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 so effective that human tick bites are usually painless - and is also a research source for novel anticoagulants and immunosuppressants.
Tick paralysis is caused by a neurotoxin in the saliva of feeding female Dermacentor or other tick species, not by any infection. Symptoms…
Within 5 to 30 minutes of biting, a hard tick begins secreting a glycine-rich saliva that hardens around its mouthparts into a cement…
Folk remedies for backing out an attached tick - lit matches, nail polish, petroleum jelly, essential oils - all do the same wrong thing:…
DEET does not poison ticks; it makes a host harder to find. The compound interferes with chemosensory neurons that respond to…
Mailing a removed tick to a lab for pathogen testing is useful for community surveillance but should not drive treatment decisions. CDC…
In a deer-tick mouse model, Powassan virus passed to naive mice after as little as 15 minutes of tick attachment. There appears to be no…