One of your recent questions dealt with someone’s frustration over doing a tick-check after every walk in the woods. Your conclusion was that doing so was the best preventative, and I heartily agree. There is, however, a pleasant way to do this which has other health benefits:
Take a hot shower (or a dip in a really cold lake or river, followed by a sponge bath on shore.) Ticks are slow, and they tend to climb. Until firmly attached, they are relatively easy to remove—especially with soap and water, which make you slippery and hard to climb or hold on to. Shampoo has a similar effect on hair. Any unattached tick is likely to get rinsed down the drain (or into the hair screen if you have one.) In the process of washing, you will automatically do a very thorough tick-check.
Additionally, have a flea comb in the shower. Use this on lathered body hair or shampooed head hair. The lather makes it slide through the hair easily.
So you get to do two pleasant things: Walk in the woods/wild; and take a shower. Even a cold dip in a 40°F lake can make you feel very refreshed.
I think even if ticks were disease free we’d still want to do tick checks … they’re harmful just on their own and nasty to boot …
Of course anti-vaxxers, climate change and colliding galaxies have their part … but if that Lyme disease vax was profitable you can bet a massive ad campaign to get everyone their shots … and legislation requiring all school aged children get the full course or not be allowed to attend school … but it’s not profitable, so public health be damned, the company ain’t gonna make it …
How much of this increase in disease be associated with just more people living closer together? …
I am glad to see a link. Yesterday and Today, using Chrome and Pale Moon, on different computers, the headline on the home page doesn’t link to anything.
Further experimentation shows that the illustration is linked to the article, but that the headline is not.
It is a must-do to tick check in my locale. People, dogs, kids. No one gets past the mudroom until checking is done. Tick diseases are horrible. I am kinda phobic about it.
Two credible citations that the vax was pulled off the market for financial reasons … there’s plenty of citations that back up your claim of “unpleasant side effects” in the many anti-vax web pages … and the efficacy of Lymerix (≈ 80%) is comparable to the mumps vax (≈ 88%) {Cite} …
Ah … the ad reciprocans versus attack … periods happen whether one learns to use them or not …
The increase in Lyme disease has to do with human-caused inadvertent shifting of the complicated relationship between mice, deer, ticks, forest vs farmland, and climate change.
I can’t imagine a Lyme vaccine being required for anyone except maybe park rangers and First Responders in high-risk areas. It isn’t transmissible person-to-person.
Here between the Swabian Alps and The Black forest we have the honour of being the most tick-infested region of Germany - possibly Western Europe. Our dog has tablets which are very successful, the tick climbs on her, bites into her skin and its central nervous system is zapped (so I’m told) and they drop off, kaput. I check her after every walk and remove any I find before they have the chance to bite.
I play golf and am vulnerable to contact with the little bastards, so have an injection every so often; I have and “Impfbuch” ( certificate of vaccination) and I’ve just checked, and the next one is due in 2022.
When I lived in TN, I discovered that the number of ticks that ended up on my body was proportional to the amount of clothing I wore. When I wore lots of clothes, I got lots of ticks (often more than a dozen). When I wore no clothes at all on the exact same piece of land, I got very few ticks, sometimes none at all.
I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned treatment of clothing with Permethrin. It repels. It also kills ticks exposed to the clothes. Compared to people who treated just their shoes and socks, those who didn’t were 73.6 times more likely to get bitten by a tick. As a side benefit, permethrin treated clothes also repel and kill mosquitos. (That cite from the Univ of Rhode Island Tick Encounter Resource Center also covers the risks associated with usage and looks at proper use to mitigate risks to things you don’t want to kill.)
I could see clothes both providing better grip to scramble higher along with protection from being inadvertently brushed off once they get underneath. On the other hand, I also have managed to avoid getting bitten in some pretty infested areas with lots of clothes. A lot of that was because the army made me tuck my pants into my boots and my t-shirt into my pants. Ticks had a long way to scramble to find exposed flesh. I still generally wear and blouse pants into hiking boots when I am going into high tick areas. I also generally wear a light long sleeved shirt over a t-shirt tucked into those pants if there’s a high tick and/or mosquito threat. It’s dressing like the Army had me dress for the woods whenever there’s a lot of biting insects; I’m aware my comfort with a socially odd way of dressing is uncommon. Especially for mosquitos, IME less tasty exposed flesh makes me a harder meal. I’ve even managed to avoid ever getting a tick bite. Anecdotally it’s working. Of course adding permethrin in more recent years probably helps keep that record going.
I’ll tack on one other inadvertent side effect that likely has an impact. In much of the the Eastern US, whitetail deer are estimated to be more plentiful than when white guys with guns showed up in North America. That’s partly thanks to us shooting the habitat free of most of the predators that prey on adult deer. Higher deer populations mixed with reduced habitat can make for high deer population densities.
Even a little bit of science showing that deer population is related to the incidence of Lyme disease. That’s the abstract for a 13-year study in the same area before and after a hunt to reduce population densities.
In some areas socially and politically supporting deer hunting to reduce populations is a longer term form of prevention. Even longer term, supporting projects to increase large predator populations can eventually help reduce the tick borne disease threat.
Permethrin treated clothes are never going to catch on. It’s extremely, extremely toxic to pet cats. Being exposed - just contact with the clothes or to dogs who have been treated with it - to the chemical leads to about a 40% fatality rate in cats, and with over 85 million pet cats in the US alone, there aren’t that many people who are going to blithely risk that.
Poisoning with permethrin leads to *up to * 40% fatality.
Permethrin has low absorption rate, so poisoning is difficult to achieve unless you eat it. Even then it’s breakdown rate is fast enough so that it doesn’t damage people or dogs.
Because cats lick their fur, you should not coat them in Permethrin. (As well as avoiding feeding it to them). As well as avoiding using permethrin treatments for dogs or children on cats, you should also avoid letting them get liquid (garden) solutions on their coats.
Especially for mosquitos, IME less tasty exposed flesh makes me a harder meal. I’ve even managed to avoid ever getting a tick bite. Anecdotally it’s working. Of course adding permethrin in more recent years probably helps keep that record going.