Tag Archives: Ticks

U-M Health-West shares tips on preventing tick infections

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By Dr. Del DeHart
Infectious Disease Specialist

University of Michigan Health-West

A combination of outdoor activity and warmer weather makes it more likely for residents to be exposed to ticks. (Pxhere.com)

Spring is here, and with warmer weather people are outside much more, which is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, ticks feel the same way and the combination of outdoor activity and warmer weather makes tick exposure more likely. With National Lyme Disease Awareness Month approaching in May, if you plan to spend time outdoors this spring and summer, there are things you should know about ticks and the diseases they spread.

Exposure risk:

  • Ticks are active from early spring to fall, and they like woodlands and grassy areas
  • Ticks vary in size as they develop over the year
  • While we think of exposure when we are out in the woods or grassy areas, many to most bites occur around our homes
  • Ticks are moving into some areas where they were not common in years past
  • Tick-borne diseases can be regional, so it is helpful to know common ticks or infections in your area
  • Use tick prevention for dogs too

Tick exposures and tick bites:

  • Preventing exposures is the first line of defense
  • When trekking in areas of higher risk wear tight-fitting clothing and tuck pants into socks
  • Check for ticks on clothing and on skin periodically
  • Remove any attached ticks quickly with tweezers
  • If a tick is engorged or has been attached for more than a few hours keep it for possible identification
  • Most common tick-borne infections are not transmitted quickly, but towards the end of the blood meal so early removal is very helpful
  • Rashes and bites may not be in an area where it will be noticed, and bites are often painless

When to seek medical advice:

  • If you develop a rash or fever after a bite or exposure to high risk area
    • In areas with high risk of Lyme disease and clear high-risk tick bite, prophylactic antibiotics may be prescribed
    • Save the tick: If the tick can be identified it can help with identifying specific infection risk. Tick identification can be helpful, but testing the tick for pathogens is a waste of money and time
      • Many commercial labs will nevertheless do this testing for lots of money
      • Any given tick may carry several pathogens
      • Infected ticks don’t regularly, or even commonly, transmit infections
    • Be aware the tick you find may not be the one that bit you, or the only one to which you were exposed

Resources

Recent video from the New England Journal of Medicine about ticks and tick diseases:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2302440https://youtu.be/YQpOxlGCMYg

Excellent and comprehensive information for consumers and clinicians at the CDC can by found by clicking here.

Lastly, state health departments often offer information and help as well. For example, Michigan has a

free tick identification service with links available online.

About Del DeHart, MD

Dr. Del DeHart is an infectious disease specialist with University of Michigan Health-West.

About University of Michigan Health-West

New mobile app helps ID potential Lyme disease-carry ticks

3-bottom, Citizen Journalism, Community Health, Environment, Great Lakes, Hard News, Health, Pets/Animals, , ,

By Genevieve Fox
Capital News Service

An adult black-legged (deer) tick. (By Photo by Scott Bauer. – This image was released by the Agricultural Research Service, the research agency of the United States Department of Agriculture, with the ID k8002-3 (next)., Public Domain)

Picture this: You’re walking through the woods when you brush up against some tall grass, or maybe you wandered off trail momentarily. You head home, but the next day notice a black speck on your arm.

It’s a tick. 

Beyond the gross-out factor, you wonder if it might make you sick. A new mobile app may help figure that out.

Emily Dinh, a medical entomologist with the Department of Health and Human Services, says encounters people are having with ticks are becoming more common.

That’s as the state’s tick population has been on the rise, including numbers of the American dog tick and the blacklegged tick, which can transmit the bacterium that causes Lyme disease.

“That blacklegged tick is something that we’re concerned about and seeing a greater distribution throughout the state of Michigan. That is the tick that can transmit Lyme disease,” Dinh said.

In 2021, the state health department reported nearly half of Michigan’s counties had a known risk of Lyme disease for people and animals.

Ticks like shady, moist areas

Ticks are typically found in wooded and brushy areas but can even show up in suburban yards.

“The most important thing to be aware of is where ticks are, so ticks like shady, moist areas in woody, grassy locations,” she said. “Especially in the warmer months of April through September, but sometimes into October as well because ticks can be active when the temperatures are above 40 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Barry OConnor is a tick expert at the University of Michigan’s Zoology Museum. He cites a rise in temperatures as a possible reason for the increased risk.

“We’ve certainly seen changes in the distribution of several species of ticks moving northward over the years as temperatures have become warmer,” OConnor said.

According to the state, average yearly temperatures have increased two to three degrees in the past two decades.

