They’re already here. With the mild winter and a booming deer population, tick season has begun and bugs are biting. If you live anywhere that ticks appear, learn how to protect yourself from these parasites and their bites, which can lead to Lyme disease and other illnesses.
[See: 10 Ways to Detect and Treat Spider Bites.]
Know Your Tick Risk
Deer ticks, also known as blacklegged ticks, are tiny but dangerous — they’re the ones that spread Lyme disease bacteria, called Borrelia burgdorferi.
This year on the East Coast, ticks have been spotted in national parks in Maine, New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia and Virginia. Tick-testing laboratories are busy evaluating ticks sent in by state residents. While Lyme disease is heavily concentrated in the Northeast U.S. and the upper Midwest, it also occurs in states like Texas and Alabama. Lyme disease is also seen on the West Coast, particularly in California.
Your risk of tick-borne illness depends on a combination of factors, including where you live, the time of year, climate conditions and tick life stage. Scientists like Thomas Mather, director of the University of Rhode Island’s Center for Vector-Borne Disease, calculate these risks so you don’t have to. To scope out your local tick situation, click on your part of the country using the Current Tick Activity tool provided by the university’s TickEncounter Resource Center.
Ticks can’t tolerate long dry days, Mather says, but they love humidity. If you’re watering your lawn by Memorial Day, that’s a bad sign for tick survival. However, he says, the cloudy, rainy, humid days that beachgoers hate are “happy conditions” for ticks who will show up in force just as people head to summer campgrounds.
Dress to Repel and Other Tick Tips
If you live in a deer-tick heavy location, like the woods of rural Maryland, it’s time to protect yourself, says Dr. John Aucott, research director of the Johns Hopkins Lyme Disease Research Center.
“When you go hiking — people don’t like to do this but it’s like driving your car safely — you wear long pants,” he says. “You treat your clothes with a chemical called permethrin, which kills ticks and is safe to use on your clothing. You use DEET on your skin. You walk in the middle of trails. You don’t let your dog off the leash; you make him walk in the middle of the trail.”
Most tick-to-human Lyme transmission occurs around the home, Aucott says. “Create a safe zone around your yard and house, where you have a fence to keep deer out and a chip barrier to keep the ticks out.” Within the barrier, foster a tick-unfriendly environment. “Ticks need leaf litter and moisture and brush and high grass to survive,” he says. “You want well-mowed grass and yards without leaves.”
[See: Is It Healthy to Sleep With Your Pets?]
Mice are the prime source of infection for ticks, who feed on the rodents and then spread the infection to humans. Targeting mice is another way to reduce tick-borne disease.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides tips for removing an embedded tick from your body: Grasp it with fine-tipped tweezers as close to the skin as possible; pull upward with steady, even pressure to keep the tick intact, and clean the bite site and your hands thoroughly with rubbing alcohol, an iodine scrub or soap and water. Place the tick in a baggie and seal it with tape, or flush the tick down the toilet. The CDC recommends checking with your doctor before sending a tick on for testing. If you’re curious about a tick you’ve spotted, you can snap a photo and submit it to the TickEcnounter Resource Center for identification.
Mather encourages people to do a nightly tick check, for instance while showering, to avoid spending eight hours sleeping with a bloodthirsty parasite.
Don’t Wait for a Bull’s-Eye
The Lyme Disease Research Center offers details and visual guides on what to do after a tick bite and how to recognize potential Lyme disease symptoms. For those who develop Lyme disease, Aucott says, “The prognosis is very good if people get an early diagnosis and treatment.”
Unfortunately, misinformation leads to missed opportunities. “The biggest [misconception] I see is people are looking for a target lesion, because ‘Lyme disease causes a bull’s-eye rash,'” he says. But that’s not necessarily the case. With a persistent rash or bump, he says, “If it’s round or oval and red, and it’s bigger than a couple inches, and you’re in a Lyme-endemic area in the right season — it’s Lyme disease.”
Some infected people don’t have any skin symptoms, he notes. Unexplained, flu-like symptoms that don’t occur during flu season are suspicious. When a summertime condition involves fever, chills, sweats and achiness, he says, patients and health care providers should consider the possibility of Lyme disease.
The recommended treatment for early Lyme disease involves several weeks of oral antibiotics. Doxycycline is usually prescribed for adults and amoxicillin for children.
Chronic Lyme Disease: a Gray Area
Referred to as “chronic Lyme disease” by patients and “post-Lyme disease treatment syndrome” by researchers, prolonged illness in the aftermath of Lyme disease is not well-understood or universally accepted in the medical community.
“It’s usually after the initial treatment of their Lyme disease,” Aucott says. “It’s often after a delay in diagnosis and treatment, when a subset of people go on to these long-term, persistent symptoms.”
The syndrome is real and its toll is significant, he says. “It’s 10 percent of people who get Lyme disease and there are 300,000 new cases of Lyme disease a year,” he says. “That’s a big deal because those people don’t get better very quickly. Sometimes they never get better.”
Shelly Walker of Redwood Valley, California, runs a local Lyme disease support group. Her case of suspected tick-borne illness goes a long way back, to a 1997 incident. In the middle of the night, she reached up to feel the back of her head. Her hand, she says, was soaking wet. “I got up and turned on the light and said, ‘Oh, my, God, my hand’s covered with blood — what happened?'” Walker says. She woke up her husband, who looked and told her that she had a big hole in the back of her head. “I wasn’t in pain but there was a lot of blood,” she says. She cleaned up, went back to bed and forgot about the episode. Six months later, when symptoms began to show, she didn’t make the connection.
Enduring a series of seemingly unrelated health problems, Walker, a health technician for her local school district, tried to carry on. She never received a solid diagnosis, she says. It wasn’t until October 2010, after she became numb and had facial drooping while attending a pro football game, that Walker was told she likely had a vector-borne illness — meaning an infection spread by an insect bite, in her case, probably a tick. Most vector-borne illnesses are spread by ticks.
[See: On a Scale From 1 to 10: Most Painful Medical Conditions.]
Walker has been through a series of therapies, both traditional and complementary, and she’s undergone surgical procedures to treat long-term side effects of her condition.
As one who learned about tick-borne disease the hard way, Walker hopes to spread awareness. “Educate yourself about Lyme disease,” she advises. “Know how to prevent it. Know how to pull out a tick. Know to send that tick in for testing. Know to seek immediate medical treatment.”
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Keeping Up With Ticks originally appeared on usnews.com
