Short, sourced facts about ticks, the diseases they carry, and how to remove them. Each fact links to the species, condition, or technique it concerns.
CDC's mandatory case reporting registers roughly 30,000 to 40,000 Lyme disease cases per year. Analysis of commercial insurance claims by Kugeler and colleagues estimated 476,000 patients diagnosed…
Borrelia miyamotoi disease shares a vector with Lyme disease - the same Ixodes species - but presents differently: high fevers that recur in waves, often without the erythema migrans rash. Standard…
Dermacentor occidentalis is found only along the Pacific coast of California, Oregon, and Washington and inland through California's coast ranges. It bites people most often in late summer in…
Ixodes scapularis takes three blood meals over a roughly two-year life cycle. Larvae and nymphs feed mainly on white-footed mice and other small mammals and birds; adults prefer white-tailed deer.…
Ticks find hosts using Haller's organ, a sensory pit on the tarsus of each foreleg. It carries chemoreceptors tuned to ammonia, carbon dioxide, and host odors, plus thermoreceptors for body heat. A…
Rickettsia parkeri rickettsiosis, transmitted by the Gulf Coast tick, causes fever, headache, and a near-pathognomonic black eschar at the bite site. The eschar is a useful contrast: classical Rocky…
Ehrlichia ewingii ehrlichiosis was first recognized in human disease in 1999, almost exclusively in immunocompromised patients - HIV, transplant, or chemotherapy. Many cases test negative on…
Babesia microti lives inside red blood cells and survives standard blood-bank storage. Between 1979 and 2009, 159 of 162 reported United States transfusion-transmitted babesiosis cases were caused…
Anaplasma phagocytophilum lives inside human neutrophils, where it forms cytoplasmic clumps called morulae visible on a Giemsa-stained blood smear. Spotting morulae in a neutrophil is a fast bedside…
Unlike Lyme disease in the United States, tick-borne encephalitis has an effective inactivated-virus vaccine in routine use across central Europe and parts of Asia. In Austria, where childhood…
Ticks are arachnids, not insects - close cousins of spiders and scorpions, with eight legs as adults and two body regions instead of three. Larvae have only six legs and are sometimes mistaken for…
Tick saliva contains hundreds of pharmacologically active proteins that suppress the host's immune response, dilate blood vessels, prevent clotting, and dull pain at the bite site. The cocktail is…
The most effective personal protection against tick attachment in field studies is the combination of permethrin-treated outer clothing and a 20 to 30 percent DEET (or 20 percent picaridin)…
Soft ticks in the genus Ornithodoros can survive years between blood meals and live for a decade or more. A single infected tick can sit in cabin woodwork for many seasons and infect a new sleeper…
A 2009 laboratory study by Felicia Keesing and colleagues placed larval ticks on captive opossums and found the animals groomed off and ate roughly 96 percent of them - leading to the widely cited…
Within 5 to 30 minutes of biting, a hard tick begins secreting a glycine-rich saliva that hardens around its mouthparts into a cement cone. Combined with the backward-pointing barbs of the…
Amblyomma maculatum was once confined to a coastal band along the Gulf of Mexico. Established populations now reach Connecticut and the lower Hudson Valley, carried north largely by migratory…
Alpha-gal syndrome was discovered backwards. In the mid-2000s researchers including Thomas Platts-Mills and Scott Commins were trying to explain why some cancer patients reacted severely to the drug…
Whole-genome sequencing of the Tyrolean Iceman Otzi - a 5,300-year-old natural mummy from the Italian Alps - recovered roughly 60 percent of the Borrelia burgdorferi genome from his tissue. Otzi is…
Folk remedies for backing out an attached tick - lit matches, nail polish, petroleum jelly, essential oils - all do the same wrong thing: they stress the tick into salivating and regurgitating gut…