The Tick App

A group of researchers from universities across the U.S. decided to create a mobile app, called The Tick App. (Courtesy, The Tick App)

Because of growing concerns about the pests, both in Michigan and across the country, a group of researchers from universities across the U.S. decided to create a mobile app, simply called The Tick App.

Michigan State University professor Jean Tsao said the app allows scientists to learn more about where ticks are and what people are doing to keep safe from them. She is in the Department of Fisheries & Wildlife and is part of the group that helped develop the digital portal.

“It’s a mobile health app that is both a research tool as well as an outreach tool,” she said.

When people download it, they’re prompted to fill out a 10-minute survey about potential risk factors.

“We really wanted to understand, if possible, when and where and what kind of activities people are doing to expose themselves to ticks,” Tsao said.

She said users are also able to take a picture of a tick and submit it to the app. The research team is then able to identify it within 24 hours.

“They have a lot of reliable information all collated into one area that can tell you about what a tick is, what the various species of ticks are that you’re likely to contact in the area that you live and what are prevention measures that you can take,” Tsao said.

Tips on avoiding ticks

To avoid ticks, Tsao recommends wearing bug repellent and long clothing outside.

 

After returning home, a full-body tick check and shower is also ideal.

Tsao said the research team is working to use artificial intelligence to make tick identification faster and more accurate.

She said she hopes that with this advancement, the app may one day be used by health care workers as a diagnostic tool.

Genevieve Fox reports for WKAR Radio in partnership with the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism and Capital News Service.

Lyme-bearing ticks more widespread in U.S. than thought

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The most commonly encountered ticks—the deer tick, the western black-legged tick and the lone star tick—carry the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay


Think you live in a place that’s free from disease-carrying ticks? Don’t be so sure.


Citizen scientists found ticks capable of transmitting Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses in dozens of places across the United States where the pests had never previously been recorded, a new study reports.


All told, disease-carrying ticks were detected in 83 counties where they’d never been found before across 24 states.


The numbers reflect a rise in tick populations across the country, said study author Nate Nieto. He’s an associate professor with Northern Arizona University’s department of biological sciences.


“People should be aware of ticks and tick-borne disease, even when they may think there’s not a recorded incidence of a tick in a county,” Nieto said. “These things, they’re not obeying borders. They’re going by biology. If they get moved there by a deer or bird or people or pets, they’re going to establish themselves and start growing.”


The massive nationwide study also provides evidence that ticks are born carrying infectious diseases, rather than picking germs up from the animals upon which they feed, said Wendy Adams, research grant director for the Bay Area Lyme Foundation, in California.


All life stages of the most commonly encountered ticks—the deer tick, the western black-legged tick and the lone star tick—carried the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, Adams said.


“That’s important, because that would say that a tick doesn’t need to acquire an infection from a blood meal. It’s born with the infection,” Adams explained.


These findings are the result of an unexpectedly successful effort by the Bay Area Lyme Foundation to collect tick samples from across the country.


Between January 2016 and August 2017, the foundation and Northern Arizona University offered free tick identification and testing to the general public. People were encouraged to send in ticks they found on themselves, their pets or around their communities.


The scientists’ original goal was to collect about 2,000 ticks. They wound up with more than 16,000, sent in by people from every state except Alaska.


“We got such a phenomenal participation,” Nieto said. “Two weeks in May, we got almost 2,000 packages per week. That is just powerful data.”


People found ticks in areas not represented in tracking maps maintained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the researchers discovered.


Most of these new areas were right next to counties with known tick populations, Adams said.


“Ticks are spreading. Tick populations have exploded,” Adams said. “This is good data to show the extent of that. It’s a message to people that even if you think ticks aren’t a problem, they could be.”


The 24 states that contain counties with newly documented populations of deer ticks or Western black-legged ticks are Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.


Further, ticks were found in states where they simply weren’t supposed to be, Adams said. Lone star ticks were found in California and black-legged ticks were found in Nevada, both for the first time ever.


People also found ticks carrying Babesia—microscopic parasites that infect red blood cells and cause the potentially life-threatening disease babesiosis—in 26 counties across 10 states in which the public health department does not require physicians to report cases of the disease.


The new study “highlights the geographic variability of ticks and the pathogens they carry,” said Dr. Paul Auwaerter, clinical director of infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore.


“Surveillance is increasingly important as we see climate and environmental changes, because we do see expanding ranges of ticks. We’ve seen that with Lyme disease. We’ve seen that with babesiosis,” said Auwaerter, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.


