It’s Tick Season – Be Alert 25 Jun 2014

It’s been some time since I’ve written about ticks but this season seems to be producing a bumper crop, so it’s time to ramp up your awareness and bite prevention.

Ticks are responsible for over 90 percent of the vector-caused diseases in this country. Mosquitoes are involved in a mere 5 percent. They are attracted to body warmth and carbon dioxide. Moving slowly and stiffly like arthritic robots, they try to locate a comfortable, protected spot behind your knees, on the inside of your thigh, around your waist, or in your belly button. They may even set up housekeeping between fingers and toes, in underarms, groin, in hair, or behind your ears.

Immature Ticks Are Most Dangerous

Young ticks are the ones most likely to transmit disease. They are tiny – about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Only when the tick has become swollen with blood and looks like a grayish bump or mole are you likely to notice it. It usually takes up to 12 hours of feeding for a tick to infect you, so early discovery is important.

Repelling Ticks

Tuck pant legs into your boots. Use repellents containing DEET or permethrin. Spray permethrin on clothing, tent flaps, or mosquito netting and let it dry. It bonds to the fabric and will remain active even after several trips through your washing machine. Apply DEET repellents to the skin, but those with permethrin should be used only on clothing. Contact with the skin chemically deactivates it.

Tick Removal

If you find a tick dining on you, do not remove it with your fingers. Dr. Nancy Hinkle, an Extension Specialist at the University of Georgia, describes ticks as balloons with an attached hypodermic needle. If you squeeze them, they may regurgitate pathogen-loaded stomach contents into you or burst, spreading disease organisms that can enter your body through breaks in the skin or when you rub your eyes.

Grasp the tick with tweezers as close to the skin as possible and pull gently until it comes off, but don’t twist or rotate it. Ticks aren’t threaded, so you don’t have to unscrew them!

Never coat a tick with Vaseline or oil, burn it with a match or cigarette, put alcohol or gasoline on it, or violently jerk it off. Jerking it may leave its head and mouth parts attached and cause an infection. Any of these techniques upset the tick and will increase the likelihood that it will vomit disease organisms into your body.

Tick-borne Diseases in the United States

About 14 diseases are carried by ticks in this country. The most common ones are Rocky Mountain spotted fever and Lyme disease. Ticks also carry tularemia (rabbit fever). A new disease called Heartland Virus Disease has recently been diagnosed in Missouri and Tennessee.

Tick Paralysis

Some tick bites cause a rare form of paralysis. After five to seven days of attachment, a neurotoxin in the tick’s saliva causes paralysis starting in the feet and legs and progressing upward. In about ten percent of cases when the offending tick isn’t located, respiratory failure and death may occur. Once the tick is removed, recovery is usually very rapid.

Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever usually causes a rash on the ankles, wrists, and forehead, spreading to the trunk of the body, accompanied by fever, chills, and fatigue.

Lyme Disease often begins with an expanding “bullseye” rash at the bite site; red in the middle, then a white circular band and a red circle just outside the white area. Fever, chills, joint pain, headache, stiff neck, backache, and a feeling of exhaustion are common.

Months or even more than a year after the bite, Lyme disease may cause severe arthritis of the knees, hips and ankles. In some cases, meningitis, numbness and tingling of the extremities, loss of concentration and memory, hearing loss, double vision, depression, paralysis of the facial muscles, and heart problems may occur.

An outstanding article with excellent photos on Lyme disease can be found on WebMD at: www.webmd.com.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) also has a very good tick site at: www.cdc.gov/ticks/.

If you are bitten, make a note on your calendar and keep the tick. Put it in an empty plastic prescription bottle, snap the cap closed, label it with date and location and put it in your refrigerator or freezer. Then if you become ill, it can be identified and help your doctor make a correct diagnosis.

The key to defeating tick-borne illness is early diagnosis and treatment. In their early stages they can usually be effectively treated with antibiotics. So stay alert, take precautions, and have a bite-free summer.


Dr. Risk is a professor emeritus in the College of Forestry and Agriculture at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. Content © Paul H. Risk, Ph.D. All rights reserved, except where otherwise noted. Click paulrisk2@gmail.com to send questions, comments, or request permission for use.