Tick borne diseases

Very interesting and a concern of mine. My brother has Lyme. Thank you so much for sharing!

The low rate of bullseye rash, low contact times, high infection rates, and dangers of the tiny ticks and nymphs are all alarming.  It sounds like the medical community is updating the information they use to diagnose, and are aware that the disease is much more common than they thought.

yeah – the idea that a disease can be transmitted in 20 minutes is not fun to hear!

i’d been going on the advice that it takes a tick ~24 hours to pass along its little gifts.

The nymphs scare me; you can’t find those suckers on you.  I don’t hike in tick country much, but we are seeing an increase in tick-borne diseases even here in the PNW in veterinary medicine.  Permethrin clothing and covering up seems to be the best defense with minimal chemical exposure.  I generally use picaridin on myself for mosquitos, but I’m going to have to check into the efficacy against ticks.   I do spray my hiking clothes with permethrin at the beginning of the warmer season, mostly as a defense against mosquitos–they love me!–but I do make sure I spray socks and gaiters because of the tick factor.  I tend to hike in shorts and a skirt because I get overheated easily, but if our summers in Western Washington get warmer and ticks become more prevalent, I may have to revise my plan.

One weird tick-borne phenomenon is red meat allergy, promoted by bites of the tick Amblyomma americanus, the Lone Star tick.  People become sensitized to a protein in red meat, because the same protein is found in the tick’s saliva.  People then experience a Type 1 hypersensitivity reaction after eating beef, port or lamb, with a rash up to full-blown anaphylaxis.  Watch out for BBQ!  It used to be thought to be limited to the Southeastern United States, because that is the range of the Lone Star tick, but 1) the range of the Lone Star tick is expanding northward and eastward, and 2) the same problem has been found in the European tick Ixodes ricinus and sufferers of the allergy were found in Stockholm. Here in the Pacific Northwest, on the coast, the main tick is Ixodes pacificus, the western black-legged tick.  So far as I know, they don’t have the capacity to transmit the protein, but it is an evolving area of research, so maybe it just hasn’t been found.

Diseases are the only reason to avoid tick bites.

Excuse me, I meant to say, diseases aren’t the only reason to avoid ticks.

Turn the edit function back on!