In addition to Lyme disease the other that most have heard of is Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. The CDC lists another nine or so, and that is just those transmitted to humans and those identified in N America!
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Gear to protect against THE most deadly backcountry beastie…
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Even more listed in this recent BPL thread:
— Rex
I do spray treatment of all my hiking clothes with permethrin. Shirts, pants, shorts, hats, socks, gaiters, boots. The stuff not only repels ticks, but is also effective against mosquitos and black flies and gnats.
Instead of buying the Sawyer stuff, I buy a bottle of concentrate and mix it with water. Makes five spray bottles for the price of one Sawyer bottle. I don't really care how long it lasts. I figure one treatment lasts through one short NH summer and I'll do another round of treatment next spring, when the bugs around here are at their worst.
I also spray my backpacks and my tents and the underside of my tarp, the first time I set them up. Seems to work pretty well as a general campsite insect repellent.
I'm going out this weekend, low temps will be around freezing to slightly below. Are ticks still ACTIVE then? I know they can survive below freezing temps no problem, but are they still physically active around freezing?
They’re still active in fairly cold temperatures. I picked up a tick at last year’s GGG at night. I don’t think it was quite freezing though. I don’t remember any frost when I woke up. Maybe 40F/5C?
Hi Jim, thank you for the reply.
One article i read, said that they start to go into dormant, hibernation like state around freezing, but can pop right out of it once it gets warm enough. The guy who wrote the article, collected some ticks, put them in a cup, put the cup in the freezer for awhile.
When he took them out and spread them out to look at them, they looked quite dead. He got distracted by a phone call, and after the phone call about 15 minutes later, they were re-animated and crawling again.
Kind of creepy and scary. Who needs to go see horror movies, when we got things like ticks.
I don't know much about the habits of ticks outside of my area, but, here in Idaho, they are most prevalent in mid spring. I don't recall having seen a tick on me past ~mid summer here…though I'm sure they're around. In N Cali, where I likely contracted Lyme and babesia, the ticks seemed out in force the first part of June. I just haven't been tromping around enough there to have observed more.
My vet says freezing kills ticks – no need for medicine for my dog after regular freezes.
I found a tick crawling on me on the Deschutes River in central Oregon in the winter
But I was cutting brush off a trail so maximum opportunity for ticks to get on me
Maybe there are way fewer, but they're not gone completely
In Washington the ticks seem most active in the spring and are largely gone by late summer. I have only seen them on the east side of the cascades.
Re: "I wish a new vaccine would be developed."
The problem with Lyme is that it's a bacterial infection, so vaccines cannot provide long-term immunity. My mother's dog received the canine Lyme vaccine (which is still on the market, despite the fact that the human version was deemed unsafe), and developed Lyme-like symptoms afterward. There are many reports of this. Vets will most likely tell you that your dog must have been bitten by a tick before receiving the shot, but I'm not convinced.
Plus, when you take into account all the other diseases for which ticks are vectors, I don't think a vaccine to prevent a single infection is worth the risk. You'll still need to take preventive measures against other tick-borne illnesses.
I have mixed feelings about pyrethroids like permethrin. It does work, but it's also a neurotoxin and potential carcinogen. http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/PermGen.html#whatis
Not to mention the harmful effects pyrethroids have on beneficial insects such as honeybees, and their potential role in colony collapse (this is definitely more an issue of agricultural pesticides than of individual use of repellants, but still…).
I'm from New England, the Lyme disease red zone, and I'm still hesitant about using topically applied pesticides, regardless of whether they go on your skin or on your clothes. Since it takes 24 hours for a deer tick to transmit Lyme, I think the best bet is still to do daily (or better, twice-daily) checks. It's a really good reason to change into different clothes for sleeping; that way, you have an opportunity every morning and every night to do a full-body check.
Other preventive measures: apply cedar oil daily (like Doug mentioned); garlic like Justin noted (only very small amounts for dogs–and don't give it to cats because of potential toxicity); a B-vitamin complex and vitamin C to increase system immunity (B-vitamins are great for helping boost resistance to mosquito bites, too). In terms of risk-benefit analysis, boosting your system's ability to deal with infection through long-term changes to diet and environment has a serious edge over the short-term application of pesticides like DEET and permethrin, neither of which guarantees 100% protection anyway…
New York Times article reporting recent research:
Complete with a video closeup of a tick burrowing into skin.
When seen with an electron microscope, a tick’s mouth has what look like twin saws (chelicerae) flanking an appendage (a hypostome) that appears to be the kind of long, barbed sword that a villain in a video game might favor.
Dr. Richter said the blood-feeding apparatus described in the paper was present only on female ticks. The mouth parts of the male tick are adapted to transfer sperm. “The mouth parts of the male tick are different,” she said. “They look gruesome. They look really bad.”
— Rex
I have picked up ticks in Rancho Cuyamaca State Park and have dug one out of my love handles while he was gums deep in manflesh. Still have the scar. Nasty little bastards. Or maybe it was the bacon grease I used as repellent. From the raw bacon. Oh hell.
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