jump in leaf piles), woodlands, meadows, ground cover (pachysandra, ivy, etc.), high grass, brushy areas, and ecotone/transition areas along the grass perimeter of woodlands, gardens, etc. Also avoided should be those places where rodents (mice, chipmunks, etc.) dwell, including in or near stonewalls, wood piles, tree stumps, fallen logs, and outside storage sheds.

• Spray clothing, hats, shoe wear, backpacks, etc. with the chemical permethrin, which can be purchased through most large sporting goods stores such as Cabela’s, and Dick’s Sporting Goods. The clothing will repel and kill ticks through 5 or 6 washings, while shoe wear and backpacks will need to be re-sprayed every 6 weeks.

• Purchase clothing pretreated with permethrin from retailers such as Insect Shield, LL Bean, REI, Orvis, Ex Officio, and Zorrel. The clothing will repel and kill ticks for at least 70 washings or, practically speaking, for the life of the garment. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved pretreated clothing in 2003 as safe for people of all ages to wear, including pregnant women. The U.S. Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. National Institute For Occupational Health and Safety (NIOSH), and the American Academy of Family Physicians all recommend wearing apparel pretreated with permethrin for disease prevention.

• Send clothing to Insect Shield, www.insectshield.com, to be treated with permethrin for outdoor activities (summer camps, gardening, hiking, hunting, golfing, etc.). The cost is nominal and well worth every dollar spent.

• Apply tick repellents to exposed skin. In 2008 the CDC came out with a list of four repellent ingredients that they rated equally as being effective against ticks. The ingredients included the three chemicals DEET, IR3535, and Picaridin and the natural essential oil Lemon Eucalyptus. Any products containing these can generally be counted upon to provide protection against ticks. There are also a myriad of other products on the market with “natural” ingredients such as castor oil, cedar oil, citronella oil, geranium oil, peppermint oil, lavender, and rosemary oil that may also be effective in repelling ticks. But actual test data on how well these compounds really work to repel ticks is usually not readily available to the general public, which brings us to the EPA.

• Conduct body tick checks after outdoor activities, as well as at night before bedtime. Ticks like moist areas of the body especially between the toes, behind the knee, in the groin, navel, armpits, behind the ears, and on the head.

• Safely remove and save attached ticks for future testing of the tick to determine whether it may be carrying any Lyme disease organisms in its body, which could have been transferred to you. You can purchase test kits through the Amazon website. One such kit, Lyme-Aid, allows you to send the tick to a lab for testing. Another kit, Lymenator, allows you to easily test the tick yourself for Lyme disease with results obtained within 10 minutes of testing.