Mailing a removed tick to a lab for pathogen testing is useful for community surveillance but should not drive treatment decisions. CDC explicitly notes that a positive tick test does not mean the person was infected, that tick-testing labs are not held to clinical quality standards, and that a negative result can falsely reassure. Symptom monitoring still wins.
A removed tick is not biologically dead the moment you take it out - it can survive in a sealed container for weeks. CDC recommends…
Tick tubes were developed by Sam Telford and Andrew Spielman's group at Harvard in the late 1980s. The original Massachusetts trials of…
A 2001 NEJM trial by Robert Nadelman and colleagues showed that a single 200 mg oral dose of doxycycline within 72 hours of removing an…
Folk remedies for backing out an attached tick - lit matches, nail polish, petroleum jelly, essential oils - all do the same wrong thing:…
Southern tick-associated rash illness produces an expanding red rash that looks indistinguishable from early Lyme disease, but it follows…
Tick saliva contains hundreds of pharmacologically active proteins that suppress the host's immune response, dilate blood vessels, prevent…