Adams agreed, suggesting that more funding should be directed to these sorts of crowd-sourced tracking efforts.


“We have to invest federal dollars to examine the spread of ticks,” she said.


In the meantime, the Bay Area Lyme Foundation suggests that people protect themselves from ticks by:

  • Wearing light-colored clothes to make ticks more visible.
  • Do regular tick checks after being in a tick-infested area, and shower immediately after to wash away ticks that might be crawling on you.
  • Consider using tick repellents like DEET for skin and permethrin for clothing.
  • Talk with your doctor if you develop any symptoms following a tick bite.

The new study was published online in the journal PLOS One.


Reprinted with permission from Spectrum Health Beat.


Growing menace: Asian longhorned tick

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Specific regions of the U.S. are more prone to infestations of a new invasive species: the Asian longhorned tick. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay


An Asian tick newly introduced into the United States has the potential to infest a wide swath of the country, researchers say.


It could carry with it numerous diseases that threaten humans.


The Asian longhorned tick “could spread all the way from the Gulf Coast to southern Canada,” said study author Ilia Rochlin, an entomologist with the Rutgers University Center for Vector Biology in New Brunswick, N.J.


This highly adaptable pest originated in regions of China that share a similar climate to much of the United States, Rochlin said.


Huge swaths of land along the Eastern seaboard, the Midwest and the South would provide highly suitable habitat for the bloodsucking parasite, Rochlin’s computer models predict.


The tick has already been found in nine states—eight on the East Coast, and Arkansas.


“The first real detection occurred in New Jersey in 2017,” Rochlin said.


This tick is not yet known to have infected any humans in North America, but it is linked to severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome, an emerging tick-borne virus in China, South Korea and Japan.


Thrombocytopenia syndrome is fatal for 10 percent to 30 percent of people infected, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.


Thrombocytopenia syndrome is very similar to the tick-borne Heartland virus, which already is transmitted in the United States, Rochlin added. It’s possible the Asian longhorned tick could serve as a vector for Heartland virus as well.


The populations of this tick can grow rapidly once it finds a suitable habitat, said Thomas Mather, director of the University of Rhode Island’s Center for Vector-Borne Disease.


Mather recounted a recent trip to a park in Staten Island, one of the five boroughs in New York City, during which he dragged a length of tick-grabbing cloth called a “flag” along the parking lot to see how badly infested that area had become.


“Within seconds our flag was covered in larvae,” Mather said. “We were surprised at how abundant they were.”


For this new report, Rochlin studied climate data from places where the Asian longhorned tick is already established, including East Asia, Australia and New Zealand.


He then used climate data from North America to estimate likely suitable habitats for the tick. They include:

  • Coastal areas from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in Canada to Virginia and North Carolina on the East Coast.
  • A large inland stretch of land from northern Louisiana up to Wisconsin and into southern Ontario and Quebec.
  • A westward extension that includes Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri.
  • Coastal areas from southern British Columbia to northern California on the West Coast.

Warmer temperatures to the south, cold winters to the north and dry terrain in the west make the rest of the United States less suitable, Rochlin said.


The Asian longhorned tick reproduces asexually, allowing its populations to grow rapidly and rendering moot any insect control efforts that would target its mating cycle, Rochlin said.


Mather said the ticks employ an “ambush” strategy to help find fresh sources of blood. Its larval ticks, thirsty for blood, hang out in tight clumps on the tips of tall grasses.


“They’re all clumped there, ready to get onto something,” Mather said.


“Not just one or two get onto something—they all get onto something,” he continued. “If there were 75 or 80 larvae on the tip of a blade of grass and our flag went over the blade of grass, there would be 65 of them on my flag.”


Severe infestations can threaten livestock, weakening them by depleting their blood supply.


Mather is concerned that pets will make the Asian longhorned tick’s spread more likely.


One of the ticks was found recently on a dog in Colorado that had traveled there from a New Jersey “hot zone,” Mather said.


“What if it had gone to Seattle instead, which has a more permissive climate according to this model?” Mather said. “The number of emotional support animals flying on domestic airline carriers in the United States has more than doubled in the last year or two. Not just people are moving around, but pets are, and most of the reports of longhorned ticks so far have come from pets.


“The group sitting on the front line are pet owners and veterinarians,” Mather continued. “They need to be aware of the potential of them picking up and moving these ticks throughout the country.”


Rochlin’s study was published in the Journal of Medical Entomology.


Reprinted with permission from Spectrum Health Beat.